Jeffrey McManus

The New Thing

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Entries Tagged as 'Web/Tech'

We All Have Our Sacred Cows, Mr. Benioff

October 17th, 2009 · No Comments · Microsoft, Web/Tech

Link: Microsoft’s Future, Beyond Windows 7 and the PC – NYTimes.com
“[Microsoft is] trapped in their own psychosis that the world has to revolve around Windows on the PC,” says Marc Benioff, the C.E.O. of Salesforce.com, which competes against Microsoft in the business software market. “Until they stop doing that, they will drag their company into [...]

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Plug-In Comment Systems Suck

July 18th, 2009 · 4 Comments · Collaboration, Content, Community, Web/Tech

I do a lot of commenting on other peoples’ blogs, so I pay a lot of attention to the user experience for comments. In the last year or so I’ve been noticing the rise of third-party plug-in comment systems such as Disqus and Intense Debate. I understand the value of these systems (single sign-on, presence, [...]

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Web Developers: Don’t Do This

July 15th, 2009 · No Comments · That's Pretty Messed Up Right There, Web/Tech

I’m not including the URL of this page in case somebody figures out how to turn this into an exploit, but in a way I almost wish somebody would, because after filling out these guys’ survey and getting this horrifically amateurish error message on the final page, my first impulse was to figure out a [...]

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The Associated Press Discovers Tagging

July 12th, 2009 · No Comments · Collaboration, Content, Community, News, Web/Tech

The Associated Press is floating the idea of creating a tag taxonomy that would provide metadata about their news stories to automated crawlers.
Setting aside the fact that this would appear to be an attempt at creating their own niche set of copyright regulations, I’d be surprised if the AP will even be able to pull [...]

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Matt Mullenweg: “Wordpress Themes are GPL, too”

July 2nd, 2009 · 5 Comments · Collaboration, Content, Community, Open Source, Web/Tech

Link: WordPress › Blog » Themes are GPL, too
One sentence summary: PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required.
I don’t see this doing much to calm the shitstorm over commercial Wordpress themes (missives from attorneys seldom do); it definitely draws a line in the sand and clarifies [...]

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Reasons to Not Start a Michael Jackson Moonwalking Flashmob

June 28th, 2009 · No Comments · The Funny, Web/Tech

Link: Rob Manuel: How I started the Jacko flashmob by accident
I have stuff to do, I have a newsletter to write and a meal to cook for my wife. She’d demanded Spaghetti Bolognese and tells me, “you cook the best spag bog in North London.” She delights in calling it “bog”, it’s her reference to [...]

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Comparative Pricing for Virtual Hosting Providers

June 25th, 2009 · 4 Comments · Amazon, Virtualization, Web/Tech, Work

Rackspace just launched a new suite of cloud computing (really virtualized hosting) products. We use a bunch of these products from different companies. We also have a consulting practice dedicated to Amazon’s EC2 offering, so I wanted to take a closer look at how the different offerings stack up in terms of price and features. [...]

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Teaching This Fall

June 24th, 2009 · No Comments · Collaboration, Content, Community, Teaching, Web/Tech, Work

Big news! The University of Victoria’s program in Business, Management and Technology has asked me to teach a class. This will commence in September of this year and will be repeated in January 2010 (assuming I don’t totally cock it up). The course I’ll be teaching is Web Design and Management I, a very basic [...]

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The Newspaper Business: Still Confused About Itself

April 20th, 2009 · No Comments · News, Web/Tech

I’m taking in all the news about the 2009 Pulitzer Prize awards. Because the industry is at a perilous crossroads, I had a feeling that the announcements would be a rich source of quotes of the ironical variety, and indeed I was not disappointed:
“The watchdog still barks. The watchdog still bites,” [Pulitzer administrator] Gissler said. [...]

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Thoughts on Oracle/Sun

April 20th, 2009 · 2 Comments · Collaboration, Content, Community, MySQL, Web/Tech, Work

Interesting quote about the Oracle/Sun acquisition from EETimes.com:
“Acquisitions have strengthened Sun’s position in the enterprise storage and business integration software markets, but have not positively affected the company’s business or financial profile.”
To put that another way: Sun has been attempting to achieve incremental successes at a game that nobody else really wants to play anymore. [...]

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