Matt Mullenweg and Craig Newmark

Matt and Craig

I was in Dublin yesterday to see Matt and Craig become Honorary Patrons of The University Philosophical Society in Trinity College. It was a low key informal event with many students and a few staff in attendance.

Eamon Leonard, of Echo Libre, kindly used my Flip Mino to record the Q&A session that followed. I want to express my gratitude to him for doing a fine job, especially as I saw him switch the camera from arm to arm during the hour long event. It wasn’t easy holding the camera aloft for so long. I’m currently transcoding the video and trying to make it smaller before uploading it.
I’ll add it to this post later, you won’t want to miss it!

Update! Matt was interviewed by Silicon Republic earlier today. Catch up on what’s happening at the Web Summit in Dublin by following #dws2 on Twitter.

Jelly pirates walk the plank

I can’t remember how I found this twitter account but Jelly SMS runs a jellysmspirates account listing people who are using a hacked copy of their software.

A real time feed of people who are using a hacked copy of Jelly SMS for iPhone or iPod Touch

If you use a hacked copy of their software you better watch out. Your info might be listed on that Twitter account!

The important question for developers is, “Does it work?” Apparently it does. The developer has even seen increased sales and says, “For me, piracy seems to be a good thing!”

I wonder if any other online services do the same?

jellysms

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How to avoid Amazon Wishlist headaches

If, like me you have an Amazon wishlist you may be missing out on wishes if you’re not careful selecting them.

The wishlist is a great idea. Browse around Amazon picking items you like and add them to a public list that your friends and family can use to buy you gifts. The only problem is that Amazon won’t always deliver the goods, but you won’t know until someone tries to buy something for you.

The first I knew about this problem was when someone sent me a tweet saying they got an error buying a game on my wishlist. Alarmed, I tried to purchase the same item.

amazon-gift-registery-problem

amazon-gift-registery-problem2

The first time I saw the message “We’re sorry. This item can’t be delivered to a Wish List or gift registry address” I hadn’t noticed the previous “Marketplace items cannot be sent to Gift Registry addresses”. At the time I was a newbie to all this and didn’t realise the difference between the Marketplace and Amazon itself. Searching for the error message took me to blog and forum posts discussing the problem. None were on the Amazon website. Surely it wouldn’t take that much effort to hide the “Add to wishlist” button on Marketplace product pages?
I eventually found time to correct things, and replaced as many items as I could with those available from Amazon itself, and not a 3rd part reseller.

Does this apply only to Irish addresses on the UK Amazon website or is it a general problem?

Oh, and here’s another quick Amazon tip. Buy gift cards on the Amazon site local to the receiver. My wife bought a voucher for her sister in New Zealand, but we used the UK Amazon website. When the voucher was delivered and used, it didn’t work. That’s a waste of money and embarrassing too. I should have cancelled the payment through my credit card but never thought to do so at the time.

Important Message
There’s something wrong with the gift certificate claim code you entered. Please check for transposed digits, omitted digits, and similar errors.

You’d think they’d have these basic problems sorted out wouldn’t you?

Ryanair Staff Give WordPress some lovin'

Oh yeah, a couple of Ryanair staff really love WordPress! Or maybe not. Jason Roe discovered that Ryanair’s website session handling isn’t 100% reliable. Click through to the voucher section, click back and suddenly the price of your flight is 0.00!

ra1

Unfortunately a few Ryanair staffers decided to take it upon themselves to chastise Jason for his blog post and took a dig at WordPress while they were at it.

You dont get a free flight, there is no dynamic data to render which is prob why you got 0.00. what self respecting developer uses a crappy CMS such as word press anyway AND puts they’re mobile ph number online, i suppose even a prank call is better than nothing on a lonely sat evening!!

Personally, I believe him about ryanair.com and the “dynamic data” which I presume is POST data, but they should handle these situations better. Their chief rival in Ireland, Aer Lingus show an “expired session” page at every wrong turn which is annoying but at least doesn’t lead me down the garden path of trying to buy tickets for €0.00!

Maybe Ryanair should hire Damien to give them a clue about how to play nicely online. Can’t see that happening though. They’d probably charge you €2+€5 credit card fee just to send them a refund request by tweet.

PS. Jason verified the IP addresses of the Ryanair staff. They were browsing blogs at work from their company’s designated IP range of 193.120.152.0 to 193.120.152.127.

Me and my Santa hat

donncha

Thank you Walter for my Santa hat! Walter has created a simple Pixenate app that adds a Santa hat to your Twitter avatar. Check out some of the other Christmas Avatars!

As my Gravatar is used anywhere I comment, I updated that too. It’s been a while since I updated it, and it’s nice to see it’s as simple to update as before. It even stores my old Gravatar so it’ll be simple to change back at the end of the month.

A nice demo of the capabilities of Pixenate, good job Walter!

What do you call a twit?

In the course of developing my Twitter stats page it occurred to me that there is no definitive name for a Twitter user. So I asked,

what do you call people on Twitter? Twitterer?

Replies came thick and fast:

I still don’t know, so I went with what I originally thought, “Tweeters”.

The Twitter Stats are generated from data I’ve collected since July 29th using my Tweet Tweet plugin for WordPress. It’s collected almost 100,000 tweets since that date. The stats are fairly basic, and they’re cached (individually) by memcached and the page itself is cached by WP Super Cache which is a good thing because it takes several seconds to generate! So far, the stats presented are:

  • Top 30 Twitterers
  • Top 30 Twitterers who repeat themselves
  • Top 30 friendliest Twitterers
  • Top 30 Twitterers who talk to me

For more interesting stats, check Tweetrush. (It’s down right now, but I presume @ajmckee and the lads are working on it and will have it running in no time at all!)

Google Chrome on Linux and Mac

Google Chrome, the open source browser that recently made headlines, was unfortunately only released for Windows. Linux and <a href="Mac users were left out in the cold.

It was possibly to get the browser working with Wine, but it wasn’t very stable by all accounts. Thanks to CodeWeavers, they have ported the Chromium browser to Linux and Mac OS X and packaged it ready for download on both systems!

First impressions of the Linux version? For some reason my whole screen goes black while a page is loading or when a new tab is opened. I see this in Vice (The C64 emulator) and any movie player other than mplayer so it’s an issue with my setup, not the browser. The fonts in the url bar suck as well, but I’m sure they can be fixed too. My curiousity is sated. CoveWeavers did a great job, but I’m going back to Firefox. (Via Tom)

So today I am pleased to announce that we have shipped freely available versions of Chromium for both the Mac and Linux. Not only does this give Mac and Linux users a chance to see what all the hype is about, it also lets the world see just how far Wine has come and how powerful it truly can be. In just 11 days, we were able to bring a modern Windows application across to Mac and Linux.

TechLudd Cork 2008

Anton Mannering organised TechLudd Cork last night at the Cork International Airport Hotel. I demoed Tweet Tweet and answered questions about WordPress and some of the plugins I had running on my blog.

Apart from showing off Tweet Tweet I took a few photos too. Pictured below are only some of the people there including (in no particular order): Walter, Bernard Goldbach, Anton, Aileen, Gavin Harkness, James Galvin (who should tweet more about Tweetrush!), Walter Wynne, John Peavoy, Pat Phelan, Ashley Halsall, Robin Blandford and some crazy guy who calls himself Damien.

If you see yourself in one of the photos please leave a comment, and apologies for not getting your name on the night.

Yes, the lighting in the toilets in the Cork International Airport Hotel really do change colour.

Tom's going away dinner at Proby's Bistro

Last night a number of bloggers met in Proby’s Bistro for a dinner to see of Tom Raftery who’s leaving our fair isle and heading off to live in Spain next Sunday. I won’t bore you with details of who went and who said what to whom, but a good night was had by all! If you really must know who attended, Conor O’Neill listed each blogger’s Twitter account. Check out the gallery for more!

My wife noticed this morning that Tom was featured in yesterday’s Evening Echo. Alongside him are Pat Phelan of MAXroam and Catherine Wall of IT@Cork. That was the Echo with the photo of the Spencer Tunick Blarney shoot, so I’m sure that copy’s circulation numbers were up!
The last photo in the gallery is a shot of that image. Note the prominent WordPress sticker? Thanks Pat!

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