Joe Six Pack

So, who is this “Joe Six Pack” that Sarah Palin keeps going on about? The Urban Dictionary says,

Average American moron, IQ 60, drinking beer, watching baseball and CNN, and believe everything his President says.

That isn’t the most flattering description of a demographic group. Who would willingly view themselves as a “Joe Six Pack” after reading that? Is there an Irish or British equivalent?

Anyway, I became curious after hearing another news report about American politics on Irish radio and found that Joe Six Pack really does exist! Joe dishes out the info on a range of topics and describes himself as, “America’s Most-Popular Divorced Dad”. Odd.

It turns out that Joe The Plumber exists too. They’re a plumbing company in Amarillo, Texas. I want one of their tshirts!

I’d love to see their stats. I wonder if the McCain/Palin campaign has sent much traffic to either site? Check out Palin as President for a humorous look at what Sarah Palin’s first day in the Oval Office might be like. Cracked me up.

So, who’s for a Brian Cowen tshirt? Or even an Enda Kenny tshirt? Can you imagine car bumper stickers with Cowen’s face? What would that do to the accident rate in the country?

PollDaddy join the Automattic Family

You’ve probably heard the news that Lenny and Eoin of PollDaddy have joined Automattic. PolDaddy has been acquired by Automattic, but on a personal level we’ve been joined by two great Irish guys from Sligo bringing the Irish contingent of Automattic up to three. Lenny did completely trash me at Wii Tennis but I won’t hold that against him!

We’ve even taken over a house here in Breckenridge, calling it the Irish House. The Irish Tricolour is flying outside an Irish pub downtown. They might lend it to us if we ask nicely ..
Raanan is staying there too so I guess we’ll make him an honourary Irishman for the week!

As well as the great PollDaddy news, expect a few more enhancements to WordPress.com soon, and if I have anything to do with it, a plugin or two that will make it into the WordPress MU community too!

Hold your breath

Life here in Colorado at 9,600ft is much the same as at sea level except for one major difference. The air is noticeably thinner at this altitude and takes some getting used to.

Thankfully we’re not here to train for the Olympics or do anything strenuous like that. Lying in bed is difficult enough! I tried reading last night and became breathless just because I was looking down at my book. Rolling on my side helped, but it’s scary when you can’t catch your breath. It feels like someone holding a bag over my head.

There’s an oxygen bar in a local town, and cans of oxygen can be purchased at the local store. Hopefully no more frights.

No previews of what we’re working on right now, but you’ll see the fruits of our labour soon enough!

IMG_3682

For photos see the Automattic Group on Flickr and/or my Colorado Set.

PS. Check out the WordPress MU plugin contest winners. Well done to everyone involved. 🙂

My favourite Irish bloggers

For the last few months I’ve added a link to one of my favourite Irish bloggers to my sidebar. If your eyes wander over there now you’ll see Green Ink, Riemann’s Cut, and this month’s blog, Inside View by Bernie Goldbach.

All eyes are on the Irish Web Awards (this weekend!), Irish Blog Awards and the “Blog Post of the Month”, but why not show your appreciation for the great blogs you read by highlighting them? Have your own “Blogger of the Month”!

The blogs I add to that list are those blogs that no matter how much they post, I’ll always try to read every post because they’re entertaining or informative. Thanks guys (and gals in the future)!

WP Super Cache 0.8.3 "Speedy"

WP Super Cache version 0.8.3 is now available. WP Super Cache is a page caching plugin for WordPress that will significantly speed up your website.

Double Caching

This releases fixes a long standing compression bug. In older versions of the plugin, the cached page was compressed twice. Once to display to the current visitor, and once again for the cached files stored on the server. This has now been fixed and there’s a noticeable speed increase for anonymous visitors. Unfortunately as a side effect, it’s not possible to display the “super cache gz” html comment now. To verify that html pages are being served from the supercache directory you’ll have to add an error_log() somewhere and check that visits aren’t logged.
The plugin now uses fopen() instead of gzopen() which according to a comment on the gzopen() manual page is unreliable under high load.

IE7 Fixes

Apparently IE7 has problems when gzipped files are served as “x-gzip” files, under certain circumstances. This is an obscure bug but this has been fixed. If you’re upgrading, either remove wp-content/cache/.htaccess and visit the admin page and that file will be regenerated, or edit that file and change “x-gzip” to “gzip”.

A number of smaller bugs were also fixed. Check the changelog for further info.

Miley Cyrus vs Miley Byrne

Well Holy God! Did ya ever think there’d be another Miley to rival our own Miley Byrne? Apparently Myley Cyrus is a young actress/singer who stars “as Miley Stewart/”Hannah Montana” in the television series Hannah Montana on the Disney Channel.” I’d never hear of her before coming across this post on WordPress.com but what do you know, she’s famous! That explains all those Hannah Montana lunchboxes in the shops.

Meanwhile, the real Miley was a character in the Irish soap Glenroe that enthralled the Irish nation during the 80’s and 90’s. Mick Lally who played the character recently joined TG4’s Ros na Run. Must set that up to record later. He also released a single that flew up the charts to hit the no. 1 spot in Ireland. Check it out on Youtube. There is also an atrocious remix of the Glenroe theme song by Dustin. Oh dear, prepare to have your ears assaulted if you click that link!

A song from the series, The By-Road to Glenroe, performed by Mick Lally, was released as a single in Ireland in 1990, featuring the Jim Lockhart version of the theme tune as its B-side, and reached Number 1 in the Irish singles chart.

I did a double take when I heard about Miley Cyrus, thinking of Miley from Glenroe of course. The same happened when I first heard Fergie on the radio. I thought, “she doesn’t have such a bad voice for a British Royal.”

Show me the money!

World markets might be in freefall but here’s a reminder of better times. On January 1st 2002, Ireland changed it’s currency to the Euro along with the 14 other countries in the Eurozone. Price increases followed as retailers “converted” their prices from the Irish Punt to the Euro. The economy went into overdrive as cheap credit flooded the market and drove inflation to sky high levels.

Still, it’s handy going on holiday to Spain and not worrying about converting currency any more. If only we could afford to go on holiday again ..

Irish coins

In this gallery are each of the Irish coins and the £5, £10, £20 and £50 notes that were legal tender until February 2002. More information about the changeover can be found on the ECBI Euro website. I also have a ten shilling note from 1963. Anyone remember those?

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!)

WordPress MU Sitewide Tags Pages 0.3.1

One of these days I’ll rename all my plugins and give them nice snappy titles.

Version 0.3.1 of the Sitewide Tags Pages plugin (for WordPress MU) has just been released. If you’ve been using this plugin you should probably update because this fixes a number of bugs including the problem with the Prologue Theme (and possibly Feedwordpress but I haven’t tested that.)
This release wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Thomas Schneider!

Main changes:

  • Pages are now filtered out because they don’t really fit neatly anywhere in the global posts page.
  • Prologue Theme problem with wp_insert_category() is fixed.
  • Set comment and ping status of global posts to closed.
  • Lots of translation work, including a German translation.
  • Lots of fixes related to when blogs change status, or posts are edited.

Grab it from the download page.

WordPress MU 2.6.2

WordPress MU, the multi blog version of WordPress that runs on WordPress.com has been updated.

Version 2.6.2 is now available for download and is a required update. WordPress MU isn’t vulnerable to the security bugs that were the reason for WordPress 2.6.2 but it does contain a number of important bug fixes, including:

  1. xmlrpc.php works better if you use multiple sites. #735
  2. get_option() wasn’t reading all options.
  3. Configurable media buttons on the Write page. #598, #738
  4. 404 “file not found” errors on folder installs is mostly fixed. #745
  5. And more .. (timeline)

PS. Don’t forget the voting is now open in the WordPress MU plugin competition.
PPS. Registration is now open for BarCamp Cork II on November 1st. I’ve put my name down to give a talk there.

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