We are live from BarCamp South East!

Here I am blogging away at BarCamp South East. It’s been a great day so far. My talk was scheduled for 10:50am which was a relief to get out of the way. Feedback has been positive too and horrors of horrors, I actually enjoyed the talk! Video and podcasts will be online eventually and I’ll update this post when they’re available. Elly left Bernie’s dictaphone on the seat next to me, Joe and Conor had video cameras so I’m sure you’ll get to hear or watch me talk about WordPress one way or another if you’re interested!

Thank you all for the comments on yesterday’s post. I’m hopeful that things will return to normal sooner or later on inphotos.org!

Now, I’m off to look around and mingle with the rest of the attendees!

Just spotted on Lifehacker, is How to manage kids in the home office, a topic brushed upon in my talk.

I’m sitting in the Drupal talk now by Alan Burke and Stephane Corlosquet on the laptop. John Handelaar is showing off his voter site written in Drupal. It’s a great presentation on the power of Drupal and it’s plugins.

Ken McGuire has a review of the day, and apart from everything else, and it was great to talk to Justin Mason finally.

Great day. I think everyone’s looking forward to the next one in May!

Conor O’Neill has posted videos of my talk on his blog. I could embed them here, but he went to all the trouble of uploading them, so go visit his blog and check them out. There are bits there about scaling WPMU by hashing blog_ids and partitioning databases, as well as how to get past the 32,000 file limit of ext2/ext3 in the blogs.dir files directory. Also, if you work from home I discuss my experiences doing the same, and communicating within a virtual company.

Bernie has posted the first podcast of my talk. He’s posting the second half tomorrow about working from home and in a virtual company.

The second part of Bernie’s podcast is online today! In this part I talk about working from home and balancing work and home life. Should be of interest to everyone working from home!

How to dump a cheating girlfriend

Galaxy Radio’s Danny dumps the girlfriend of a guy who is about to propose to her when he finds out that she, eh, serviced her married boss at the Christmas party.

It’s cruel, it’s awful, and the way she was dumped wasn’t too nice either but didn’t she deserve it?

Did she deserve that? Did they go too far? Have you got any similar breakup stories? (via)

Getting to know the Trotts

Just goes to show what a hectic week it was last week. Despite it being on the front cover of the Business Section, I completely missed this Sunday Times interview with Mena and Ben Trott, the founders of Six Apart, makers of blog software Moveable Type, Vox, Typepad and owners of Livejournal.

It’s a personable interview that doesn’t go into any great technical detail but it’s interesting for me to find out a little about the competition from my outpost across the Atlantic.

Is RSA encryption broken?

First spotted on the ILUG mailing list, it appears that a young 16 year old student has cracked the RSA encryption system and won 1st prize at the BT Young Scientist Competition 2007.

If it’s true then Internet commerce could be in for a rough time, but some previous winners have proven to be less than remarkable when seen against the cold light of day. This comment from the winner, Abdusalam Abubakar, seems to indicate that the method used might not be that effective either. Check out this ILUG thread for further discussion. Can it be true he wrote it in Visual Basic?

“It was great, unbelievable. I didn’t think I was going to win anything. I didn’t want to be optimistic,” he told The Irish Times last night. Abdusalam, whose name translates into “man of peace”, based his initial work on partially successful attacks on the world’s most widely-used encryption system, RSA, mounted by two mathematicians. He decided to take the best aspects of both and generalise a new approach, which he believes has the potential to tackle at least some less complex coding systems.

The Paris Hilton video

Paris Hilton makes headlines all over the world just for being her but her sex video, “One Night in Paris” made her even more infamous! Now just hanging out with Britney Spear isn’t enough. The video released by ex-boyfriend, Rick Salomon caused quite a stir.

Now here exclusively is Paris Hilton’s new video! Check out the video here for download. Be careful, it’s shiny!

(Yes, this is like Pamela Anderson’s latest video, and yes, this is the last time I’ll recycle this joke!)

What is it about Paris Hilton that made you search for her video today?

Continue reading “The Paris Hilton video”

Idiots on the road on film

Gardai are investigating a video found on bebo.com made by two lads from Cork. They made a video of themselves driving at 200km/h through the Jack Lynch Tunnel and then posted it on the Internet for all to see. I wonder who did they think would watch the video? Has the video made it outside Bebo yet? Apparently the Gardai have asked Bebo.com to take the video down so it could be gone for good. Pity, it could go down in Irish Internet Folklore.

While we’re waiting, here are two lads who decided to drive at speed through Dublin city center, at least until they passed an unmarked Garda car. (via Blogorrah)

The video might not be playing, but you can view it here still. Not sure why but it’ll probably right itself eventually. Note the comment from the driver:

deloford (2 months ago)
They stopped us because it was an english reg in dub& they thought the car was stolen by a couple of nackers, also you cant see clearly but it was v. bad driving in rain,nearly ran someone down,run red light,speeding in bus lane,a guy videoing it in the front seat which they saw.
Normal cops dont threaten to shoot you and if it was normal cops we’d ave been in the shit. He started to search and got a call.

And this comment was definitely not made by an Irish person, like,

Why is everyone using like at the end of every sentence what ever the fuck that means?!!!

Ask the developer

On January 20th I’ll be speaking at BarCamp South East on the subject of WordPress.com and WordPress MU. The talk is titled, “WordPress.com – running the biggest wpmu site in the world” which is vague enough that I could talk about anything but I’d like to know what you want to hear.

Public speaking isn’t my strong point, I prefer to be behind the keyboard, or looking through a camera lens but sometimes you have to push yourself to do unfamiliar things. Here’s my go at public speaking.

Talks will be in 45 minute slots and I would like to make mine more of a discussion forum like the WPMU talk we had at WordCamp way back in August last year. It went really well and everyone got something out of it.

Subjects I’m considering include:

  • Merging code from WP core which is horribly exciting, have you ever seen vimdiff in action?
  • Site stats – did you know we publish them?
  • Hardware – server porn. How do we handle the load generated by Slashdots, Diggs, and almost 600,000 blogs?
  • Hooks and plugins – new hooks in the signup process and wpmu admin backend.
  • Anyone interested in working from home and virtual company issues? Automattic has employees in at least four countries.

So, if you’ll be there I want to hear from you. If you won’t, I still want to hear from you because I’m sure Bernie or someone will record the talk and put it up online.

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