EGOPOLY

I just used the WP Automatic Upgrade plugin. WordPress’s upgrade procedure has always struck me as cumbersome, and this plugin makes the experience a lot simpler.

I ran into a few little snags, mostly because my WordPress installation is not at the root of my server, and I have some rewrite rules that confuse things. But it was pretty robust to those problems, and I made it through the approximately 10 steps in the upgrade without having to go into a shell or manually do any backups or tar extracts.

IMO, the WordPress team should work on nothing until this kind of functionality can be integrated into the main capabilities of WordPress. PHP and PHP applications are such an extreme vulnerability, that all friction to keeping up to the latest patches should be removed.

Steve Yegge is my long lost, slightly smarter, twin brother. His recent rants have convinced me of that fact, to a scary degree. (Loves emacs, worships JWZ, not a Mac nut yet has switched, hates IDEs)

Bad news for you, Stevie, is that you’re really 41, not 40. Or maybe I’m 40, not 41. That’s a better thought.

At work we just got this new coffee machine. Google always brags about the free soda, snacks, meals, massages, pedicures, dry cleaning etc. But that stuff is expensive.

This coffee maker wasn’t cheap either, but if you allocate the cost across the 15+ engineers that use it, it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than buying RAM upgrades. And the coffee it makes is so delicious, so much better than normal drip-brewed coffee, it will make your programmers happy. Imagine if your programmers and product designers were not only happier, but cranked up on good old caffeine.

Can you love a machine? Spend a week with this beauty and you’ll find out. So shiny.

I’m kicking around the idea of getting a new iMac for home. It would be mostly for web browsing, email, encoding my DVDs to Apple TV and iPod, and playing some games.

First of all, why didn’t Apple make the iMac with a user-accessible hard drive? I understand that the iMac is supposed to be a “consumer” computer, simple, all-in-one. Not expandable. Not for nerds like me who like to tinker with their computers.

But they made the memory user-accessible, which is actually more important because Apple charges insanely high prices for RAM upgrades: a 4GB upgrade for an Intel iMac is $400 from Apple, $100 from crucial.com. Why not the hard drive?

The one part on a computer that is most likely to fail, the one mechanical part on just about any computer (except for fans), is the hard drive. It’s also something for which Apple charges an unreasonable amount (like RAM). An upgrade to a 1TB drive is $400! It’s only about $250 at New Egg, including shipping.

You could get an external disk for more storage, but then you’re ruining the nice clean desk that the iMac gives you.

This is mostly rhetorical: I know they probably didn’t say “let’s make it hard/impossible to upgrade the hard drive in this puppy.” The Apple designers clearly wanted to make something beautiful, and they just couldn’t work it out so the disk was user accessible. A hard trade-off, but that’s something Apple does often.

So here is my current recipe for best value iMac: get a 20-inch Intel iMac, 2.4GHz processor, with 1GB RAM and 320GB Hard drive. 2.4 GHz processor gets you the good video card, if you don’t care at all about games, get the 2.0 GHz. Then go to crucial.com and get the 4GB iMac upgrade kit for $106. Total cost: $1605. If you want a big screen, get the same configuration in the 24-inch model, buy the same memory upgrade from Crucial, total cost $1905. Use a network drive for expanded storage.

I continue to be astounded by Twitter. It’s very cool, quite addictive. What blows my mind is that it can continue to exist as a very popular web site with absolutely no visible means of support. How deep are those pockets? What happens to my tweets when the cookie jar runs out?

Steve Yegge has written up some great stuff about how to get hired. In particular, he’s talking about how to get hired by at Google, and probably when he is interviewing you. But I think the advice would work at a lot of places, including where I work.

We’ve been interviewing a lot of candidates recently, so I’ll offer my little bit of advice to the job seeker: cut your resume down to one page. I don’t care who you are, or how much you’ve accomplished in your life. If you can’t express your life’s work in a one-page summary, you either:

1. Have an overinflated opinion of yourself and what you’ve done.

2. Have no idea how distinguish the important from the trivial.

Either way, I won’t want to work with you, for you, or have you work for me.

I was ranting about this today, holding up as an example a nice, clean 1-page resume of a college intern. “This is brilliant. One page. Everybody should have a one-page resume.”

Paul said, “what if you’re Steve Jobs?”

I don’t care who you are. In fact, if you are Steve Jobs, this is your resume.

I’m Steve Jobs.

If you want to get all wordy, you could probably get away with:

I invented the Macintosh, the iPod, the iPhone, brought the music industry weeping to me at my feet, and am in the middle of taking over Disney. Who am I?

Back in reality, you might be saying, but I did all these things and I learned all this stuff. Guess what? You’ve either had a lot of jobs, and you’ve done one or two really interesting/difficult/awesome things at them, or you’ve had a few jobs, and you’ve done slightly more interesting/difficult/awesome things.

You should be able to summarize each interesting thing you’ve done in one sentence. Furthermore, I claim that you can’t really do much more than 1 interesting thing per year. If you claim that you can, I think you and I have very different ideas about what “interesting” means. This summary sentence should be like a newspaper headline, something that will make me think “Gosh, that sounds really interesting, I must ask them more about it.” Then we’ll be able to talk about all the details about what made that thing hard or fun or really terrific. Your resume is bait, to get me on the hook.

My friend Russ found this. I can’t believe I didn’t know about it, and I can’t believe how incredibly awesome it is.

I’ve found that the “back to my mac” functionality in Leopard to be incredibly disappointing. I have a lot of Macs that I either own or am responsible for in some way: a couple at home, some at work, and a bunch at my wife’s practice. Using VNC viewers like Chicken of the VNC is incredibly inefficient and slow. So I was hoping that the “back to my Mac” thing would let me not only use the more efficient Apple optimizations to remote access, but blow through firewalls so I wouldn’t have to use ssh tunnels.

But back to my mac almost never works for me. I think I got it to work once, when I was at home, and accessing the other Mac I have at home. That’s not a very interesting use case.

Anyway, I had resigned myself to staying on Apple Remote Desktop, which is a really nice application, but is also total overkill for what I want to do most of the time: just get access to a desktop.

So, that’s all a lot of annoying background to get to a simple how-to. If you have enabled remote management on a mac, and you want to open the Leopard screen-sharing application, just do this in a terminal:

open vnc://IPADDRESS-OF-REMOTE-MAC

Please, everybody stop it. Please.