Matt Mullenweg from Automattic has just launched a new website called the WordPress Foundation.

From their “about page”:

The point of the foundation is to ensure free access, in perpetuity, to the projects we support.

This certainly sounds good to me. The aim being that WordPress and similar projects will have support to survive far into the future and provide a stable platform for generations to come.

It’s a non-profit organisation and I guess it has similarity to the Mozilla Foundation which was formed to promote and support development of open innovation on the internet. The aim of the WordPress Foundation is to ensure that people will always have an open-source option for publishing content on the internet.

The moment we’ve all been waiting for: the WordPress Foundation is now public. As they say, slow cookin’ makes good eatin’.

via Getting off the ground.

Congrats to Matt and co, and I hope the foundation is a success.

For the benefit of Meontwit_ter2 who was curious as to what a bluegrass version of Metallica’s “For Whom The Bell Tolls” actually sounds like.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

This cover is by “Iron Horse” from their album “Fade to Bluegrass: The Bluegrass Tribute to Metallica”.

Enjoy!

Recently enough Google has changed their default search behaviour to include a “Show Options” button which brings up a sidebar to narrow your search results by a variety of parameters such as type, time, previously visited pages and so on.

However they haven’t extended this functionality to their Google Custom Search results.

I created  my own Custom Search for searching WordPress plugins to make up for what used to be a very poor search functionality on WordPress.org’s plugin directory. This search function has massively improved but I still find myself using the Custom Search I created.

In order to add an option to view by date modified I found this handy tip on Lifehacker which I thought I’d share here:

Google can reorder search and news results from the last day, week, a few months, or entire year by adding a small string to the end of the search URL. Just add this string—&as_qdr=d—to the address bar and hit enter.

via Filter Google Results by Date with a URL Trick.

Since arriving in India my days have been extremely busy to say the least. My typical day has been:

• Wake Up
• Eat Breakfast
• Go to sound studio and work until late evening
• Return to hotel
• Eat dinner
• Work in hotel room on prepping next days work
• Sleep

That’s pretty much been it. I’m looking forward to being finished and finally getting a chance to look around a bit – fingers crossed I might post a little more often on here as well.

I have to head off to the sound studio to sort out the deliverables for this film, but I thought I’d share a video which demonstrates fairly accurately what Indian driving is like. I first saw this video a few years ago and it seemed insane to me at the time. Now that I’ve been here for a couple of weeks it seems quite normal…

Ever wanted to know what the first web page ever created looked like?

The World Wide Web project

Thanks to SixRevisions for sharing this and a huge amount more information in their article, The History of the Internet in a Nutshell, a really fascinating look back over the way this remarkable technology has developed.

A priceless video replete with examples of rap at its best.

Apart from the rap, another favourite part of mine is the sax-player that mimes along to a part of the song where there is no saxophone (there might not actually be a saxophone in any part of the song, not even a synth one, but I’m not sure I can watch it again to check), along with the piano player with the fixed grin staring at the camera and not at the piano.

Thanks to Graham Linehan for sharing. By the way, the video ends around 3.13, but plays a black screen to 5 minutes.

Am I stressed? Yes.

Remaining time to complete film

Timer courtesy of countdown.onlineclock.net

What happens when there’s a terrorist in your child’s drawing?

I’m not exactly sure whether this is originally by House of Grindlebone, or not, but it’s a great image.

Thanks to Jonas Nockert for sharing this one. The instant I saw it, the image struck a chord, both introspectively and as a commentary on broader society today.

Below I have reproduced the most recent cover of the New Yorker, posted by Design Milk, which says a lot about today’s society. Something of which I know I’m guilty -  my face constantly being lit up by a screen of some sort. It is also something which I’ve seen in action at the last stadium concert I attended – the view from the stand seats being one of a sea of camera phones held up to capture the moment, either calling friends during famous songs, or camera-phoning the event.

November Cover of New Yorker

This humorous new cover for the November 2, 2009 issue of The New Yorker says a lot more than it appears to at first glance. For a closer look in case it’s difficult to see, read more.

via Design Milk – The New Yorker Cover by Chris Ware.

This cover also made me think of one of the best articles I’ve read on TechCrunch in a long time – NSFW: Weezer, plane crashes and everything else that’s worrying about the real-time web – which I recommend reading, and captures a lot of my own thoughts and concerns about the all-encompassing, always-on, realistically unsocial (at least in the traditional sense) internet world into which we’re drifting.

Am I guilty of a lot of these things – hell yes. My world is now driven by internet-based communication and social networking tools, I’m as bad as anyone. Still, I want to keep it in check and make some changes that result in me having a bit more physical world interaction over the coming years. I think travelling to India and Cambodia will help with this. Maybe I’m wrong and it’s just a natural evolution, but I still think I need to keep it in mind.

Anyway, great cover – wanted to share it out there (I recognise the somewhat ironic nature of using the medium I am slightly knocking to deliver this message).

Visit the New Yorker

Image by robo7 on Flickr

A bleary set of eyes I find upon me this morning, but my brain is alive and kicking, and in fact, has been alive and kicking all night long. My increased levels of brain agitation are probably part of the reason for the bleariness of my eyes.

Anyway, part of this brain agitation lead to me dreaming about two good friends of mine and their newly published book, a beautiful embossed hardcover in a powder red colour. The only problem is that it doesn’t exist, that is, outside the realm of my dreams – unless there’s something  S and D haven’t been telling us.

Unless they have kept it under wraps, it belongs purely in Lucien’s library¹, and I truly hope that Unkie Dave and his Very Understanding Girlfriend steal it out of there and get writing.

I know I’d love to read it.

(Unfortunately I cannot remember what it was about nor what the title of the book was, which is probably not a huge amount of help)