Author: Otto

Press Mentions

“Otto is 255 miles northeast of Grand Turk Island and is moving in a northeasterly direction at a speed of about 2 mph.” – Source

“Otto’s presence in the western Atlantic might increase the risk of riptides along the southeastern coast of the U.S.” – Source

“The Miami-based hurricane center said that on its forecast track, Otto could end up affecting the Portuguese Azores archipelago in the Atlantic … in four to five days.” – Source

“Otto poses no threat to land. The forecast calls for it to aim northeast out to sea…” – Source (that’s what they think…)

“Otto remains … strong …, maintaining some non tropical characteristics. The forecast calls for Otto to soon shed its subtropical look, becoming a totally tropical system later Thursday. Then Otto will begin to be steered to the northeast through Friday…” – Source

“Otto is currently nearly stationary and has lost a bit of his energy. However, … he is over very warm waters. He will remain in a favorable environment through Friday, which is why he should be able to grow. A cold front on the east coast will push eastward which will knock Otto into a faster steering flow. Otto will race northeast over the weekend, … to the Azores early next week … Otto will not impact the mainland United States during his life span.” – Source

“Otto is being referred to as ‘an area of low pressure.'” – Source

“Bad news: Otto will continue to move to the north and then northeast. He’s already heading back north before Saturday gets here. By the way, it’s no coincidence that Otto is heavily-orange, right? I know that has nothing to do with heat signatures and everything to do with random chance. Obviously.” –

Source

Oh well...

Advertising on the web

Just got a phone call (yep, voice! In this day and age?) from a company wanting to buy advertising on my ottopress.com website. Did a reverse lookup on the phone number, and the company seems legit enough, for a “Search Engine and Advertising Network”. Not somebody I’d advertise for though, even if I did advertising.

For the record, I don’t do paid advertising on my sites. I do, however, accept bribes and free stuff, so feel free to contact me about any of those. 🙂

I know how they got my number, of course. I don’t use privacy on my domain registrations. However, I’ve now gone through and changed that information to have my Google Voice number, which allows me to whitelist my contacts more easily. Unknown callers there can just go straight to my voicemail instead.

Still, I have to wonder how effective this sort of tactic is… Cold calling a site owner to see if you can buy ad space? Does that really work? Anybody else experience this or have any comments?

Genetic Testing: 23andme

A while back, the personal genetic testing company 23andme offered a special sale. They discounted their normal price from $500 to $99 for one day only. Naturally, I jumped on it.

Just got my results back. Nothing particularly surprising here, but it is neat.

  • My blood type is A (A/O). I knew this, good to see it backed up by genetics. 🙂
  • I have an elevated risk for Type I and II diabetes (no news here, my sister is diabetic).
  • Apparently, I can’t taste “bitter”. This does explain why I love Brussels Sprouts.
  • I’m lactose intolerant. I was pretty sure of this already.
  • I have a natural resistance to norovirus (stomach flu). Didn’t know that.
  • I am a carrier for Cystic Fibrosis. I don’t have it, but it’s possible that my children could.
  • I am a slow caffeine metabolizer. It says that drinking coffee increases my heart attack risk (duh), but I’m not sure what this really means. Caffeine typically doesn’t do a thing to me, at least not immediately. I go through a fair amount of it on a regular basis.
  • Paternal Haplogroup: I1*, Maternal Haplogroup: H1. This basically makes my ancestry 100% European. Very vanilla there. However, this does conflict with my known ancestry slightly, in that it says I don’t have any Native American ancestors (within 5 generations). But then again, I don’t have a whole lot of reliable information on that branch of the family tree.

There’s a ton more information (apparently I’d respond really well to Interferon Beta Therapy, whatever the hell that is), and I haven’t gone through it all yet.

One thing I did note is that they do allow you to download the raw data, which is pretty cool. However when I looked at it, I noticed that it’s not a complete record of your DNA, just a sampling. Basically it’s like 500,000 markers of it instead of the full 3 billion or whatever. Clearly you don’t need the complete sequence to draw useful information out of it.

Still, kinda neat that this is within the reach of the average person.

New Job: Working for the Matt

WordPressI’ve been delaying this post for a while, but I recently got a new job. I’ve been hired by Matt Mullenweg, of WordPress and Automattic fame. My first goal will be to start the revamping of the WordPress.org website, which has needed some reworking for some time now.

I didn’t really expect this or see it coming, but I’m sure glad it did. Though it does mean leaving my position at AutoZone for the second time (I doubt they’ll hire me back a third time 🙂 ), it’s an opportunity that I’m extremely excited about and honestly simply could not pass up. I do like the people at AutoZone, and wish them the best. I have one week remaining with them, and I’m doing my best to ensure a smooth transition.

Since Matt is a distributed kind of guy, I’ll be able to work from a laptop, wherever I happen to be, and I plan to take full advantage of that. I’ve never been to a WordCamp, for example, but I’m planning on going to WordCamp Savannah this year in August. Well, actually I plan on going to Savannah for a week or two, while there’s a WordCamp going on. I love Savannah; me and friends used to go there for the week of St. Patrick’s Day every year. Did that for 7 years before the prices got too steep. Went back once for New Year’s Day a couple years ago, and I miss the place. I needs me some Crab Shack.

I’ll also be at the big San Francisco gathering next year, and I might be around other places from time to time. Because of that, I’ve decided to turn this blog into more of a personal journal. Expect changes to accommodate more of a photoblog, sort of thing. Most entries are probably just going to be photos with captions. If you’re not down with that, sorry. For my tech ramblings, head over to Otto on WordPress instead.

Addendum: For those who are curious, I am not going to be working for Automattic. I’m working directly for Matt. My title, however, is “Tech Ninja”. 😀

Ottopress – A New Blog

Joseph Ducreux, original pimp.
Joseph Ducreux laughs at your nonsense.

For those of you who read this site for my WordPress knowledge, code, rants, or what have you, I’m writing this to point you in a new direction. I’ve started a new site just for that sort of thing: Otto on WordPress. Despite the name, I plan on putting other things there too, including code and other geekery.

Partially I’m doing it because I feel that I want to post more personal information type stuff here. More stuff about Memphis and what I’m up to and photo libraries and such, and my friends aren’t much into that sort of thing. Partially I’m doing it because I’d like to build more of a personal brand.

But, mostly I’m doing it because the ottopress.com domain name was available and I liked it. 🙂

I won’t be eliminating all geekery from this site, but it will be significantly toned down. Maybe. Dunno yet.

So, I’d suggest going over there if you like my technical rantings and ravings, since those won’t be here anymore. Also, this site may not be busy for a while. It’ll take a while to get into the swing of things, and I may start pulling more smaller microblog type posts in here. So if you want to switch your subscription around, now would be the time, while I make the changes.

For those people subscribing only to my WordPress tagged posts feed (I know there’s a few), I’ve redirected that feed now. You don’t have to switch, though you may want to. And if you suddenly got a bunch of repeat posts, that’s why. I moved a few of them over there when setting up.

So there you go.

BTW, if you’re not subscribing to my feeds, but prefer to use Facebook or Twitter, then I’ve separated some of that all out now too.

You can follow Otto on WordPress on Facebook here: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=334947428931

You can follow this blog, Nothing to See Here, on Facebook here: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=116002660893

And you can follow both of them on Twitter here: http://twitter.com/ottodestruct (Still working on this one, it’s not 100% reliable yet).

Simple Twitter Connect

Since people have been emailing me and asking for it…

WordPress Plugin: Simple Twitter Connect

It’s similar in concept to the Simple Facebook Connect plugin. In fact, it rips off quite a lot of the same code. But instead of Facebook, this integrates your WordPress site better with Twitter.

Now, there’s a lot of Twitter plugins out there already. And this plugin by no means competes with them (yet). This plugin can’t, for example, send a post to Twitter (yet). Nor can it pull posts from Twitter to display on your own site (yet).

What it does is to provide the framework for a more complete Twitter integration. Right now it can do:

  • Login via Twitter
  • Comment via Twitter

Not much, really. But it has the backend code necessary to make it easier to connect your site to a Twitter Application, and to make plugins surrounding it that won’t interfere with each other. That’s the same basic reason for the Simple Facebook Connect plugin.

So yes, eventually this plugin will send and receive stuff from Twitter. But for now, it lets you allow users to Login and/or to have users Comment using their Twitter credentials.

Expect frequent updates.

Don't include wp-load, please.

Edit: This post has moved to here: http://ottopress.com/2010/dont-include-wp-load-please/. Take your comments there.

Time for Otto’s general griping: WordPress plugin programming edition.

Here’s a practice I see in plugins far too often:

  1. Plugin.php file adds something like this to the wp_head: 
    <script src='http://example.com/wp-content/plugins/my-plugin/script.js.php'>
  2. Script.js.php has code like the following: 
    <?php
include "../../../wp-load.php";
?>
... javascript code ...

The reason for this sort of thing is that there’s some option or code or something that the javascript needs from the database or from WordPress or whatever. This PHP file is, basically, generating the javascript on the fly.

Usually, the case for this turns out to be something minor. The code needs the value from an option, or some flag to turn it on or off. Or whatever.

Problem is that finding wp-load.php can be a bit of a chore. I’ve seen extreme efforts to find and load that file in plugins before, including searching for it, examining the directory structure to make decent guesses, etc. This sort of thing has existed even before wp-load.php came around, with people trying to load wp-config.php themselves and such.

But the real problem is simpler: This is always the wrong way to do it.
Continue reading “Don't include wp-load, please.”

How to Setup your Facebook Connect Application

Note: This post has been moved to here. Please leave comments there instead.

The majority of the email I get from users of the Simple Facebook Connect plugin is questions regarding how to setup their Facebook Application. It’s really not that hard to do, but the plethora of options can seem somewhat intimidating. So here’s the basics of what you need to do.

Continue reading “How to Setup your Facebook Connect Application”

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