Category: Rants

Stand up against the #censorwall

On By westiIn Rants, Security, Technology

Censorship is a hot topic at the moment after David Cameron announced plans to introduce default adult Internet filters for everyone. It is also a topic that is close to my heart every day as I support the fine people who work on the WordPress.com Terms of Service team as they work to protect everyone’s rights.

If we push internet censorship forwards as David Cameron has announced then we are going to be joining a small “club” of countries with pervasive censorship of our internet access and people are going to start searching for ways to work around the censorship which is likely to put them at more risk than they would have been before they had their access restricted. People will start searching out open proxies to use to bypass the censorship. Often these proxies are run by people with a vested interest in collecting usernames and passwords which is going to put people’s online accounts at risk.

If you can do one thing as a result of reading this then please sign the ORG Petition and if you can do two please also join the Open Rights Group and support them as they campaign to protect your rights.

It’s time to stand up against this attempt at censorship and be counted.

Setting up an Airport Express on Mountain Lion

On By westiIn Rants, Technology, Tutorials

The old style Airport Expresses are amazing and have been around a long time, they are great for extending your home network and also great for setting up impromptu networks when travelling.

However, as of Mountain Lion the Airport Utility (which is now pretty dumbed down) doesn’t support them which is kind of lame – I guess when the devices once had an expected life of 18 months that isn’t much of a surprise.

There is however still a solution, AirPort Utility 5.6 for Mac OS X Lion, which of course you can’t install on Mountain Lion until you find these excellent instructions.

From frustrated to happy in the space of 5 minutes, now I can get this Tiger running Mac Mini from 2006 back online alongside the new Mac Book Air that replaces it.

Now I just need to see if I can set the second one up for my in-laws too so they can get iPlayer on the TV šŸ™‚

My ethos for sharing code

On By westiIn Rants, Technology, WordPress

A recent discussion around the way we write and share small helper scripts inside Automattic made me think a lot about why I do things the way I do and why I am against “authorship attribution” in shared code.

The views I have are strong and I think a good guiding principle for working collaboratively with your peers especially in Open Source projects:

I am very strongly against authorship attribution ā€“ it puts up a barrier to contribution by setting a subconscious ownership barrier around things.

I give you my code to do as you wish, I mold your code to do as I wish, I blame early and often when searching for bugs, and I expect you to have forgotten you wrote the tool Iā€™m asking you about especially if you committed it yesterday!

What is your ethos and what do you think of mine?