Month: May 2019
👓 Reverting the Bulk Ticket Closing | Make WordPress Core
Recently, a bulk modification was performed on Trac affecting 2,300+ tickets that had not seen any activity in 2 years or more. These tickets were closed and marked as wontfix. To read a more detai…
👓 #20977 (Add Dynamic Comment Statuses) | WordPress Trac
👓 #36669 (Update SimplePie to Latest Version and possibly include PHP-MF2) | WordPress Trac
👓 #44067 (Refactor get_avatar and related functions to make Gravatar a Hook instead of a Default) | WordPress Trac
👓 How I Twitter | Leo Laporte
As you may know I deactivated my half-million follower/bot twitter account last August. I don’t miss it at all except as a newsfeed. Twitter practically killed RSS readers by providing a firehose of instantaneously “curated” news. With all its flaws, that firehose is useful for a variety of re...
Leo Laporte (This Week in Google | TWiT.tv)Everybody, every company, ought to have a website: a place they can call their own, a place where your best stuff lives, a place where, when people Google you, they find your site.
I tell every teenager: [...] create a website, get your domain name—preferably your own name—put stuff up there so when people search for you they find your best stuff. It's so important.
And if you're a business it goes double. A business that's not online practically doesn't exist.
Now you may say, "well i have a Facebook page, I have a Twitter account." You need your own spot! Sure you can have your Facebook page and Twitter feed and all that stuff, and it should link to your website, but you gotta have the website.
—Leo Laporte, The Tech Guy on the Premiere radio network, broadcaster, podcaster, tech pundit. Founder, TWiT Netcast Network. ❧
📑 Solomon Golomb (1932–2016) | Stephen Wolfram Blog
in June 1955 he wrote his final report, “Sequences with Randomness Properties”—which would basically become the foundational document of the theory of shift register sequences. ❧
📑 Solomon Golomb (1932–2016) | Stephen Wolfram Blog
Despite all his contributions to the infrastructure of the computational world, Sol himself basically never seriously used computers. He took particular pride in his own mental calculation capabilities. And he didn’t really use email until he was in his seventies, and never used a computer at home—though, yes, he did have a cellphone. ❧
Ha! I should take a little bit of pride here as I was the one that helped Sol to finally set up and get his email working. I’d have to look, but I suspect that it wasn’t until around 2004ish when I saw him somewhat regularly and frequented his and Bo’s annual Christmas parties.
👓 Solomon Golomb (1932–2016) | Stephen Wolfram
Stephen Wolfram (blog.stephenwolfram.com)The Most-Used Mathematical Algorithm Idea in History
An octillion. A billion billion billion. That’s a fairly conservative estimate of the number of times a cellphone or other device somewhere in the world has generated a bit using a maximum-length linear-feedback shift register sequence. It’s probably the single most-used mathematical algorithm idea in history. And the main originator of this idea was Solomon Golomb, who died on May 1—and whom I knew for 35 years.
Solomon Golomb’s classic book Shift Register Sequences, published in 1967—based on his work in the 1950s—went out of print long ago. But its content lives on in pretty much every modern communications system. Read the specifications for 3G, LTE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or for that matter GPS, and you’ll find mentions of polynomials that determine the shift register sequences these systems use to encode the data they send. Solomon Golomb is the person who figured out how to construct all these polynomials.
A fantastic and pretty comprehensive obit for Sol. He did miss out on more of Sol’s youth as well as his cross-town chess rivalry with Basil Gordon when they both lived in Baltimore, but before they lived across town from each other again in Los Angeles.
Many of the fantastical seeming stories here, as well as Sol’s personality read very true to me with respect to the man I knew for almost two decades.
📑 Solomon Golomb (1932–2016) | Stephen Wolfram Blog
As it happens, he’d already done some work on coding theory—in the area of biology. The digital nature of DNA had been discovered by Jim Watson and Francis Crick in 1953, but it wasn’t yet clear just how sequences of the four possible base pairs encoded the 20 amino acids. In 1956, Max Delbrück—Jim Watson’s former postdoc advisor at Caltech—asked around at JPL if anyone could figure it out. Sol and two colleagues analyzed an idea of Francis Crick’s and came up with “comma-free codes” in which overlapping triples of base pairs could encode amino acids. The analysis showed that exactly 20 amino acids could be encoded this way. It seemed like an amazing explanation of what was seen—but unfortunately it isn’t how biology actually works (biology uses a more straightforward encoding, where some of the 64 possible triples just don’t represent anything). ❧
I recall talking to Sol about this very thing when I sat in on a course he taught at USC on combinatorics. He gave me his paper on it and a few related issues as I was very interested at the time about the applications of information theory and biology.
I’m glad I managed to sit in on the class and still have the audio recordings and notes. While I can’t say that Newton taught me calculus, I can say I learned combinatorics from Golomb.
Matthias Ott (Twitter)Downside of removing Disqus from my site: I have essentially no idea if anyone is reading my posts.
— Tania Rascia (@taniarascia) May 14, 2019I read your blog because you have the easiest to follow tutorials. And I know I can reach you here on Twitter to shoutout
— Tea (@_tealalala) May 14, 2019Curious... Have you heard of Webmentions? See https://t.co/sfFdc53m6b (section "Use Webmentions and Microformats – and join the IndieWeb") and https://t.co/JaZezYzGMP
— Tea (@_tealalala) May 16, 2019Hi! Thanks so much for the mention, Tea! If you want to learn more about Webmentions, there’s also this great article by @ChrisAldrich for @alistapart which I totally forgot to include in my post:https://t.co/Owf6YEExkk
— Matthias Ott (@m_ott) May 16, 2019
Oh, we’re reading you Tania Rascia (@taniarascia)! Even easier for you it looks like Chris Biscardi (@chrisbiscardi) has already built out some infrastructure for webmentions on Gatsby(@gatsbyjs).
https://indieweb.org/gatsby#Plugins
https://indieweb.org/gatsby#Plugins
Chris has written a bit about his process as well: Building Gatsby Plugin Webmentions.
📺 Embarrassing 80’s – Ricky Gervais & Seona Dancing | YouTube
Seona dancing was a 1980s British new wave group, best known for providing comedian Ricky Gervais with his first experiences as a public performer. Although the band were not successful, their single "More to Lose" went on to become a teen anthem in the Philippines.
In June 1982, in his final year as a student at University College London, Ricky Gervais and his friend Bill Macrae formed Seona Dancing, with Macrae writing the songs and playing keyboards and Gervais writing and singing the lyrics. After recording a sixteen-song demo tape, they were signed by London Records which released two of their singles: "More to Lose" and "Bitter Heart". In 1983, the duo performed their single "More to Lose" on the ITV syndicated children's television show Razzamatazz. Yet, despite the promotion of "Bitter Heart" through its music video and "More to Lose" by its TV performance, both singles failed to break the Top 40. With "More to Lose" charting at number 117 and "Bitter Heart" at number 79 on the UK Singles Chart. After the lacklustre performance of their two singles, the band split up in 1984.
Gervais went on to have a successful international career as a comedian and actor, while Macrae later embarked on a solo career, though he has not made any real media appearance since. When Jimmy Kimmel asked about Macrae in an interview in 2014, Gervais said jokingly, "I hope he got fat too."
👓 Seona Dancing | SeonaDancing.com
Seona Dancing was a 1980s British pop group best known for providing Ricky Gervais with his first taste of fame. The band was formed in 1982 by aspiring pop stars Bill Macrae and Ricky Gervais. Their single "More to Lose", released in 1983, only made it to number 70 on the Billboard charts, and the band quickly disbanded in 1984. A year later, in 1985, a DJ from 99.5 DWRT-FM in Manila in the Philippines started playing a song called "Fade" by Medium (also billed as "Medium" by Fade). It became a runaway hit, and the angsty theme song for many Filipino teenagers in the mid 1980s. Eventually, the identity of the song was revealed as "More to Lose" by Seona Dancing. Bill Macrae faded into obscurity, but years later Ricky Gervais found new fame as the co-writer and star of the hit BBC comedy The Office.
He definitely had a different look when he was young!
Created by David Gelb, Brian McGinn. The inspirational story of street food chef Jay Fai, who puts a spin on tom yum soup and boasts a Michelin star for her crab omelets.