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On Thursday I got my Google Glass Explorer Edition unit. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it is a really awesome device for asking Google simple questions, mapping / directions, and taking pictures or movies while I’m on my bike. It doesn’t have many apps; the native SDK isn’t available yet, but there are some interesting web APIs you can use called Google Glassware.

The device has an ok camera, ok battery life, and ok WiFi and Bluetooth. The projector screen looks reasonable but isn’t very high resolution. Along my right temple there is a touch sensitive surface. There isn’t a speaker, but it uses a bonefone for sound output (by vibrating against the back of my ear). The mic can pick put other people shouting commands at me, but it is only in voice command mode very VERY briefly so having unwanted input is not a huge concern.

Glass runs Android Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0.4. All of the local applications appear to be standard apks. You can take download them to a PC using adb, uncompress them, and examine their structure. The various Dalvik bytecode inspectors still work correctly and there doesn’t seem to be anything special going on under the hood as far as software goes.

Using Glass is somewhat of a mixed bag. The voice commands are rather limited; however, the voice recognition and synthesis are VERY good. Taking a picture, recording a video, starting a call, and performing a search are nearly instant. Getting directions, making a call, sending a message, and starting a hangout tend to be good if you are on WiFi but you are at your carrier’s mercy when you are tethered to your phone. Overall the voice controls are impressive where they exist.

If you wish to do other things (ex, read a notification, configure your device, share a photo), you will probably have to use the touch controls on your temple. They are limited (you have single finger swipe left, swipe right, swipe down, and tap gestures), but once you get used to them you can navigate the device quite well.

A lot has been made about the social implications of Glass (mostly in the press which has had a nice babble head quality about the device). In general the reactions I have had have been good. Lots of people have come up to me to ask about it and get a quick demo. No body has asked me to take it off and for people who havn’t heard of Glass saying “It’s a computer” generally satisfies them. I still feel self conscious about it when I go out with it, and I’m not used to having strangers ask me questions about my tech. At the very least it has been good practice for public speaking.

From a developer’s point of view I adore this device. It is VERY different from what I am used to in terms of affordances and capabilities. Being able to have a very quick, unobtrusive, but intimate moment with my user is completely new. However, the capabilities in terms of amount of content I can deliver and receive is limited. This is a Jane. You ask it to tell a server elswhere to do something on your behalf and wait for the response. It has sensors to collect all of the necessary information it may need. Then it is my job to take that information and use my server resources to create a good response and deliver it to the user (quickly).

Currently, there are several companies making Glassware applications for the device. The New York Times has a nice service you can subscribe to. Twitter released an application, and there are some third party Facebook apps as well. Google has been on a regular update cycle for the device so it should have extra functionality rolled out over the next few months. Finally there are several I/O sessions about the device which should encourage more development.

In addition to the device itself, there is a companion Android application which helps with configuring, tethering, and demoing the device. The app includes a screen catcher so people can see what you see. There is also a web app which is used for installing services, managing your shared contacts, and viewing information about your device. Finally there is a web forum for connecting with other Glass Explorers.

I’m researching the device, its software, and its services. I am planning on making some hello world style applications and advocating the technology. I don’t know if this will change computing or consumption, but I hope it at successfully and popularly augments it. We have been promised wearable and ubiquitous computing for a while and Glass is the next step in this general evolution.

WordPress 3.6 Beta 3 is now available!

This is software still in development and we really don’t recommend that you run it on a production site — set up a test site just to play with the new version. To test WordPress 3.6, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”). Or you can download the beta here (zip).

Beta 3 contains about a hundred changes, including improvements to the image Post Format flow (yay, drag-and-drop image upload!), a more polished revision comparison screen, and a more quote-like quote format for Twenty Thirteen.

As a bonus, we now have oEmbed support for the popular music-streaming services Rdio and Spotify (the latter of which kindly created an oEmbed endpoint a mere 24 hours after we lamented their lack of one). Here’s an album that’s been getting a lot of play as I’ve been working on WordPress 3.6:

Plugin developers, theme developers, and WordPress hosts should be testing beta 3 extensively. The more you test the beta, the more stable our release candidates and our final release will be.

As always, if you think you’ve found a bug, you can post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. Or, if you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on the WordPress Trac. There, you can also find a list of known bugs and everything we’ve fixed so far.

We’re looking forward to your feedback. If you find a bug, please report it, and if you’re a developer, try to help us fix it. We’ve already had more than 150 contributors to version 3.6 — it’s not too late to join in!

{ "keys": ["ctrl+b"], "command": "toggle_side_bar" }

jboss-eap-6.0/bin/add-user.sh --silent=true <username> <password> [ManagementRealm]

WordPress 3.6 Beta 2 is now available!

This is software still in development and we really don’t recommend that you run it on a production site — set up a test site just to play with the new version. To test WordPress 3.6, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”). Or you can download the beta here (zip).

The longer-than-usual delay between beta 1 and beta 2 was due to poor user testing results with the Post Formats UI. Beta 2 contains a modified approach for format choosing and switching, which has done well in user testing. We’ve also made the Post Formats UI hide-able via Screen Options, and set a reasonable default based on what your theme supports.

There were a lot of bug fixes and polishing tweaks done for beta 2 as well, so definitely check it out if you had an issues with beta 1.

Plugin developers, theme developers, and WordPress hosts should be testing beta 2 extensively. The more you test the beta, the more stable our release candidates and our final release will be.

As always, if you think you’ve found a bug, you can post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. Or, if you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on the WordPress Trac. There, you can also find a list of known bugs and everything we’ve fixed so far.

We’re looking forward to your feedback. If you find a bug, please report it, and if you’re a developer, try to help us fix it. We’ve already had more than 150 contributors to version 3.6 — it’s not too late to join in!

As an open source, free software project, WordPress depends on the contributions of hundreds of people from around the globe — contributions in areas like core code, documentation, answering questions in the support forums, translation, and all the other things it takes to make WordPress the best publishing platform it can be, with the most supportive community. This year, we’re happy to be participating as a mentoring organization with two respected summer internship programs: Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and the Gnome Outreach Program for Women.

Google Summer of Code

GSoC is a summer internship program funded by Google specifically for college/university student developers to work on open source coding projects. We have participated in the Google Summer of Code program in the past, and have enjoyed the opportunity to work with students in this way. Some of our best core developers were GSoC students once upon a time!

Our mentors, almost 30 talented developers with experience developing WordPress, will provide students with guidance and feedback over the course of the summer, culminating in the release of finished projects at the end of the program if all goes well.

Students who successfully complete the program earn $5,000 for their summer efforts. Interested, or know a college student (newly accepted to college counts, too) who should be? All the information you need about our participation in the program, projects, mentors, and the application process is available on the GSoC 2013 page in the Codex.

Gnome Outreach Program for Women

It’s not news that women form a low percentage of contributors in most open source projects, and WordPress is no different. We have great women in the contributor community, including some in fairly visible roles, but we still have a lot of work to do to get a representative gender balance on par with our user base.

The Gnome Outreach Program for Women aims to provide opportunities for women to participate in open source projects, and offers a similar stipend, but there are three key differences between GSoC and Gnome aside from the gender requirement for Gnome.

1. The Gnome program allows intern projects in many areas of contribution, not just code. In other words, interns can propose projects like documentation, community management, design, translation, or pretty much any area in which we have people contributing (including code).
2. The Gnome Outreach Program for Women doesn’t require interns to be college students, though students are definitely welcome to participate. This means that women in all stages of life and career can take the opportunity to try working with open source communities for the summer.
3. We have to help raise the money to pay the interns. Google funds GSoC on its own, and we only have to provide our mentors’ time. Gnome doesn’t have the same funding, so we need to pitch in to raise the money to cover our interns. If your company is interested in helping with this, please check out the program’s sponsorship information and follow the contact instructions to get involved. You can earmark donations to support WordPress interns, or to support the program in general. (Pick us, pick us! )

The summer installment of the Gnome Outreach Program for Women follows the same schedule and general application format as GSoC, though there are more potential projects since it covers more areas of contribution. Women college students interested in doing a coding project are encouraged to apply for both programs to increase the odds of acceptance. All the information you need about our participation in the program, projects, mentors, and the application process is available on the Gnome Outreach Program for Women page in the Codex.

The application period just started, and it lasts another week (May 1 for Gnome, May 3 for GSoC), so if you think you qualify and are interested in getting involved, check out the information pages, get in touch, and apply… Good luck!

Google Summer of Code 2013 Information
Gnome Summer Outreach Program for Women 2013 Information

In honor of the upcoming 10th anniversary celebrations, we’ve put a special 10th anniversary tshirt in the swag store at cost — $10 per shirt plus shipping. They’ll be on sale at this price until the anniversary on May 27, and they’ll start shipping out the week of April 29.

Some people who are planning parties or who organize meetups are already talking about doing group orders to save on shipping costs, which is a great idea — just make sure you allow enough shipping time. If you’re not sure if the tees could make it to you in time on your side of the world, use the contact options at the bottom of the store page to ask about shipping times. If they can’t reach you in time and you want to have a local printer do some for your group, we’ll post the vector file on the wp10 site within the next week (and this post will get updated accordingly).

The shirts are available in black or silvery gray. Why silvery gray? Because of trivia: the traditional gift for 10th anniversaries is tin or aluminum.

I've been exclusively using Google Voice for months now, and just for voice mail for more than a year. I feel like the plain-old telephone system (POTS) is an unreasonably high toll to pay given how technology has improved. There is no reason to have non-trivial long-distance rates between Europe and the U.S. in a day when Skype does it for around a penny a minute. Google is doing a wonderful thing by promoting an Internet-based phone number.

Rather, Google is starting a wonderful thing. In the time I have used it, many of the most obvious problems haven't improved in the slightest.

Here's a quick run down of the good and the bad as I see it. Overall, I see it as comparable to my two-year stint using a Mac for software development. The promise is there, but when you actually try it, you realize why it's not yet the norm.

The Good

I love receiving calls and having all my devices ring. In 2013, it's the way things ought to work. If I'm in the car, my car stereo should ring. If I'm at my desk, I should get a notification on my desktop. If I'm watching TV, my physical phone should ring. Google Voice gets this just right.

I love the option to take calls at my desk. I already do a lot of voice chat sessions with coworkers around the world, and it just seems right that I should do the same thing with gmail addresses and numeric phone numbers.

I love the text transcription of voice mails, for those times I can't take a call immediately. The quality is iffy but is usually high enough that I can understand the gist of what the person was telling me.

Phone number porting works just fine, so you can keep your pre-existing number and not even tell people you are using Google Voice. Well, you have to tell them for a different reason: there is so much bad with Google Voice that you need to warn your potential calling partners about how gimped your phone service is.

The Bad

It doesn't work over data connections. I really don't understand why it is missing. Because of this problem, I have to buy minutes on the POTS to use it on my cell phone, and minutes are far more expensive than the associated data cost. More pragmatically, if I am travelling and don't yet have a local SIM card, it means I cannot use my phone to call over a wifi network.

You can't make or take calls directly from the Voice web page. You have to log into both Google Talk and Google Voice, configure Voice to talk to Talk, and then make your call from Voice. Yes, you can also make a call from Talk directly, but that's a separate feature of the Google suite, thus confusing matters even further. Google is normally excellent at building web user interfaces, but that seems to go down the tubes when an issue crosses multiple teams.

When you make a call at your desk, using Talk, the volume is extremely low. I originally thought that was just my configuration, but some web searching indicates that this has been a widespread problem for several years. I have to turn up my system volume to the max just to barely hear the other person, at which point every random system notification is an ear splitter.

It doesn't support phone usage from the UK. This is a very surprising restriction, because Talk can make calls to the UK just fine. Part of the benefit of Voice for me is the promise that I can travel around and call POTS numbers from wherever I am. However, even if I get a UK SIM card, it's just not supported by Voice.

There is no MMS, and there is no warning on either side when an attempted MMS does not go through. I have to tell people to use email, or to use my physical cell phone number rather than my Google Voice number. If Mom emails me a photo of one of my nieces, it quietly disappears. I am oblivious, and she is wondering what planet I am on that I didn't write back.

The Ugly

The ugly part is that Google is not doing anything to fix all of this. I'm willing to be a beta tester in this case. It's not beta testing, though, if they never fix the problems.

At this point, the POTS tax is substantially higher than the Microsoft tax of yore. It costs tens of dollars a month to participate, and you can't live without it.

What’s on May 27, you ask?

May 27, 2013 is the 10th anniversary of the first WordPress release!

We think this is worth celebrating, and we want WordPress fans all over the world to celebrate with us by throwing their own parties. We’re using Meetup Everywhere to coordinate, and will be putting up a website just for the 10th Anniversary so that we can collect photos, videos, tweets, and posts from all the parties.

The rules are very simple:

1. Pick a place to go where a bunch of people can be merry — a park, a bar, a backyard, whatever
2. Spread the word to local meetups, tech groups, press, etc and get people to say they’ll come to your party
3. If 50 or more people RSVP to your party, we’ll try to send you some WordPress stickers and buttons
4. Have party attendees post photos, videos, and the like with the #wp10 hashtag

We’ll be using Meetup Everywhere to coordinate parties all over the world, so get your city on the map and register your party now !

We’ll follow up with registered organizers  over the next few weeks with some tips for how to publicize your party and to get addresses for swag packages. To that end, make sure you check the option that lets WordPress 10th Anniversary know your email, or we won’t be able to get in touch with you for these things or to give you access to the WP10 blog.

Whose party will be the biggest? The most fun? The most inventive? Will it be yours?

Note: If you already run a group on meetup.com, making your party an event in your group is great, but you still need to post it and have people RSVP at the special party page, because regular groups and Meetup Everywhere groups aren’t connected yet. 

WordPress 3.6 Beta 1 is now available!

This is software still in development and we really don’t recommend that you run it on a production site — set up a test site just to play with the new version. To test WordPress 3.6, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”). Or you can download the beta here (zip).

We’ve been working for nearly three months and have completed all the features that are slated for this release. This is a bit of a change from the betas of previous release cycles. I felt very strongly that we shouldn’t release a beta if we were still working on completing the main features. This beta is actually a beta, not an alpha that we’re calling a beta. If you are a WordPress plugin or theme developer, or a WordPress hosting provider, you should absolutely start testing your code against this new version now. More bugs will be fixed, and some of the features will get polished, but we’re not going to shove in some big new feature. We’re ready for you to test it, so jump in there! The more you test the beta, the more stable our release candidates and our final release will be.

As always, if you think you’ve found a bug, you can post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. Or, if you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on the WordPress Trac. There, you can also find a list of known bugs and everything we’ve fixed so far.

Here’s what’s new in 3.6:

• Post Formats:  Post Formats now have their own UI, and theme authors have access to templating functions to access the structured data.
• Twenty Thirteen: We’re shipping this year’s default theme in our first release of the year. Twenty Thirteen is an opinionated, color-rich, blog-centric theme that makes full use of the new Post Formats support.
• Audio/Video: You can embed audio and video files into your posts without relying on a plugin or a third party media hosting service.
• Autosave:  Posts are now autosaved locally. If your browser crashes, your computer dies, or the server goes offline as you’re saving, you won’t lose the your post.
• Post Locking:  See when someone is currently editing a post, and kick them out of it if they fall asleep at the keyboard.
• Nav Menus:  Nav menus have been simplified with an accordion-based UI, and a separate tab for bulk-assigning menus to locations.
• Revisions: The all-new revisions UI features avatars, a slider that “scrubs” through history, and two-slider range comparisons.

Developers:  You make WordPress awesome(er). One of the things we strive to do with every release is be compatible with existing plugins and themes. But we need your help. Please test your plugins and themes against 3.6. If something isn’t quite right, please let us know. (Chances are, it wasn’t intentional.) If you’re a forward-thinking theme developer, you should be looking at implementing the new Post Format support in some of your themes (look to Twenty Thirteen for inspiration).

We’re looking forward to your feedback. If you break it (i.e. find a bug), please report it, and if you’re a developer, try to help us fix it. We’ve already had more than 150 contributors to version 3.6 — it’s not too late to join the party!