by kierenmccarthy on August 2, 2010
Missed this last week: the Internet Society (ISOC) has handed out its annual Postel Award, which honours those who have made outstanding contributions to, broadly, the Internet.
The winner this year – awarded at the IETF meeting in Maastricht on Wed 28 Jul – was Chinese technologist Dr Jianping Wu (left). Dr Wu received the award for “the pioneering role he has played in advancing Internet technology, deployment, and education in China and Asia Pacific over the last twenty years”.
Dr Wu developed the China Education and Research Network (CERNET), the first Internet backbone network in China. It has since become the world’s largest national academic network. He has also been building a large-scale native IPv6 backbone in China. IPv6 is a crucial but complex expansion of the current Internet system and it is large-scale rollouts that are making it possible to shift the Internet onto these new networks. [click to continue…]
Popularity: 3% [?]
by kierenmccarthy on July 12, 2010
I love Wordpress – the software that this blog runs on. And I love Thesis – a clever piece of software that works with Wordpress to provide all sorts of clever customisations.
But the combination of them is driving me nuts at the moment. In particular, the fact that they keep bloody updating both too frequently, and each time something goes wrong with one or the other or the combination of both and then I am forced to trawl through techy posts from people who *believe* they are being clear but really aren’t.
A few months ago, I abandoned an upgrade from Thesis 1.5 to 1.7 because it destroyed the look of the site and made it unreadable (and this despite me following upgrade instructions carefully). Of course, lots of other people had the same problem and so “guides” started appearing online. I tried these guides, and it fix some issues but also created new ones. So I stepped back down to 1.5 – and found I had lost some of things I previously had.
I decided, unwisely, to try again tonight after a break. Same problem – mostly with the menu. So I decided to leapfrog 1.7 and try the beta of 1.8 which, amid all the wonderful reasons as to why you should upgrade, also noted it had fixed an issue with navigation menus. This I did and the site all appeared great. Except now the options within 1.8 don’t actual change the site – so now I have two useless menu items at the top of my blog that I don’t want and can’t get rid of.
AT THE SAME TIME as these troublesome upgrades, Wordpress has put out at least three upgrades in the past few months. I had also held off upgrading for a while because of the problems I’d have in the past. But, I had used the updated versions (on new sites) and they were better, so I bit the bullet and upgraded. And then upgraded again. And then upgraded again. And now I see Wordpress is urging me to upgrade a fourth time to version 3.0.
Will people PLEASE STOP PUMPING OUT NEW UPGRADES! You are turning them out too fast. You are causing people to have to constantly go back to their site and fiddle about with it, and you keep causing problems with other plugins that aren’t upgraded every bloody month. I know you think you need to do this but you don’t!
I know you think that new features that enable the user to upgrade some plugins with just a click mean that upgrades are easy and so you can do more of them – you are wrong. It is a royal pain in the arse and you are causing me and many thousands of other people alot of grief. Stop it. We use your software because it means we *don’t* have to fiddle around with code and files.
Store up your great ideas and new tweaks and resist the urge to keep banging them out like over-excited schoolboys. Please, a maximum of once a year. It really, really is not worth doing more than that. I know you think it is but can I please assure you that it isn’t.
Popularity: 2% [?]
