August 2, 2010

Joshua Schachter Raising Capital for New Startup

Good news for the perl community: Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us fame is organizing a new company.

Having cut his teeth in NYC finance tech, Mr. Schachter built del.icio.us in perl. I saw him speak at a Ycombinator startup school and this man is the quintessential Wall Street engineer: practical, tough, direct, and funny as hell. It is obviously too soon to tell whether he will use perl to build parts of his new venture, but he probably won't be using anything like Yahoo's php+c++ framework.

July 22, 2010

Cloud Canvas: HTML5 At Its Best

If you're into seeing how HTML5 can be used to the max, definitely check out Cloud Canvas. This is an awesome way to do graphics in your web browser and is the work of Chance Roth, known for previous ventures in toy design and motion 3D production.

July 17, 2010

Wordpress Themes: Don't Call Them Templates

Mark Jacquith does his best to make WordPress' "themes" look not only technically snaggle-toothed, but also GPL-poisoning. Why he and others in the WordPress community want GPL lock-in so badly for their theme-makers truly boggles my mind. So does the whole notion that API callbacks and shared memory represents some sort of ownership rights transfer.

It isn't correct to think of WordPress and a theme as separate entities. As far as the code is concerned, they form one functional unit. The theme code doesn't sit "on top of" WordPress. It is within it, in multiple different places, with multiple interdependencies. This forms a web of shared data structures and code all contained within a shared memory space.

Ah, yes, how wonderful, a web of sharing between you, your lawyer, and a lamprey with seventeen heads.

The WordPress community could use a good dose of TIMTOWTDI as embodied in MT's approach to contributions (and in perl in general).