Month: February 2015

More goodness in wordpress.org plugin repo updates

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Seems like the wordpress.org plugin pages, after recent improvements to the ratings-logic, now got an even more important update. They now use “active installations” as most important metric (as has been done on drupal.org module pages for years), with total number of downloads having been relegated to the stats page.
That stats page got a face-lift as well, featuring a graph of the active versions:
autoptimize wp.org plugin page
In case you’re wondering what the source of that “active installations” data is, I was too and reached out to plugin-master Otto (Samuel Wood, who replied;

[The source data comes from] plugin update checks. Every WP install asks for update checks every 12 hours or so. We store a count of that info.

wordpress.org plugin repo: ratings changed

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autoptimize ratings on feb 26th 2015Yesterday the average rating of all plugins on the wordpress.org repository changed; ratings that were not linked to a review, were removed. That means that ratings dating from before approximately November 2012, when reviews were introduced, are not being taken into account any more.
This had a positive impact on the average rating of my own plugins, but especially so for Autoptimize. That plugin was largely unsupported before I took over in January 2013 and got some low ratings as a consequence (the average was 4.2 at the time, if I’m not mistaking). With those old numbers now out of the way, the average went from 4.6 to 4.8 overnight. Yay!
[Update: a couple of days later there were even more changes on the WordPress Plugin pages.]

Dat de staat innovatie in de weg staat?

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In de hippe wereld van startups en zelfverklaarde innovatoren wordt de staat nogal makkelijk weggezet als dé grote hinderpaal voor échte innovatie. En dan lees je dit;

Wezenlijke innovatie kost minstens tien tot vijftien jaar, schrijft Mazzucato, maar de spanningsboog van private durfkapitalisten is hoogstens een jaar of vijf. Zij gaan pas een rol spelen als de grootste risico’s al zijn genomen door de staat. […] Maar als je de staat voortdurend wegzet als logge sukkel, dan kom je nooit ergens. Aanvankelijk is het niet de onzichtbare hand van de markt, maar de zichtbare hand van de staat die de weg wijst. De overheid is er niet alleen om het falen van de markt te voorkomen. Zonder de staat zou er in veel gevallen niet eens een markt zijn.

Het volledige artikel (opgebouwd rond onderzoek van de Italiaanse econome Mariana Mazzucato en toegepast op Silicon Valley maar ook dichter bij huis ASML) kun je lezen op De Correspondent.

User Agent Madness

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Just found this one in my http logfile;

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/40.0.2214.111 Safari/537.36 OPR/27.0.1689.69

So one User Agent string mentioning 4 browsers (Mozilla, Safari, Chrome and finally Opera 27, which is the actual browser) and 3 rendering engines (Applewebkit, KHTML and Gecko)? There is a lot of web-history in those 127 characters.

Music from Our Tube; Ala.ni

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Ala.ni appears to be

a London-based singer/songwriter, producer & video director who already worked with such artists as Mary J Blige, Damon Albarn and Andrea Bocelli

While that may sound a lot like your typical name-dropping in a press release of the next would-be-star, her music has a distinct jazzy forties-yet-modern feel to it and above all it’s really beautiful;

ALA.NI - Suddenly (Official Video)
Watch this video on YouTube.

Ala.ni will issue an EP in March and the first song from that, Cherry Blossom, is well worth a listen too!

Wanted: testers for WP YouTube Lyte (the one with the new YT API)

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As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, YouTube is shutting down their old v2 API, forcing WP YouTube Lyte to swith to v3. The main change; users will have to get an API key from Google and provide that in the Lyte settings page.
Initial development & testing has been done (this blog switched already) and I now need some brave souls to test this. You can download the “beta” from https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/wp-youtube-lyte.zip and report back here or on the wordpress.org support forum about how that did or did not work for you.
Looking forward to having to fix some nasty bugs until everything will finally be in it’s right place once again 😉

Osunlade ft Erro Everything In Its Right Place
Watch this video on YouTube.

What does a webtech addict do when in a Tesla?

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Tesla Model S infotainment panelWell, checking out the browser, off course!
I had the opportunity to ride along with a friend in his brand new Tesla yesterday. Great ride, but you know that already, so I checked out the browser and data connectivity obviously. I visited my own little “ip check” page and saw this in the logfile:

188.207.103.140 – – [05/Feb/2015:12:17:24 +0100] “GET /check_ip.php HTTP/1.1” 200 132 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux) AppleWebKit/534.34 (KHTML, like Gecko) QtCarBrowser Safari/534.34”

Breaking it down:

  • The free mobile data connectivity is provided by KPN (Base) in Belgium (and Holland, probably).
  • As per the useragent the car display runs on Linux (that little OS that could is really everywhere these days)
  • The browser is QtCarBrowser, which would obviously be built with QT and WebKit. Based on the WebKit version, one can deduct that the version of QT uses is 4.8. As such, QTCarBrowser seems very similar to QTWeb and might indeed be based on it. HTML5test.com rates QTWeb with 204/555, but Tesla’s QTCarBrowser result might still be different off couse.
  • The WebKit-version, 534.34, is pretty old and as such dates from mid 2011 (QT 4.8 was released in December 2011). This is close to the version that was used in Safari 5.1 (534.48.3).

I sure hope there are not too many vulnerabilities in those old version of of QT and WebKit, but one does not drive a Tesla to browse the internet, does one? 😉