Poirot

I’ve been binge-watching old episodes of Poirot (via Amazon Prime) recently. I haven’t seen the early episodes since they first aired, and I probably haven’t see all of them, since I (of course) didn’t have a DVR in those days.

The series is coming to an end now, after about 25 years. There are good write-ups on it at NPR and the NY Times. I don’t think I’ll be signing up for Acorn TV just to see the last few episodes. I’ll wait until they show up on PBS (or possibly Amazon Prime or Netflix).

WP-CLI on 1&1

After coming back from WordCamp, I mentioned that I wanted to start messing with WP-CLI. Well, today, I decided to give that a try under my 1&1 account. I first tried installing it with curl and running it, as described on the WP-CLI home page. But (to make a long story short), I had some problems getting it to work.

Then, I did some searching, and found some indication that WP-CLI might already be installed and configured on my account. So, I just typed in “wp cli info” and hey, it’s there and working. (Thanks, 1&1!) I’ve had some problems installing Jetpack updates from the WP admin page, so now I can just ssh in and type “wp plugin update jetpack”. Much smoother!

Of course, nothing’s perfect, so right now, some of the WP-CLI commands are throwing a whole bunch of warnings up on the screen, but they’re all working, so I’ll see if I can fix the warnings later.

New York Comic Con

I had pretty much decided not to go to NYCC this year. I wasn’t really that enthusiastic about it earlier this year, so I didn’t get around to checking on tickets until after they’d sold out on every day except Thursday. So I said “oh well” and forgot about it. But then a friend at work mentioned recently that he might be able to get me a free ticket, so that got me interested again. Well, that didn’t work out either, but I noticed that tickets would be going on sale at some comic books stores today, so I thought I’d give that a try.

I headed over to The Fallout Shelter in Highland Park today at lunch time to see if I could get tickets. They open at noon, and I got there just after noon, maybe 12:02. There was a long line out the door and down the street. Apparently, a number of people got there early and lined up! I didn’t really want to get in line, so I decided to wander around a bit, then come back. Highland Park had a farmers market going on, so I stopped by there and got some fresh peaches and bread, then went back to the comic shop. I got back there at 12:10. The line was gone, but they’d just sold out on tickets! So I picked up Sandman Overture #1-3 and headed back to work.

So I’m still not going to NYCC, and I probably missed my last chance to get tickets, but I’ve got a few good comics, and a handful of fresh peaches and fresh bread, so it wasn’t a wasted trip!

WordCamp NYC notes

I just got back home, after attending WordCamp NYC this weekend. Overall, it was pretty good. The presentations were mixed, with a couple of really good ones, and a few that weren’t really useful to me (but might have been to others). I’m kind of surprised at how much they were able to do for only a $40 registration fee. Free t-shirt, and free breakfast and lunch on Saturday. And all in a nice hotel. (I guess a lot of the cost is borne by the corporate sponsors?)

I was going to write up a long post with links to some of the more interesting topics that came up, but I think I’m too tired to do that now. I’ll just link to two things that I’d like to look into a bit further: Piklist and WP-CLI. Maybe I’ll post more detail later, if I can find the energy.

 

WordCamp NYC

I’m Attending WordCamp NYC – August 2-3, 2014
I’m planning on going to WordCamp NYC this weekend, barring any unforeseen circumstances. I’m looking forward to it, since I haven’t been to anything like this since Drupal Camp in 2012. The schedule looks pretty interesting; I should be able to learn some stuff.

WordCamp won’t really make up for missing San Diego this year, but hey, it should be fun!

WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials

In my continuing quest to pick up some useful WordPress skills, I just finished reading WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials by Brian Bondari & Everett Griffiths.

This book covers all the basics you’d need to develop a plugin, from setting up a local dev environment, to pushing code to the WordPress.org plugin directory.

This is definitely an overview book, covering a bunch of stuff without trying to be exhaustive about any particular thing. There is some coverage of necessary PHP and JavaScript topics, though this wouldn’t be a good book for someone with absolutely no background in PHP or JavaScript. The coverage of the WordPress API in general is sufficient to cover the basics, and to point you in the right direction on the topics that it doesn’t cover.

The book was published in 2011, and is somewhat out of date. For example, there’s a whole chapter on using Subversion, which is still useful in some circumstances, but I think most people would be using git for their day-to-day work at this point. And the first example plugin is built around Digg’s API, from the previous version of Digg (before it was re-launched in 2012), so it doesn’t work anymore. (It’s still a useful example to read through, but you wouldn’t be able to make it work.) I’m not entirely sure, but I’m pretty sure that all the core WordPress stuff that’s covered is still recent enough to be useful.

The heart of the book walks through a number of sample plugins, devoting a chapter to each. The author builds each plugin up a little at a time, explaining what he’s doing, before going on to the next part. In general, he builds things up in such a way that the plugin is functional at each stage, so you can run and debug your code as you go. This is a good approach, especially for less experienced developers.

For my own purposes, I didn’t bother actually working through the examples, as I found the explanations clear enough, and I know enough about web development that I didn’t feel like I needed to. And I skimmed over a lot of the material that was either out of date (e.g. the Subversion stuff) or that I already know (e.g. PHP and JavaScript basics).

If there were an updated version of this book available, I’d recommend it to anyone looking to get started with WordPress plugin development. As it stands, though, I’d really only recommend it if you don’t mind skipping over the stuff that’s out of date. If you can get the ebook version when Packt is having a sale, it’s worth picking up.

Not at Comic-Con

I didn’t manage to get to San Diego this year. I tried, but just didn’t manage to win the “ticket lottery.” I’m holding out hope for next year! As usual, though, I’m following the news on Twitter, The Beat, and other sources.

I haven’t seen any really amazing news yet, but it’s only Thursday. And there have been a few interesting things, such as Comixology announcing DRM-free backups, which is quite nice (though it doesn’t cover Marvel or DC books, predictably).

Code Complete

Jon Bentley describes a case in which a thousand-line program spent 80 percent of its time in a five-line square-root routine. By tripling the speed of the square-root routine he doubled the speed of the program.
Bentley also reports the case of a team that discovered that half an operating system’s time was spent in a small loop. They rewrote the loop in microcode and made the loop 10 times faster, but it didn’t change the system’s performance — they had rewritten the system’s idle loop.

via Code Complete, First Edition.