Jamas

34th America’s Cup – Highlights

A few hours ago the 34th America’s Cup finished, in what I consider the most spectacular comeback in sporting history. In the 19th race, an all or nothing winner takes all final race, the USA team won. The New Zealand team dominated the early races. They have been at match point for 8 races but had not been able to capture that final point. During a lighter wind race #13, New Zealand was ahead by over kilometre when the race reached the time limit and was abandoned, they only had 3 minutes of sailing left to win the whole event.

This was an amazing event.  The coverage was unbelievable, with live streaming from YouTube and amazing on water graphics that really allowed an audience to understand what was going on. San Francisco was an amazing venue to the event, providing fans great viewing from shore.  Larry Ellison’s vision for this cup had many critics but it came together in an amazing way, close match racing in boats travelling 40 plus knots. I can’t wait to see what he has planned for the next one.

Here are a few highlights worth checking out.
Emirates Team New Zealand bow down in race 1 (3 min)
Emirates Team New Zealand nearly capsizes (2 min)
Highlights: America’s Cup Finals Races 9 &10 (46 min)
America’s Cup: Apparent Wind (2 min)

The first two are just crazy things that happen on these boats. In the first check out the amount of engine power that the rescue boat requires to keep up with the AC72.

Race 10 was amazing, really worth watching.

The Apparent Wind video does a really nice job of explaining the concept and why on these boats it is so important.

My thanks to everyone involved in the event, special mention to my favourite team Team New Zealand who should be proud of their performance and sportsmanship. Big congratulations to Oracle Team USA on an amazing comeback, especially Jimmy Spithill for his never wavering conviction they could win.

WordPress 3.6

WordPress 3.6 “Oscar” has arrived – always nice to see a great Canadian musician be recognized internationally. Looks like some great new features, the improved revision control system is very nicely done. The built-in video and music players will be handy for a few projects. My thanks to the entire WordPress team who have put out another great release which will be sure to keep WordPress at the top of the CMS list.

Happy Birthday WordPress #WP10

WordPress 10

Dear WordPress,

Happy 10th birthday.  You seem so much older than 10, mature beyond your years. I first meet you around your 2nd birthday.  You have grown so much.  I can’t wait to see what you do next.

Jamas

What happened on this day:

1703 – St. Petersburg was founded by Czar Peter the Great.

1936 – The Queen Mary left England on its maiden voyage, arriving in France four hours later.

1937 – Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco opened.

 

Beer == Solar Power

Beau’s All Natural Brewing Co., located about 1 hour outside of Ottawa, produces some mighty fine beer, burp! They also have the most impressive graphic designs that I have ever seen from a beer company, their beer labels are real works of art.

As part of a new project, to lighten their environmental impact, they are adding solar panels to the roof of the brewery. They have come up with an ingenious way to get this project funded by selling memberships to their Greener Futures Project. Membership is $300, which entitles you to 30 large bottles of barrel aged beer, that are only available to members. I have had 5 of the bottles so far, 4 have been stellar, with the one sour beer being a little too much for me.  If you like beer and live in Ottawa or Toronto then this is a great way to help the planet while enjoying some very tasty brews.

Greener Futures Project

JOSSA 2012

Well only a few months late again, at least I made it this year. Who knew a new puppy could be so much work.

So a little late but here are the 10 projects that received my JOSSA (Jamas Open Source Software Award) for 2012.

KeePass – Dominik Reichl – With the sheer number of logins I need on a daily basis it is easy to get lazy by using the same password on most sites. This of course is a really bad idea. To help keep track of all those passwords I went hunting for a password manager. KeePass is a free open source project that packs a lot of features. It also has an iOS app so combined with Dropbox you can keep your password list with you while on the go.

DisplayFusion – Binary Fortress Software – I love my dual monitor setup! I was a little shocked at the lack of support in Windows for this setup. DisplayFusion comes in free and paid versions, the free version is great. It allows for many options for dual displays, even working with Rainmeter setups.

Firebug – Fire Bug Working Group – When doing any sort of web development having a browser debugger is a must. Firebug is a Firefox Add-on that provides every tool you will need to debug webpages.

Duplicator – Cory Lamle – Creating a copy of a WordPress site for testing requires a significant amount of effort. It also requires some mucking in the WordPress database to change URLs so the test site functions properly. With Duplicator this is amazingly easy. Everything is automated by the plugin, what used to take hours is now only a few minutes. You can add a test site, move a site to a new host and even use it to create a full site backup.

WP Super Cache – Donncha O Caoimh – I have never really paid much attention to how quickly web pages load until we started running our own VPS. In my quest to reduce load on the server and speed up page load times I found WP Super Cache. This plugin will create static html pages that will be shown to visitors instead of creating the pages dynamically. While there are a lot of config options to go through the end result is worth the effort. For this site load times went from 9 seconds down to 1 second.

Akismet – Automattic – I hate spam! It is bad enough to have in your inbox, but it now shows up on website comments. Akismet provides spam filtering for your WordPress comments.

BackUpWordPress – Human Made – Having backups on your desktop is important. The same thing goes for your website. This plugin for WordPress makes keeping backups of you site a snap. It supports scheduling and will send you emails with your DB attached. Very easy to use.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) – Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine – When visitors come to your site you want them to stick around. YARPP provides the ability to include a list of related content the user might like. A recent update added a thumbnail display option which makes links just begging to be clicked.

WPtouch – BraveNewCode Inc. – With everything going mobile these days many websites need a mobile version. Doing a whole separate site can be too much work for most site owners. WPtouch is a plugin that creates a mobile version of your site with next to no effort. It has lots of options if you want to really control your mobile look.

WP to Twitter – Joe Dolson – Promoting your site on social media is a great way to increase traffic. WP to Twitter makes the promoting of new links automatic. Very easy to setup and allows you the ability to customize tweets sent for each post.

Well that is it for this year.  I hope 2013 JOSSAs won’t be so late, I already have a pretty full list.  I encourage you to start your own JOSSA style award.  It isn’t a lot of money but it will hopefully make a developers day, which will make your year better.