Month: March 2010

The press embargoes have lifted and the first reviews of the Apple iPad are up. Walt Mossberg usually doesn’t write very critical reviews, but this time he seems to have hit all of the right points in his Wall Street Journal / AllThingsD review:

My verdict is that, while it has compromises and drawbacks, the iPad can indeed replace a laptop for most data communication, content consumption and even limited content creation, a lot of the time. But it all depends on how you use your computer.

If you’re mainly a Web surfer, note-taker, social-networker and emailer, and a consumer of photos, videos, books, periodicals and music—this could be for you. If you need to create or edit giant spreadsheets or long documents, or you have elaborate systems for organizing email, or need to perform video chats, the iPad isn’t going to cut it as your go-to device.

As for myself, I’m holding out for now. Not only am I totally inconsistent in judging first-gen Apple devices – I said that the first iPhone wasn’t for me before buying and loving it – but it’s hard justifying another device when I already switch between a smartphone, netbook and MacBook Pro.

VaultPress: WordPress cloud backup/monitoring/security updates

Automattic, corporate sponsor of the amazing WordPress web publishing platform, today announced the new VaultPress service and initiated a private beta.

VaultPress is, in short, a cloud service that provides automatic cloud-based backups, uptime monitoring, and security updates for any WordPress instance. They’re planning to charge about $10/month for the service, but will finalize the details at a later date.

As a WordPress administrator, blogger and consultant, I couldn’t be more excited about such a service. WordPress is one of the biggest Content Management Systems (CMS) out there, and powers everything from personal blogs (like ZekeWeeks.com) to the New York Times. But like any web application, it requires backups, uptime monitoring, and quick responses to emerging security vulnerabilities. For people like me who administrate several clients’ WordPress instances, the overhead of such management is a serious challenge. VaultPress looks as if it will provide a great centralized way to do this for WordPress blogs of any size. And if the pricing turns out to be so low, it will be accessible to many, from the individual blogger to the biggest company.

Those wanting to get in on the private beta may apply for it here. While I’m not yet offering VaultPress as part of my custom WordPress consulting solutions, I’m keeping an eye on it for the future. And if you’ve been thinking about your own web strategy recently, (shameless plug alert) I love nothing more than putting people in command of their own web presence with tools like WordPress- feel free to drop me an e-mail at (my first name) @ZekeWeeks.com .

What’s happened to Ubuntu?

Cloud storage SaaS. Music stores using unlicensed codecs in the OS. What happened to the days when the focus was on making a modern Debian desktop targeted at everyone, including nontechnical folks? I don’t feel like the Ubuntu OS has gotten any worse, but I fear that all of these new initiatives will eventually distract Ubuntu’s leadership from the desktop OS they’ve been so great at making. In my humble opinion, this makes it look like Canonical is getting desperate to find ways to make the Ubuntu project more financially sustainable, and is taking any form of revenue stream it can find, even to the potential detriment of the quality of its main product.

(For the record, I think openSUSE is currently the best Linux desktop, but really would rather have something Debian-based like Ubuntu.)

San Francisco

Yesterday I got back to Colorado from my spring break to San Francisco. I spent the week visiting with Alan, whom I had only seen once since high school graduation. His apartment is downtown just blocks from the Embarcadero, so we had easy access to all kinds of stuff. I got to hang out with a lot of Alan’s salesforce.com and Carnegie Mellon alum friends- lots of rock band, cupcakes, and hot tubs were had throughout the week.

I posted a stream of the more interesting places I visited on my Foursquare account. I particularly liked walking around in the Mission (in the sun 😀 ) and checking out some of San Francisco’s, ahem… more eccentric cafés (that link is mildly NSFW).

Towards the end of the week, I got to do some more catching up. I spent a day in Silicon Valley with family: Denis and Shana and my cousins Anora and Quinn. The kids have probably grown a foot and a half since I last saw them, so it was really fun to get to play with them. Shana works in HR at Google and took Denis and I around the Googleplex, which lived up to its reputation as a geek’s utopia. I also had a chance to meet up with Jessica, another friend from high school; we all went to Tommy’s Yucatan Restaurant, which is famous for their top-shelf tequila and is where my stepdad proposed to my mom.

So I had really great time overall. San Francisco is my favorite city in the United States and I’d love to find a software job out there. It isn’t making the prospects of living in Boulder, Denver or Fort Collins any less attractive, though; I had a great time there and I’m sure I’ll be having a great time there again regardless of where life takes me.

Below are the photos I took while I was there. (Denis took a couple of them while Quinn’s wrestling skills had me incapacitated.) I should also mention that Alan is way more of a shutterbug than I, and also spends a lot more time taking pictures of actual people instead of my transfixion on architecture and the like. He has a couple of great galleries from my time there: [One] [Two]

Real-life Babelfish: The Translating Telephone


This is nuts. (Skip ahead to 0:40 to ignore the SVP’s rant.) I think that automatic translation like this might be one of the single biggest advancements in technology during our lifetimes. I can see the language barriers crashing down now.

It’s also not surprising to hear that this effort is being run through Microsoft Research’s Beijing office. Pretty cool that they’ve got Australians and Germans working together on such a project- they even collaborate on the product’s development using this translation software!