Testing 1… 2… 3… it’s hard to believe that I haven’t updated the website or Clean Archives in 10+ years, until now. I should probably work on that heh.
Well moments ago I wrapped up some small tweaks and SRG Clean Archives is fully tested, working and supported for WordPress 5.0.x.
I did start a completely rewritten version of clean archives many years ago (2008 or 2009), however I’ll need to blow the dust off of that version and get back to it at some point.
In the mean time this latest “fixed” release will work with WordPress 5.0.3, so be sure to check the clean archives project page for more information and be sure snag the current version today!
If you see notice anything strange going on with your Clean Archives install, please be sure to let me know. Thank you in advance.
Small update to allow Clean Archives to work with WordPress version 2.5.x and above including 2.6.x.
Please note that if you are running an older version of WordPress prior to release 2.5.x, you will either need to run Clean Archives 4.2 or 2.2. Check the clean archives project page for more information.
A completely rewritten version of clean archives is in the works and should be released within the next couple of weeks, so keep checking back for more information.
Unfortunately, it didn’t quite go all the way. Users sent in feedback on a few issues, and Google felt an update was necessary.
The Official Gmail Blog wrote up a brief entry explaining the changes. It said:
“Previously, your Google Calendar e-mail address needed to be the organizer or an attendee of your Microsoft Outlook events for the Outlook events to sync to your Google Calendar. Now, when you choose to do a 2-way sync or a 1-way sync from Outlook calendar to Google Calendar, all of your Outlook events will be synced to your Google Calendar.”
This latest enhancement should relieve some frustration of users who were caught in the organizer/attendee web.
Google is auto-updating people who use the sync program, but if you’re impatient and want to download it directly, you can. The new version is 0.9.3.2.
Edison is front and center in the pantheon of prolific inventor-entrepreneur-opportunists. Alone or jointly, he held 1,093 patents, a record unlikely to be approached, let alone surpassed.
Thomas Edison received his first patent in 1869, at the age of 23. It was for an “electrographic vote recorder,” which allowed a legislator to cast a vote for or against an issue by turning a switch either left or right. It was a complete flop, ironically because it was too efficient and interfered with the ability of pols to lobby for vote-switching — something that was commonly done during the time it took to count votes by hand.
Edison’s extensive background in telegraphy influenced the direction his inventing would go, and he spent a lot of time ignoring his day jobs and concentrating on his moonlighting projects.
It was his development of an improved stock ticker and the sale of its patent for $40,000 (around $600,000 in today’s money) that gave Edison some financial independence and allowed him to turn to full-time inventing. Talk about opening the flood gates.
Over the course of his career, these were just a few of the things Edison either invented or had a hand in developing: the carbon transmitter (which made a practical telephone possible), the phonograph, the incandescent light bulb, the kinetoscope (forerunner of the modern film projector), the dictaphone and the mimeograph machine, along with a mighty host of lesser-known things.
He built the first functioning central power station (in Brockton, Massachusetts), and his laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, is generally acknowledged as the world’s first true research-and-development center.
There were some failures along the way: Edison came out on the losing end of the battle over direct current versus alternating current with George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla, and his attempt to marry audio to silent film — which resulted in The Great Train Robbery in 1903 — wasn’t a success. A few ideas were just loony: a concrete piano, for example.
But nothing is perfect, not even genius, and while Edison’s genius is indisputable, history has judged him less kindly in ethical matters. If his personal ambition didn’t exceed his intellect, it certainly came very close to matching it.
In an era characterized by its ruthless, cutthroat business tactics, Edison was at the head of the pack. He didn’t care whom he stepped on or exploited to achieve his ends, and he muscled in on lesser-known inventors to make some dubious patent claims.
Edison was a man with many colleagues, subordinates, competitors and even admirers, but few friends. He had a family, which he largely ignored. He was a very old man, sidelined by poor health, before bothering to stop and smell the roses.
His payoff is that he remains the iconic American success story, with all that it means.
It’s a tough question, isn’t it? Is Microsoft buying Yahoo because of its long-term and broad-scale expertise with open source? If so, to what end?
Well, I thought, maybe what they’re really buying is the expertise of the Yahoo programming team, akin to what I felt was happening with Sun and MySQL.
Unfortunately, the theory doesn’t seem to work here.
Microsoft’s current stance on open source is, from what I can tell, to provide a compelling case to run open source packages on Windows — that is, as long as we’re leaving the Linux patent issue entirely out of the picture.
How they feel about open source on something the size and scope of Yahoo isn’t clear at all — and maybe that’s why they want some existing experts in that field.
Perhaps what they’re looking for are teams from Yahoo’s side that they can put to work creating online applications — to gussy up Windows Live?
The incoherence of Windows Live is about as bad as the incoherence that swarmed around .NET when Microsoft unleashed that way back when.
So, perhaps the thinking goes, why not bring in people who seem to be natural experts at this sort of thing?
The problem, again, is one of clashing corporate cultures: Microsoft and Yahoo do not look, act, or think remotely alike. This is a far deeper problem than I think Microsoft is willing to admit, retention incentives aside.
If Microsoft is doing this to get their hands on experts, there’s nothing that says the very people they want most are not going to jump ship and head somewhere friendlier.
Perhaps Microsoft will jettison its existing online unit wholesale and simply swap Yahoo in for that — well, maybe not all at once, but over enough time to allow some kind of transition from Microsoft’s services to Yahoo’s.
Maybe the best way to approach this is just to leave the question open: What is Microsoft really buying?
The more I think about it, the more I’m wondering if even Microsoft knows by now.
Posted in Open Source + Software + Technology + WordPress | 
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