First thoughts on WordPress 3.0

When I saw the release announcement on WordPress 3.0 (Thelonious), I was excited to see that is was finally integrating in the WordPressMu project allowing one installation of wordpress to handle multiple blogs. I maintain several websites and blogs in wordpress, and have struggled with the operational best practices surrounding it. I was quite excited to see the multisite support so I decided to deploy a VM at the house to test out migration of all my sites to a single install.

Yet another reason not to trust “the cloud”

Courtesy of Intuit Works to Restore Online Access – WSJ.com: Intuit Inc. said it is trying to restore service to company websites affected by an outage that began Tuesday night, leaving consumers and small businesses without access to online versions of the company's accounting and tax software. Intuit’s products include TurboTax, Quicken and the QuickBooks accounting program used by many small businesses. The online services associated with those products remained offline Wednesday afternoon.

Warren Buffett

“Sleeping around, to continue our metaphor, can actually be useful for large derivatives dealers because it assures them government aid if trouble hits. In other words, only companies having problems that can infect the entire neighborhood – I won’t mention names – are certain to become a concern of the state (an outcome, I’m sad to say, that is proper). From this irritating reality comes The First Law of Corporate Survival for ambitious CEOs who pile on leverage and run large and unfathomable derivatives books: Modest incompetence simply won’t do; it’s mindboggling screw-ups that are required.

The iPad Will Be The Best Thing To Happen For Desktop Virtualization & VDI Adoption

More iPad tastiness – “The iPad Will Be The Best Thing To Happen For Desktop Virtualization & VDI Adoption” – Liberty Technology Blog. Excellent read on the iPad as a desktop virtualization thin client. If you’ve seen any science fiction (StarTrek, Babylon 5, etc) they all use iPad/tablet like computers. The traditional laptop/desktop form factor requires you working at a desk. If you’re doing anything standing up, normal computers fail.

Stocks to Research

I like to buy companies I use. Some stocks I’m considering: VMWare – Cloud infrastructure provider. Amazon – Not of the consumer shopping, but because of all the neat stuff they’re doing with EC2, S3 and Mechanical Turk. Citrix – Xen masters and purveyors of Go To Meeting and Go To MyPC. Apple – the iPad is the laptop killer for causal couch use. It’s a multimedia Kindle. Sucky name though.

Thomas Friedman falls just short of getting it.

@lance (an ATDC startup guy) pointed me to a pretty good Op/Ed from Thomas Friedman in the New York Times. Let me say that of all the NYT people, I respect Friedman the most. His Lexus and the Olive Tree sits up there with Mystery of Capital as one of the best economics books of recent years. It also sits up there with The Pentagon’s New Map as one of the best national-security books of recent times.