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Today I reluctantly migrated the blog from Movable Type to WordPress. There are many things I like about Movable Type, especially in version 4.0, but for whatever reason it was very slow and seemed to keep getting slower. I installed FastCGI but wasn’t sure if it ever worked, made sure the database was properly indexed and that it wasn’t slowing things down, and tried to tweak other things where I could. Eventually I decided that I was tired of dealing with slow performance, and didn’t have the energy to take the debugging to the next level. ...

Florian Jensen reports that AOL is testing ICQ and AIM interoperability using XMPP. If they adopt XMPP, AIM and ICQ should work with Google Talk as well, although they could of course prevent that from happening if they chose to do so. I started blogging about the need for interoperability among instant messaging services years ago, but very little progress has been made. Still, this is a sign of hope.

Bruce Schneier explains why he runs an open wireless network. I leave mine open as well, so it’s nice to know I’m in good company.

Wow, Sun is acquiring MySQL. That’s sort of stunning. My first impression is that MySQL has been under a bit of pressure in that big companies like IBM and Oracle have been buying up the companies who provide their transactional storage engines. Now MySQL has the (perhaps diminishing) clout of Sun behind them. Oh, and suddenly Sun goes from relatively irrelevant in the Web development market to incredibly relevant. And yes, I know that Sun provides Java, but the JDK is only one small piece of the overall Java Web application platform. The language is the language, but what affects developers most is the IDE, deployment platform, application server, and the libraries and frameworks that they use, and many Java developers don’t depend on Sun for any of that stuff. ...

In World of Warcraft, there are raid instances that reset once a week. The instances consist of several encounters that usually have to be defeated in order. For example, Gruul’s Lair, the easiest 25 man raid instance, has encounters with High King Maulgar and then Gruul. The hardest instance, the Battle for Mount Hyjal, includes five encounters. Playing all of these encounters takes time. The fights themselves are time consuming, and Blizzard includes “trash” monsters between each of them to increase the overall time it takes to complete the instance. In each instance, the encounters get progressively more difficult. So teams that can kill the one boss cannot necessarily defeat the one that follows. In game terms, this is what progression is all about. Every time you win an encounter, you get more stuff to enable you to move on to the next boss. ...

There are a lot of old Web sites out there these days. Plenty of organizations have had a presence on the Web for upwards of ten years, and like it or not, their Web sites are showing their age. It seems like I run into more and more groups who have old, crufty Web sites running many applications written in a variety of languages. What I’m wondering is what the best option is for these organizations is in terms of Web hosting? ...

For all of the negative talk about Rails lately, the truth is that for cranking out Web applications quickly and easily, it remains difficult to beat. I started on a new project last week, and in an afternoon, I managed to go from having nothing but a CSV export of a database to having a fully implemented data model of 6 or 7 tables, the model classes to represent them, unit tests for those models, and a script that imports the data from the CSV file to populate the database. ...

Tonight I happened to catch the end of the Golden Globes press event, on which two of the stupidest people in the world read the names of the award winners. The real show was canceled because the actors agreed not to cross the writers’ picket line. Anyway, in addition to reading the lists of nominees and then announcing the winners, the presenters of the show also treated us to some analysis and commentary along the way. A low point was reached when immediately before the host opened the envelope to read the winner of the “best picture” award, he asked the resident expert to predict the winner. The pointlessness of that prediction made me think of the pointlessness of nearly all predictions. ...

I’m one of the people who was concerned that the portrayal of the characters in the Baltimore Sun newsroom in the season premiere of The Wire was a tad unsubtle. Actual newspaper employee Fred Clark disagrees: I’ve read reviews complaining that Haynes seems unrealistically heroic, or that the newsroom scenes are overly explicit, with the lines of right and wrong drawn in uncharacteristically broad strokes. We’ll see. That can happen in a series’ final season, when the writers sometimes feel a now-or-never pressure that can override a previously subtle touch. But to me the scenes in the newsroom were painfully real. The dialogue rang true with words and phrases I’ve heard – or said myself – dozens of times. ...

Much time has been spent debating the merits of Ron Paul’s desire to eliminate the Federal Reserve and return the United States to the gold standard from an economic perspective. What people don’t seem to get is that Paul’s argument isn’t based on economics, but rather on his desire to take power away from the federal government. He doesn’t trust the federal government to manage the money supply (or do anything else, really), and so he opposes the Federal Reserve. There’s not really any more to it than that. ...