ready… aim…

Guess who’s turning 10 today?

December 11, 2009

Back in the closing days of the last century, roughly a Spartan military unit of us tried our hand at this little thing called “blogging.”
One of those brave souls, who persists to this day, is Sean Hackbarth, the author of “The American Mind.” Now, Sean is clearly a bullshit artist and a suck-up [...]

You are hereby summoned:
a one-day glimpse into jury duty

December 7, 2009

A jury of your peers
The right to trial by jury is so precious in our legal system that there are not one, but two amendments in the Bill of Rights that protect it: The Sixth Amendment for criminal matters, and the Seventh Amendment for civil trials. The flip side of that jury [...]

An open letter to the Florida State Seminoles football team

December 5, 2009

Dear Seminoles:
When history looks back on the tenure of Bobby Bowden, it will remember three of his teams. The first two are obvious: they are the teams that won a national championship under his guidance, first in 1993 and again in 1999. The third team? By an accident of timing, that [...]

Why the GPL/Derivative Work debate doesn’t matter for WordPress themes

December 1, 2009

Note: this is not legal advice. This is my opinion, nothing more. If you want legal advice, hire a lawyer.
How to piss people off with a legal argument
There are no atheists in a foxhole, it’s been said, and there are apparently no agnostics when it comes to the potential application of the [...]

Why the GPL does not apply to premium WordPress themes

November 22, 2009

Update
Please check out the companion piece to this article, Why the GPL/Derivative Work debate doesn’t matter for WordPress themes

Why aren’t WordPress themes automatically covered by the GPL?
There’s been a firestorm brewing in the relatively small world of WordPress premium theme designers, after WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg broadly asserted that themes built to run on the [...]

A Decade of Blogging

November 19, 2009

We didn’t start the fire
How many people can say they were on the front lines of a revolution? Ten years ago, inspired by some pretty interesting people, I started a little blog. At that time, there were roughly three hundred webloggers in the world, and most of us knew each other. [...]

Matt: GPL applies to WordPress themes

November 18, 2009

I knew that WordPress itself was covered by the GPL. What I didn’t know was that themes, even commercial themes, built to run on WordPress, also fall under the GPL, according to some GPL experts.

In this vid, Matt Mullenweg talks about the benefits of the GPL at some length, even going so [...]

A Lunatic Races the Sun

November 15, 2009

Sunrises and dolphins
The lunatic ran along the edge of the bay, under the just-risen sun. It was 7:30 in the morning, and the lunatic was just finishing his eleventh mile.
The lunatic hit a milestone just before the fourteen-mile marker. It was the longest distance he’d ever run. As if to celebrate the accomplishment, a pod [...]