____/ The Ghost In The Machine on Friday 07 December 2007 21:06 : \____
> In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Roy Schestowitz
> <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote
> on Fri, 07 Dec 2007 19:50:22 +0000
> <6653133.keOyVTAyCV@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
>> ____/ Mark Kent on Friday 07 December 2007 13:39 : \____
>>
>
> [snippage]
>
>> Yesterday (and no, I didn't post this to c.o.l.a.):
>>
>> http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1020
>>
>> As part of Novell?s arrangement with Microsoft, Microsoft
>> also is providing financial incentives to Novell to get
>> Silverlight on Linux, de Icaza added.
>>
>> ?Microsoft agreed to pay all the licensing and
>> patent fees for redistributing the (Silverlight) codecs,?
>> de Icaza said. ?We don?t have the Microsoft codecs for
>> Silverlight now. So we can not yet do streaming. ? But
>> it?s coming.?
>>
>
> Grrr...is it too much to ask for the open source community
> (presumably, Firefox) to do something intelligent with
> U+2019 (’), U+201C (“), and U+201D (”)
> when posting to ASCII media such as Usenet?
>
> Granted, this is not exactly up there with global
> warming, world peace, species extinction, and even Linux
> development, but this sort of thing isn't going to go
> unnoticed.
>
> And no, it's not Microsoft's fault...this time:
>
> Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
> Server: Apache/2
>
> (One wonders, of course, regarding the server, though. Heh heh heh...)
It's actually Matt Mullenweg's fault. I've known him since 2004 when I started
to get involved with WordPress. Before founding WordPress he was merely
hacking on b2, which was an abandoned project hosted on SourceForge (I am not
100% sure about this because Michele, its maintainer, had a homepage for it as
well). Anyway, Matt had his b2 blog and then he decided to 'hack' on it (the
system facilitated no notion like a 'plugin' at the time). His first hack was
supposed to help him avoid entering all these codes (sequences) for fancy
quotes (I hate these too).
That's how WordPress began. A bunch of Matt's plugins, together with others'
(Alex King is among them for sure). He then got together with Mike Little
(whom I once met because he lives nearby), they chatted on IM, and WordPress
was born. Some of the 'nice' functionality that was there included 'smart'
coversion of symbols. automated (and somewhat broken) nesting and markup
completion (conceded with the introduction of TinyMCE for WYSIWYG UI), among
other things. A year went by and Matt decided to drop out of college to join
CNET in SF, where he was practically paid to do some work on GPL-licnsed
WordPress and their blog (they had none at the time, I believe). ZDNet and
CNET are partners in many ways, so blogs came to ZDNet as well and... you've
guessed it... it ran WordPress... before it even ran millions of Web sites.
So, to cut a long story short... the 'dirty' DNA that is all those annoying
symbols comes from the underlying CMS at ZDNet Blogs. This caused me a lot of
trouble when I posted to COLA with the previous version of KNode, which did
something else with charsets, even when I pasted from WordPress-powered sites.
Some months ago, a year or so after Matt founded Automattic, he was voted by
PCWorld (IIRC) as one among the top 20 most influential people in the
Internet/Web. And he's two years younger than me! A year younger than
FaceBook's founder, IIRC.
--
~~ Best of wishes
Roy S. Schestowitz | #ff0000 Hot Chilli Peppers
http://Schestowitz.com | GNU/Linux | PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
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