Mark Jaquith ↓

An Introduction

Hi there! My name is Mark Jaquith (JAKE-with). I’m a Lead Developer on the WordPress web publishing platform, used by tens of millions of people around the world. I make my living as a web publishing consultant to everyone from individuals to startups to established media companies. My personal goal is to bring intuitive, low-cost web publishing to everyone who has anything to say.

On this page you’ll find some of my content from around the web.

— Mark

Quick Links:

Mark is …

… an independent WordPress consultant
… a WordPress lead developer
… 27 years old
… one of those stuck-up Mac users
… six feet, four inches tall
… really bad at answering e-mails
… an amateur photographer
… a Floridian
… a fan of Free and Open Source Software
… a capitalist and a libertarian
… a husband to a wonderful wife

Personal blog — Tempus Fugit

Mark on WordPress

Under construction

I edit this page live. So it usually looks pretty bad. I don’t know what to put here right now.

Recent Photos

Links

Ha! Great Right/Left skewering by The Onion.

“Dad’s great, but listening to all that talk radio has put some weird ideas into his head,” said daughter Samantha, a freshman at Reed College in Portland, OR. “He believes the Constitution allows the government to torture people and ban gay marriage, yet he doesn’t even know that it guarantees universal health care.”

via Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be | The Onion.
Big surprise. The position Sonia Sotomayor espoused in her Senate confirmation hearing doesn’t jibe with the dissent she joined in McDonald v. Chicago.

I understand the individual right fully that the Supreme Court recognized in Heller.

vs

In sum, the Framers did not write the Second Amendment in order to protect a private right of armed self defense.

(via Sonia Sotomayor and the Second Amendment – Hit & Run : Reason Magazine)
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die, because they’re never going to be born. The number of people who could be here in my place outnumber the sand grains of the Sahara. If you think about all the different ways in which our genes could be permuted, you and I are quite grotesquely lucky to be here.

Richard Dawkins

I think about this almost every day. Consequently it irks me that the increasingly clichéd question “what is the meaning of life?” has been epitomized in popular ontology. We are each the winner of the universe’s ultimate lottery, and our response is “It must be a game. Who has some cheat codes?”
Christopher Blizzard nails what is wrong with Apple’s “HTML5” demos which use browser sniffing and Safari- and Webkit-specific tech to exclude other browsers with good HTML5 support.

The most important aspect of HTML5 isn’t the new stuff like video and canvas (which Safari and Firefox have both been shipping for years) it’s actually the honest-to-god promise of interoperability.

via Christopher Blizzard · intellectual honesty and html5.

Indeed. While the new stuff that HTML5 enables is exciting, the most amazing part is that the spec attempts to describe how a parser should implement these features in enough detail that two different browser vendors can follow the spec and end up with a parser that works the same (for the most part) as one created by another team who also followed the spec.
Timothy Sandefur reviews John Yoo’s Crisis and Command in California Lawyer Magazine. Spoiler: it’s a trainwreck.

So are presidents the judges of their own authority, up to the very moment when they are impeached?

For Yoo, the answer seems to be yes.
Carlos Urreta takes a look at how various people (including me) with what might be called “strong calendar synesthesia” visualize their “mental calendar.” I like the idea of cutting up and rearranging a physical calendar to match! I might do that in a wall of my office.
For a year after giving birth, nursing mothers must be allowed breaks on the job to express breast milk as often as necessary, and a private place to do so that’s not a bathroom. Employers with fewer than 50 employees are exempt.

Health Care Law Includes Some Surprises – NYTimes.com

What, women can’t get in a milky mood if there’s a toilet present?
Automattic announced VaultPress, a WordPress backup and security service, in private beta. Sounds wonderful, even if the proposed price of $30 USD a month is way too high (especially if that is per blog).
Robot Touchscreen Analysis. This matches my real world experiences. The iPhone has uncannily accurate touch screen performance. Everything else seems like you’re trying to coax it into recognizing where you touched. This is a huge deal. One of the biggest reasons the iPhone feels so right is that it feels as if you are directly manipulating things.
John Gruber on Apple’s patent suit against HTC:

What worries me is that idea that Apple, or even just Steve Jobs, believes that phones like the Nexus One have no right to exist, period, and that patent litigation to keep them off the market is in the company’s interests.

Daring Fireball: This Apple-HTC Patent Thing
This is my answer too.

Another shareholder urged the company to consider more women for executive and board positions; Jobs said it’s Apple policy to look for the best people, and that sometimes they’re women and sometimes they’re men.

Macworld

People say “consider more” when they often really mean “preferentially hire.” Kudos to Jobs for standing his ground.
Change of shape in bird wings in the last 100 years could be due to habitat erosion by humans: Bird wing shape changing as possible adaptation to environmental change. This bodes well for the planet. Life finds a way. (via Kottke)
Mark Pilgrim elucidates what is so upsetting about the Apple iPad to people like us who grew up tinkering on their computers, in Tinkerer’s Sunset. Our children are going to grow up in pristine computing jails that both legally and technically thwart attempts at tinkering.