MarkMaunder dot com

Briefing Something Mission Critical When Failure Is Not An Option

I started my career in IT operations moving to London and working on initially Coca Cola’s infrastructure, and then moving into investment banking and working on trade floor infrastructure. This was after being based in South Africa and doing quite a lot of work for DeBeers on e.g. the most productive diamond mine in the […]

October 4, 2024 | Flying, NASA | No comments

And Back Again.

Just a test first blog post. Spent the afternoon setting up my blog and migrating the data from an archive I had stashed away. Managed to get posts going all the way back to 2007. Woohoo I have a blog again! And wow, things haven’t changed much at all. Still reverse proxying nginx to apache […]

September 27, 2024 | Blogging | No comments

Wordfence Reviews – Find them on WordPress.org

I’m posting this to help our customers find objective Wordfence reviews. If you are short on time and would like to view objective, reliable reviews for Wordfence that are moderated by volunteer WordPress moderators to remove spam, you can visit the Wordfence plugin review page on WordPress.org. I’m the founder and CEO of Wordfence. We […]

May 10, 2017 | Wordfence, Wordpress | No comments

Why the term "cyber" is cool.

In 1986 William Gibson published Neuromancer, his masterpiece. In it he coined the term ‘cyberspace’. For many of us it described the world of ‘computers’ at the time. It captured the experience of disappearing into code. Later ‘cyberspace’ was an uncannily accurate metaphor for getting online and disappearing into, for me, the telephone networks through […]

February 7, 2017 | Awesome, Books, Philosophisizing | No comments

Working On-Site Considered Harmful

It doesn’t make sense for knowledge workers to be on-site anymore. Working on-site comes with a significant cost. Quiet time is a precious commodity if you’re in any kind of cerebral role –  and it’s rare in most office environments. Then there’s the distraction of commuting to work, commuting back, people coming and going, the office […]

February 16, 2016 | Wordfence | No comments

The Longer Term Effects of the Paris Tragedy

Having recently lived in France for a year, my heart goes out to the French people. I lived in South Western France, but fell in love with Paris as a city of art, philosophy, history and music. That it was targeted with such violence last night is a travesty of epic proportions. At this time […]

November 14, 2015 | France, Politics, Security | No comments

3DR Tech Data and Review

I owned an IRIS+ by 3DR from Jan this year until a couple months ago when I lost it in a large desolate area in South Africa. The search is still on. As a former IRIS+ owner that pushed my drone to the limits of what it can do, I thought I’d post my first […]

June 29, 2015 | Drones | No comments

Failure Is Not An Option

If you raise money and fail, you need to consider the opportunity cost of another entrepreneur not having had access to the investment capital you lost. If you fail, you need to be sad about your failure and also be sad about the opportunity cost of your failure. But it’s “risk capital” you say – money […]

March 3, 2015 | Startups | No comments

Try Buying your Hardware

We took a lot of heat from the startup community when we bought $40,000 of Dell servers, a switch and a KVM and racked them ourselves in 2008. Seriously, Kerry (my wife and co-founder) and I hand-racked about 10 Dell 2950’s and a couple of 1950’s in the rack we leased at our data center. We didn’t […]

February 28, 2015 | Startup Hacks, Startups | No comments

Installing Ubuntu 14.10 on a Dell R630 with PERC H730 hardware RAID 10

If you arrived here, you’re probably spending your weekend doing this too, so perhaps I can save some of your weekend for you. Here’s how I did it. FYI, I’m using a PERC H730 hardware RAID controller with a 1.1TB virtual disk made up of 8 physical disks in RAID10 config. As the title says, this […]

February 28, 2015 | Startups | 1 comment

My name is Mark Maunder. I've been blogging since around 2003 when I started on Movable Type and ended up on WordPress which is what I use to publish today. With my wife Kerry, I'm the co-founder of Wordfence which protects over 5 million WordPress sites from hackers and is run by a talented team of 36 people. I'm an instrument rated pilot and I fly a Cessna 206 along with a 1964 Cessna 172 in the Pacific Northwest and Colorado. I'm originally from Cape Town, South Africa but live in the US these days. I code in a bunch of languages and am quite excited about our emerging AI overlords and how they're going to be putting us to work for them.