MarkMaunder dot com

Basic French Bread Making For Geeks

Update: Sorry, I accidentally deleted the video on my last update. Fixed now. Thanks Harold for the spelling corrections and pointing out a few unclear bullets in the method. Someone contacted me and asked how I make bread. So here’s my basic french bread recipe with a video showing the kneading and oven loading techniques. […]

June 28, 2011 | Bread | 3 comments

Advanced WordPress: The Basic WordPress Speedup

There are many caching products, plugins and config suggestions for WordPress.org blogs and sites but I’m going to take you through the basic WordPress speedup procedure. This will give you a roughly 280% speedup and the ability to handle high numbers of concurrent visitors with little additional software or complexity. I’m also going to throw […]

June 26, 2011 | Advanced Wordpress, Nginx, Wordpress | 1 comment

Can WordPress Developers survive without InnoDB? (with MyISAM vs InnoDB benchmarks)

Update: Thanks Matt for the mention and Joseph for the excellent point in the comments that WordPress in fact uses whatever MySQL’s default table handler is, and from 5.5 onwards, that’s InnoDB – and for his comments on InnoDB durability. My development energy has been focused on WordPress.org a lot during the past few months […]

June 23, 2011 | mysql, PHP, Wordpress | 5 comments

Running form

I’ve starting taking my running a bit more seriously this year, feeling the need for speed, so I’ve been looking at running form. My two favorite videos so far: My favorite video – Ryan Hall in super slow motion with pretty much god-like form at the Boston 2010 Marathon. This video has caused me to […]

June 14, 2011 | Running | No comments

MI6 to Rest of World: Cyber War is On. Anyone, Anywhere is Fair Game. Arm yourselves.

This incredibly disturbing story was posted on Hacker News 26 minutes ago. Summary: The London Daily Telegraph (via TheAge.com.au) is reporting that British Intelligence agents from MI6 and GCHQ hacked into an AlQueda online magazine and removed instructions for making a pipe bomb. They replaced the article with a cupcake recipe. A Pentagon operation was […]

June 5, 2011 | Hacker News, Law, networks, Security, Technology | 3 comments

Money Doesn't Talk

Money talks. Or, in this case it doesn’t. Have you noticed that the vast majority of published ideas will not increase your business or personal revenue? If someone has a truly great idea for increasing earnings or creating new revenue  out of thin air, they will implement or trade it themselves and will never share. At […]

June 2, 2011 | Economics, Startups | No comments

BitCoin, Chastened

The wannabe economist in me has been following the BitCoin phenomenon with great interest during the last few months. The algorithmic side of bitcoin is fascinating, but a few things bugged me about the system. One of them was that the maximum number of bitcoins that can ever exist is limited to 21 million. Most […]

June 2, 2011 | Economics | 1 comment

HN is about to overtake Slashdot.

The Alexa graph above only shows the ycombinator.com domain, but most of the traffic to the domain is HN. Also HN is visible on several other domains like hackerne.ws, which isn’t counted in the above graph, so it’s probably already passed Slashdot. Footnote: This post was something more political re comment scores. But I decided I […]

May 28, 2011 | Startups | No comments

What would a self-launching Space Shuttle look like?

This is the OK-GLI, part of the Soviet Shuttle Buran program, the largest and most expensive space program in the history of the Soviet Union. The OK-GLI completed 25 test flights between 1985 and 1988 before being retired. The OK-GLI was powered by four AL-31 jet engines with the fuel tank in the cargo bay. […]

May 28, 2011 | NASA, Space | No comments

What I love about the HN community

The smartest most helpful people hang out there. Thanks for the awesome theme Lucian!        

May 28, 2011 | Hacker News, Themes | No comments

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.