From Behold WordPress, Destroyer of CPUs:

I'm not alone; just do a web search on WordPress CPU usage or WordPress Digg Effect and you'll find page after page of horror stories, most (all?) of which are solved by the swift and judicious application of the WP-Cache plugins.

It's not like this a new issue. Personally, I think it's absolutely irresponsible that WP-Cache like functionality isn't already built into WordPress. I would not even consider deploying WordPress anywhere without it. And yet, according to a recent podcast, Matt Mullenweg dismisses it out of hand and hand-wavingly alludes to vague TechCrunch server reconfigurations.

As a former user of WordPress¹, I can't believe that WordPress still doesn't have caching built-in.

A few commenters hit the nail on the head:

If you think WordPress is polished software then you probably haven't read much of the actual code, tried to write plugins, or themes. It's just another giant messy PHP hack.

The advantage of WP of course is that it works well, and it has more plugins and themes and features and users than the others.

I couldn't have said it better myself — I wrote a plugin or two for WordPress, it wasn't fun.

1. Switched to Drupal into 2006 because of how slow WordPress was… [↩]

Jeff Atwood wrote an interesting article about Rechargeable Batteries¹ over at Coding Horror.

Every self-respecting geek loves gadgets. I'm no exception. And so many of my favorite gadgets have a voracious appetite for batteries. I don't know why all the other battery types fell so far out of favor, but between AA and AAA, I could probably power 95% of my household gadget needs.

I stopped using rechargeable batteries a little over a year ago because I was having trouble with the super-fast 15 minute chargers just killing the batteries, but the article peaked my interest again…

Enter the La Crosse Technology BC-900 AlphaPower Battery Charger².

The BC-900 is different than most of the chargers I've used. The BC-900 is geeky:

• Charge at various rates, from 200/500/700/1000mA
• Discharge at 1/2 the charging rate
• Test to determine true battery capacity
• Refresh to "revitalize" older batteries
• LCD readouts for each battery
• and more!

I ended up ordering a BC-900 from Thomas Distributing. Hopefully it will live up to the hype.

I think the next step will be to get myself some of those Sanyo Eneloops — they seem to be recommended by a lot of people.

1. The author seems to conflate discharge rate and increased capacity, but overall the article is good [↩]
2. Featured in the Coding Horror article and suddenly Out-Of-Stock at Amazon until May 29th 2008 [↩]

Over the weekend I cleaned up, documented, and released a library extension that I used for TwitterSync. I call the library Jabber Simple. It's an extension to the amazing PHP Jabber code by Centova Technologies Inc. (http://www.centova.com).

Jabber Simple offers just a few improvements:

• Automatically connecting and authenticating to the Jabber server of your choice
• Automatically discovering the event handler methods
• The potential for cleaner shorter code

I built the TwitterSync Jabber Bot (at first) based on the example Jabber Bot code for the Jabber class, but I felt like there must be an easier way to write a simple Jabber Bot…

So I wrote Jabber Simple in order to make creating a simple Jabber bot with the Jabber class a bit easier. IMHO, the example Jabber Bot via JabberSimple seems a bit easier to read, understand, and extend.

Well, that's it. I don't have much more to say. I'm happy with my library and if nobody else finds it useful, that's ok¹!

You can find the JabberSimple library at Google Code

1. I do hope someone else might find it useful [↩]

The other day I came across an interesting forum post regarding the pairing, placement, and functionality of the Roomba 500 Series Lighthouses. The forum post is on the iRobot Forums and is a good candidate for a "The Missing Manual for the Roomba 500 Series" book.

Recommended reading for any Roomba 500 Series owner.