Galina and I went on our first bike ride of Spring (pics). We rode past the Philadelphia Art Museum, along the riverfront and over to UPenn. A large part of the day was spent at a Wharton volleyball tournament with some great friends.
We met some new people while sitting in the bleachers and hanging out. It’s refreshing to visit and meet intelligent, driven, and interesting folks. While it’ll be a couple years before I can consider attending, I’m looking forward to it more than ever.
Object-Oriented Programming (OO or OOP) is the best way to have re-usable, sharable, less-bug-ridden, easily readable, easier to debug, and easier-to-pick-up-later professionally written software.
“Learning classes” is the functional way to describe learning object-oriented programming. One skill begets the other. When in college my professor played a video of a band playing music. The band represented a program, and each musician represented a class.
I hope that’s not how it’s described nowadays for comp-sci peeps because it’s a completely backwards way to learn it. It is backwards because you’re already looking at a finished product. To understand OO and classes, think in terms of small portions. Then grow from there.
To give an example of how to build out a class, let’s build a musician or rocker since we’ve been on a Rock Band kick.
.
Now, what does a rocker have?
These will be the variables we put in our Rocker class, here’s the code to support us…
<?php
class Rocker {
// OOP classes are usually capitalized. Good form.
var $name;
var $gender;
var $instrument;
var $talentLevel;
}
?>
It’s been almost two weeks since I started using Twitter as a primary source of news, links, and other fascinating bits of information. The approach has been awesome and I’ve discovered a ton of people and sites which I now return to. It’s been eye opening.
But I’ve been missing sites previously frequented. The time I’ve spent in the flow cut in to time spent reading feeds and visiting sites. And while my Google Reader feeds are grossly limited compared to the nearly 5,000 people I follow on Twitter, there is still some attachment and familiarity that goes missing.
I share my Google Reader items as a feed (RSS) or on a page (HTML), and of course it’s aggregated on my FriendFeed. I am ‘sol‘ on Twitter.
386 – 7 minutes:
When following a lot of friends in a flow environment and using XMPP, one sees the above numbers in less than ten minutes. I’d been using Adium, but Adium doesn’t smooth scroll between each received tweet. It constantly jerks messages upwards and has made it virtually impossible to have a meaningful experience. There are often times when I want to read each incoming tweet. A good, smooth, reading experience was needed.
iChat has a slightly smoother hit at each received message, and is therefore much more enjoyable to read. The interface is customizable enough, but nothing quite as nice as some of Adium’s minimal themes.
I was mostly hesitant to switch since Adium has outstanding AppleScript support. I’ve been thinking of prototyping something (given a couple hours – someday). Apparently iChat has something even better which I should have known about… Callbacks! A script can fire for each received message.
This will make dynamic, real-time, filtering a reality.
The start of something very cool…
I’m used to the speed of the flow and it’s slow. It’s time to open it up and look for five-figures…
Useful link: flow entries
Follow me on Twitter: sol
I read the flow of XMPP Twitter traffic with breakfast and in the evenings. I then scan it when checking email or if I catch a lot of added traffic on the IM window. The part which most people don’t understand is how this translates and how it’s even immaginable to distinguish signal from noise here.
It’s easy. I’m now following over 4,000 fellow Twitterers (Twitterites? Twitterans?). The TPM (Tweets Per Minute) ranges between 20 and 35. This equates to the Twitterers I’m following announcing, approximately, once every two hours (obviously some are once a day and some are every 10 minutes).
Reading the flow at this rate is easy. You have tweets coming in 24 hours per day, but you absolutely can’t follow it the entire time. Feeling like you have to read every Twitter announcement your friends send is the first psychological obstacle to get over. Once you get beyond that feeling of needing to maintain control, you free yourself to dip in to the news of the moment as reported by everybody.
To ensure I’m not missing any messages specifically to me, I keep a browser tab open (usually immediately to the right of my GMail tab) to the Twitter Replies page.
The main trick to keeping a strong signal is being selective in who you follow. By tuning this early, you avoid needing as much filtration later. To date I have only filtered out a single spammer account.
One last point is that some feel this approach is a pull technique in which I’m getting, but not giving back. I disagree. I submit my status and the special news and information I come by. I encourage people to follow me so they’ll be able to have an insight in to my thought processes and activities.
Given the present rate of flow, I see 10,000 as the next step. It’ll take a while to get there with a selective approach. In the meantime I’m interested in metrics and whether Twitter will continue to be a best source of this data.
Any service could provide an XMPP flow… Imagine Facebook, MySpace, Pownce, etc, offering an XMPP feed of updates. FriendFeed with an XMPP flavor would be incredible.