Tom Cruise’s latest interview promoting Scientology sure makes me think the guy has lost it. Did he make any other point besides being in or out? Onboard or not? He’s getting a ton of press out of the deal, and I’d bet the number of people joining and learning about Scientology is at an all time high.
Reagan was a clown that did movies with Chimps… Only to later become one of America’s more famous popular presidents. If this gets spun the right way you may find yourself voting Cruise in 2016.
That’s a cheap dig, but I heard this news this morning and couldn’t resist. “Shockwaves” don’t describe it, but it’s a big shocker for the web dev community this week. What will it mean for those of us that implement MySQL? Probably very little actually.
Sun will keep it open and we’ll still have our LAMPs. They’ll have greater influence over features which optimize their Java or OpenSolaris products. We can hope they’ll fuel faster development and maybe we’ll get some added goodies with their combo.
At least we know where to find OSAMa. Maybe their first task will be to market it with a different stack name?
Just after getting sucked in to plunking three comments down on Dave’s post about decentralized Twitter I read up on Twitter’s Starling open-source release. Were the developers at Twitter reading the minds of the community or what? Or are they really that in sync with their customers? Great news all around. And a wise move.
Primarily I’m happy to hear that they’ve got a solid block to base their system on, “When other parts of the Twitter site go down, Starling stays up.” From that block they can build out and have a scalable system.
And we’re going to help them build it. Developers and customers and companies desiring to tie in to the magic are going to help build upon that block. Heck, I’ve been buried in queue management… I’m looking forward to seeing what they’ve got under their hood.
There has been a lot of talk in the last couple days about the decentralization of Twitter. What? A few top bloggers got annoyed that Twitter keeps going down during peak use and here we are. Lame.
Back when Twitter first launched, my boss couldn’t say enough praise for their use of Ruby on Rails and the rapid speed of their development. I agreed that the speed at which they brought their service to life was impressive, but I wasn’t sold on Ruby. Rightfully so, as I soon was pointing out Twitter’s scaling problems and their blaming Ruby (it wasn’t Ruby, but it certainly cast doubt).
There are performance issues with Twitter. Their dev team blamed Ruby and was ultimately wrong. The product is so addictive that folks get angry when they can’t have it. So why not split this product up and decentralize it? Let’s make it a system of RSS feeds and all subscribe to the feeds we want. Why not?
Remember that Twitter is a service. Consider it somewhat like AIM or LinkedIn. Users have an identity, profiles, etc. It’s a social network. A very popular one at that. And decentralizing Twitter means creating a decentralized social network.
The value of Twitter (and why it wouldn’t succeed in a decentralized environment):
If Twitter were switched to a system of RSS feeds we’d be nowhere further than the present blog feeds. A one-to-many approach instead of many-to-many. It would simply be a restriction and/or self-imposed limit to 140 characters + a topic that we’d be living by.
Prognosis: Twitter will step up and solve this with architectural improvements and bandwidth/load/communication concentration. If they don’t already have request concentration which directs requests to the appropriate cluster and DB, they’re already working on building it. The discussion of decentralization will go away.
A BlackBerry 8800 had been my mobile of choice for about six months in early 2007 prior to picking up an iPhone. I moved to the iPhone and the honeymoon lasted for a while, but the loss of instant email and being able to use real software ultimately killed the love. If you call yourself a software developer you develop software (or at least are thinking about developing software).
Since I’ve been diving in to a heavier load of server programming, an SSH client has been a priority. Rove offers a terrific terminal app, Mobile SSH, covering Telnet, SSH 1&2, etc. It’s $95, but well worth it. Tailing a log file while walking with my wife last weekend was far superior to sitting at Starbucks and dealing with WiFi. Spoiled? What?
Add to it that Rove offers a combination VNC RDC client called Mobile Desktop and a file manager app (though I have no idea when I’ll be FTPing or SFTPing stuff from the bberry – who has that much content on a bberry??). What Rove lacks in creativity for naming its products, it makes up in enterprise level quality.
If I had thumbs and fingers the size of matchsticks, the blackberry could replace my laptop. The keyboard is small, but so what?… Mobile blogging isn’t about long, drawn out posts (like this one? Sorry.) With WordPress hooked up, posts are possible. We’ll see if this turns in to a true mobile blogging platform… I’d love to hear from people on their preferences in the mobile blogging arena.
So it’s hooked in to WordPress for mobile posts. Flickr is plugged in to the 8800 and flickrRSS on WordPress. Twitter is plugged in to everything. I’m not so hot on Facebook – I’ll write my own apps…