Michael Koby

Twitter has been pretty much unusable the last 2 weeks.  Things started to get bad last week, and then over the weekend they had a database crash which has caused them to turn features off and have extremely slow performance since Friday.

Twitter has never been perfect.  Its consistant downtime has been the subject of much debate since the the service debuted a little over a year ago.  The continuance of this downtime at greater intervals over the last month has rendered the service all but useless.

Current issues include:

• No pagenation on Twitter website
• No IM support (some of us don’t have unlimited text messaging)
• Constant “Limit Exceeded” on API driven applications (even when there is NO way an app could have hit the limit) - this is apparently due to a throttle placed on the API that Twitter has not made extremely known.
• Slow performance resulting in missing updates completely or getting them late

With these kind of issues, and no real word on when things will return to “normal” it is distressing to see that people still use and rely on this service (myself included).  Imagine what would happen if someone like Paris Hilton or Britney Spears started using Twitter.  The service would crumble from the spike in usage.  Twitter needs to get its act together, because if this keeps up much longer, people really will move to something else (FriendFeed?) if they find Twitter to be this continuously unreliable.

Last night my friend (another Linux junkie stuck in a Windows world) showed me a small little application called Win-X-Move.  This program is probably the coolest thing since sliced bread.  It gives you the ability to move and resize windows with the ALT key and your left & right mouse buttons, just like in several Linux window managers.

• Alt+Left Mouse Button = Move window
• Alt+Right Mouse Button = Resize window

This is such a nice feature and one that I was looking to get into Windows a couple of weeks ago.  So go my friend for finding this and letting me know about it.

The Free Software Foundation, yesterday posted an article about the NBC/Microsoft hiccup involving broadcast flags (article).  There are a couple of things wrong with this article but the main point I want to focus on is the fact that they go to great lengths to make Microsoft the bad guy in this little fiasco.

This is my first video with my new Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000, hopefully the quality is a little better than my previous video entries.

This past weekend I attended Austin CodeCamp 2008.  My first true “geek meeting” and I have to say, a ton of fun.  I got to see a co-worker present, talk to other developers, and really be engrossed in something I thoroughly enjoy.

I learned a lot of stuff and took a lot of notes (which I have photoed and uploaded to EverNote).  Once I figure out how to share things via EverNote, I’ll post a link to my notes.  For those interested, I attended the following sessions:

• Development Patterns Cage Match by Scott Lilly (notes taken)
• Principles of Object Oriented Design by John Teague & Mahendra Mavani (notes taken)
• From Minefield to Greenfield: Taming the Legacy Beast by Jimmy Bogard (notes taken)
• Reshaper-Fu by Ben Scheirman (more demonstration and discussion, no notes)
• Sarbanes Oaxley Proofing Your SDLC by Josh Handel (notes taken but not uploaded)
• Practical Uses for LINQ by Josh Handel (more demonstration, no notes)

Hopefully I didn’t get anyone’s blog link wrong (if I did let me know and I’ll correct it ASAP).  All in all the experience was great and I’d totally do it again.  One thing I need to do though is be more social.  I truely suck a being social around a bunch of people I don’t know.  I don’t ask about them, their interests, and what they work on.  Need to get better at that.

If you’re looking for some pictures, the rest are on my Flickr page in the Austin CodeCamp 2008 set.