Tuesday, May 20th, 2008
I have been using Twitter on and off for several months. Some of the time the service works, the remainder of the time I am reliably informed that "Something is technically wrong." Currently, Twitter is the only web based application I use on a regular basis which breaks just as regularly as I use it.
If Twitter provided an important service, email for example, I would have stopped using it in favour of something more reliable; however, arguably, Twitter does not provide an important service, so I have persevered with its less than reliable service, though I have to admit, my patience is wearing thin.
Should not the Twitter experience be fun?
For me, Twitter has stopped being a fun distraction and has become something which I like to do, but more often than not, I end up feeling frustrated when I do. Problem is, I have become comfortable with keeping a virtual diary of day-to-day, hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute distractions. I also enjoy the sporadic conversations which occur between mutual followers.
Do not misunderstand me, I think the basis of the Twitter service, "What are you doing?", is valid and simple enough to remain being a great idea; however, for fear of stating the obvious, I do not think the Twitter service is currently scaling well enough to cope with the digital populace. And more worryingly [at least for the Twitter developers], I am not sure it ever will, not in its current guise and regardless of the underlying technologies.
Ah b∗ll∗cks!
Also, there is something which has been bugging me about Twitter, the fact that it is hosting my data. The data in question, may on the surface seem unimportant, and for the large part it is; however, on occasion I have found myself wanting needing to refer to my backlog of tweets, only to find the Twitter service lacking, again.
As an example, only the other day, Becky and I wanted to watch an episode of a certain serial drama and neither of us could remember the last episode we had watched. Ah ha! I thought, I will search my Twitter history, I am sure to have tweeted about it. The following conversation went something like:
me: Ah b∗ll∗cks!
Becky: What's wrong?
me: Something technical!
If I was hosting the tweets myself, I feel certain the above short conversation would never have taken place. I would have been able to search my data, find the information I needed and carry on with my otherwise happy existence.
What are you doing?
I am feeling all Twittered out, not with the concept, but with the service. I am going to rectify this by developing my own mini Twitteresque application. The application will provide similar functionality to Twitter, but obviously it will be served from my own hosting account. The application will store my tweets within its own database as well as pushing them to Twitter. Ideally, once the application is running, nobody, apart from myself, should notice any difference as it will appear as though I am Twittering as normal.
Thank you Twitter
Twitter got me hooked on keeping a diary of meaningless events, but then left me wanting. So, thank you Twitter, I now have a new project to keep me amused for a while.
End rant. Start project.
Monday, May 19th, 2008
In my last post I had a mini rant regarding the BBC's use of RealPlayer and how I believe Real's media formats are not particularly well supported under Linux. In the comments which followed, James pointed out the fact that RealPlayer is supported under Linux; you just have download the executable binary file and install it yourself. In my reply to James, I stated:
While it may not be difficult for power users to install Real Player, I think regular users would maybe struggle. Personally, I cannot remember the last time I had to download and install an executable binary; which either says a lot about the current state of Linux and how far it has come, or how poorly supported Real Player is.
Anyhow, I do not like moaning about stuff without doing anything constructive to rectify things; so, I decided to write this little howto install RealPlayer guide for Ubuntu Linux. If this is something you are interested in doing then follow the instructions on my wiki.
Update: I have moved the instructional part of this post to my wiki, see:
http://crunchbang.org/wiki/realplayer-on-ubuntu/
Sunday, May 18th, 2008
In case anyone does not know, the BBC News 24 channel has a technology programme named Click. The Click website describes the show as, "The BBC's flagship technology programme"; so expect a fairly mainstream show featuring technology news and gadget reviews. Anyhow, Andrew kindly reminded me that this week Click contains a special on free [as in beer] software. Ubuntu Hardy Heron and OpenOffice.org are clearly spotted in the programme, which has to be a good thing :) If you missed the show, you can watch it online with the BBC's iPlayer.
Also, while I am on the subject of the BBC, is it not about time the BBC made their online services more Linux friendly? As a fully paid up license holder I am somewhat frustrated with the BBC's continued support of Windows Media Player and Real Player media formats, neither of which are particularly well supported on Linux. In fact, these days I rarely use the BBC website as it frustrates me so :(
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008
Some interesting thoughts about Launchpad by Martin F. Krafft. Martin is basically saying that Canonical got it wrong with Launchpad, not because of its closed source nature, but because they missed an opportunity to create a decentralised system:
What we need is something as slick as Launchpad, and thousands of instances thereof, which all peer with each other, automatically. The information would automatically be mirrored wherever it’s referenced, so the entire cloud would be highly-available and failure-proof.
I agree that this would be great, in theory, and I look forward to testing the system soon, not :) Seriously though, being a member of the Launchpad Beta Testers team and having used many of Launchpad's features, I am not sure that Martin's proposal is even remotely possible — is it possible to maintain a complex project such as Ubuntu without a centralised project management system?
Sunday, September 30th, 2007
Dictionary.com is the only site I use on a regular basis that still employs pop-up advertising. I think it's a real shame that such an important reference site should use this method of advertising.
The thing is, I think it's more than simply an annoyance, it's discriminatory against users that are unaware that pop-ups can be blocked. Most modern browsers come with anti pop-up software by default, but users that are forced to use older browsers and/or systems don't benefit from such tools.
If it wasn't for Firefox I think I would have looked for an alternative long ago. One alternative that comes to mind is dict.org. It's fast, free and sans advertising. A worthy non-commercial alternative to Dictionary.com's pop-up hell.