Written by John Minnihan, founder of Freepository. I write about software, automation and anything else that interests me.
November 17th, 2007 — Tech Tips
Since Gmail began supporting IMAP, setting up Gmail to work with both Apple Mail & the iPhone is a common need for those of us with both iPhones and new Macbooks.
I began using Gmail about two weeks and had noticed the inconsistencies mentioned in the below article, and was both pleased to see that the solution was so simple as well as slightly embarrassed that I hadn’t yet resolved the issue myself.
Here’s the HOWTO:
November 16th, 2007 — twitter
Twitter was off line long enough yesterday for me to notice (I variously rec’vd 500 pages as well as ‘Connection reset; server too busy’ pages). No mention of it in the 20 or so blogs I follow.
The 500 error indicated a back-end problem; this wasn’t just a matter of too much front-door traffic. We’ve already seen the response to that in the form of the tweety-bird page. 500 errors are the server’s way of saying “Holy Shit. I give up.”
I think Ruby’s edges (or core maybe) are showing here. This has been discussed at length at Laughing Meme, but I haven’t seen much about this subject on Twitter’s blog. Lots of folks are using Ruby daily, with many of them adopting Rails, and all of them have a stake in its future.
Performance is a tough characteristic to engineer into a language after the fact. Is Ruby/Rails going to be able to pull this off, or will it remain “…dead slow” to the point of no longer being considered for scalable web development?
Certainly, this is not the first time Twitter has had an outage. The outages were so common for awhile that they were referred to as “…yet another period of downtime” in this posting at Techcrunch . But didn’t anyone else notice? More likely they don’t care. After reloading the page a few times & seeing the errors, I gave up & didn’t check in again until this morning.
If your service can be offline (or at least unusable) for that long without any impact, then monetizing it might be problematic.
November 14th, 2007 — twitter
Could be. My frequency of twitter updates has exceeded that of my blogging, which itself may not be a surprise. Blogging requires an effort easily an order of magnitude greater than tweeting. Exaggeration? I don’t think so, and I surmise that this ‘reduced friction’ has accelerated Twitter adoption.