Space Station Lambda

If you’re a Twitter user then chances are you’ve seen this message. Here’s a rant based on it.

The Twitter web interface allows you to take a look at older tweets in bunches of about a twenty each. And every time you want to fetch a new batch you have to click on the large “more” button. Which in turn often brings up the message features in this blog post’s title.

I’m annoyed as hell by this of course, but it also gives me the opportunity for a little analysis that will end in the conclusion: Twitter will fail (unless they take some spoons of Tech Clue and change radically, that is).

What’s behind the little error message? You can’t really say for sure what happened, but since these errors occur pretty randomly it’s probably just that their servers are very busy right now.

Plus Twitter is notoriously known for having problems with scalability. For roughly the last two years, in fact. If you ask me they must be pretty clueless about scalability issues. To my knowledge their last action to solve this was to switch to another programming language (Scala). This approach seems to be motivated more by the name of the language than the actual benefit derived from switching to it. I don’t know if they have made the switch yet or whether they changed their strategy, but chances are their scalability problems won’t be solved at all with this.

The only thing that could cure their scalability worries would be a proper protocol for distributed twittering. There are suitable and proven distributed protocols like XMPP. You know, that’s the thing the Jabber instant messaging network is built on. And Google Wave too. This is quite a clue on the ability of Wave to supersede Twitter. Instead the latter ones are wasting their time with fruitless efforts. Come on!

This is made worse by the sheer simplicity of their application. I mean, in one of my projects I’m the sole developer of a complex game application. It’s understandable that I can’t be all things for all people, and scalability is just one of many problems. But what the hell are they doing all day at Twitter? They have 29 employees right now (source: TechCrunch)! Are they all busy keeping the list of top tweets fresh, or making Excel diagrams to please their VCs?

What’s your opinion on Twitter, scalability and the future of micro-blogging?

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Ardour belongs to the flagship class of GNU/Linux software:

It’s a free software DAW and thus a valuable program that has the potential to attract a lot of semi-professional and professional audio users to GNU/Linux (given the pricing, missing portability and inferior support for customization of the commercial alternatives).

Until now its main developer Paul Davis was living off a corporate sponsorship. This has changed:

With the end of SAE sponsorship, subscriptions & donations are the only thing that make it possible for full-time development of Ardour to continue. In January this added up to US$1968. That’s less than 1 copy of Nuendo, 4 copies of Logic or 40 personal copies of Reaper. If you agree that it takes more than this to support to keep Ardour moving forward, please subscribe or donate. Your support is critical and much appreciated.

Paul has not only been the industrious main developer of a great piece of free software but also a valuable member of the GNU/Linux audio user and developer community.

Although I’m not an Ardour user right now I have subscribed for a monthly donation nevertheless.

I strongly suggest you support him, too.

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Pianist and composer Marcus Loeber is collecting money for the release of his album “At the very moment”.

Here’s how it works:

First you choose how much you commit to pay while listening to excerpts from Marcus’ album.

If the target price total is reached by the end of 26 December 2008, the album is released under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND and you will be charged the fee you committed to pay before.

If the price is not reached then either Marcus will release the album nevertheless or he will decide to try something else. In the latter case you won’t be charged any money.

This album is definitely worth the money not only because of the music itself but also because it’s one of the new ways to get paid for digital content.

Remember? This is one of the new ways of selling music that the music industry refuses to take serious.

Let’s show them.

And while you’re at it, grab some free music at Jamendo, too. :)

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A surprise incentive to resume blog writing from Aaron Feng, heh.

How old were you when you first started programming?

Ten or eleven.

How did you get started in programming?

Read books about it, peeked at other people’s code, got in front of a computer, started hacking. :)

What was your first language?

BASIC.

What was the first real program you wrote?

A BASIC program calculating the Least Common Multiple of two integers.
On paper.

What languages have you used since you started programming?

BASIC, Turbo Pascal, C, C++, Java, C#, Common Lisp, Scheme, Bourne Shell, Awk, Perl, x86 Assembler, MIPS Assembler, TeX, JavaScript, PHP, SQL.

What was your first professional programming gig?

Depends on what you’d call “professional”.

When I was about 15 years old I wrote a dBase3 to CSV converter in Turbo Pascal for which I received 20 DM (about 10 EUR).

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

You bet.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

Don’t be content with your skills and work. Critically examine your own and others’ results.
Push your limits, push, push, push.

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had … programming?

Me and a friend hacking up a space game prototype with GCC and Allegro at night. I slowly discovered the joys of GNU/Linux and free software at that time.

Writing a boot loader in Assembler.

Letting creative impulses flow into Lisp code with little hindrance.

Who’s next?

Michael Prinzinger
Stephen Compall

I’d also tag Sebastian Heberer but he ain’t got a running blog right now.

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While customizing a CMS for a client, I was forced to confront an old enemy of mine: CSS.
“What”, you say, “but surely you must be convinced that CSS is the latest and greatest in the separation of style from content?”

Well, latest, yes. Greatest? Far from it.

The good points: CSS is the only standardized tool that lets you separate content. The cascading model is well-designed and most often well-implemented. The set of selectors and attributes is as well.

But now let’s face two glaring problems of CSS. And no, cross-browser compatibility hacks are not among them.

1. dynamic layout: show me a CSS multi-column layout without at least one column fixed in width. With the scourge called
   I can specify percentages and they work nicely, adapting themselves to the screen estate of the client. Why this omission? It feels like stone age in a world full of handheld devices and lots of different resolutions.Most web designers seem fine with specifying pixels all around. But then again a lot of web designers have Macromedia Dreamweaver, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop among their favourite tools. I’m always tempted to use tables instead, which gives me the additional boon of a working vertical alignment.
2. arithmetic expressions: it’s not possible to do even the most simple of calculations like 2em + 50px. Also, wouldn’t it be badly needed to be able to say: 2em + (SCREEN-WIDTH / 2), especially with absolute positioning? In this case, I can actually see why CSS don’t has this, though: Microsoft Internet Explorer often messes up even with only one value.

What makes it really bad is that CSS3 doesn’t attempt to solve those, to my knowledge. But let’s see whether HTML5 with its semantic additions can help here.

What are your experiences with CSS?

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Well, I don’t know.

But I can at least tell that I belong to the 20% minority.
Moreover, I’m a member of the bipolar faction, which also explains a lot of other things in my life.

What about you?

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