Technical Difficulties from on Top of the Mountain: April 2007

Technical Difficulties from on Top of the Mountain

2007-04-27

a few ways to make Twitter better

I was asked recently, how would you make Twitter better. My first answer was just to make it work, as it has performance/scaling issues at the moment. But that's not a very satisfying answer to someone who's not an infrastructure mechanic. So, putting my user hat back on now that the week's pressures have flowed past, here's a list of things you might do to make twitter better:

edit/delete old posts
secret email gateway address for posting to
multiple secret addresses so I can revoke one and not another
random message feed : 1 per day, (or variable frequencies)
see what friends of friends are saying (perhaps in a much smaller font)
ability to nudge friends of friends
get friends to vouch for me to their friends
group friends
set limits on updates wanted per friend or per group of friend
more complex routing rules
multiple IM accounts, multiple sms #s
spell checker
mobile friendly page (lighter on javascript & images)
search on usernames
search on user web addresses
search on message text (who's talking about TIG)

Well, lets start there and see what else I can think of.

Labels: engineering, twitter

¶ 10:00 PM 0 comments

2007-04-07

Still on fire

I kind of hoped I'd be done with burning by now. I'd rather be relying on the sun at the point and not having to drag more bags of sawdust around. But it is not to be. The weather still wants to be winter, with occasional snow still falling and plenty of cold wind. So the fire stays lit. At least the stores still have pellets in stock still. Last time around now it was a little hard to find pellets in any serious quantity or at a decent price.

So March finished off still going regular,

Month This year Last year

September 360 -

October 1,360 -

November 1,640 1,200

December 1,920 1,720

January 2,360 2,000

February 1,920 1,280

March 1,320 1,080

April ? 440

Month	This year	Last year
September	360	-
October	1,360	-
November	1,640	1,200
December	1,920	1,720
January	2,360	2,000
February	1,920	1,280
March	1,320	1,080
April	?	440

I should try and figure where I can store a mountain of these things next year and buy them all early in the season while they're still cheap.

¶ 10:00 PM 0 comments

2007-04-02

Still pushing at the straw.

Been fairly regular at starting up sharing on Fedora Core, and so managed to push another 100GB out since last time. Of course in that time, I've also added another 500GB to my desktop, thus continuing to demonstrate the hopelessness of net backups. But I'll keep at it, just for the heck of it.

Labels: bandwidth, linux

¶ 10:00 PM 0 comments