Monthly Archives: June 2009

Coffee & Crowds

  • You know you need coffee when: you put a filter in the coffee maker, then go back to get…a filter for the coffee maker. #
  • It gets better: after that I went to put the bag of coffee back in the fridge. Where I’ve never kept coffee. Ever. Batting 1000 today. #
  • Mall is a lot more crowded than Wed. Sure, it’s Friday, but also I think schools let out yesterday. Waiting in line this time at Jamba #

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DMOZ Contact Unknown

So is dmoz.org dead or what? Applied to edit a category, got the “reply to this to confirm” message, replied…and got user unknown. #

Update: I re-sent my confirmation from another address and it went through. Apparently their server doesn’t like mail from pobox.com. But instead of saying so, it gives a bogus “user unknown” error.

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Oddities: Environment Ideas, Browser Bits…and Perry Mason

  • Top 10 Odd Environmental Ideas (Time via @ThisIsTrue). Some are disturbing, but I like the staple-free stapler. #
  • Aha! The 17 links that have been stuck in the linkcheck queue since yesterday are all to posts on the old Spread Firefox site. The archive’s locked. #
  • Spam: “Para legal information” from…Perry Mason. Wait, shouldn’t that be “Perry legal information?” #
  • Odd: Opera’s Reinvent the Web event is launching at midnight Pacific time? #

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Reach for the Sky

Spotted in Old Town San Diego.

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Coffee Cliché

Realized I’m doing the cliche coffee+laptop+wifi thing…except I’m at home with coffee I brewed myself and using my own network. #

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Pushing Daisies Mini-Review

Pushing Daisies had a satisfying don’t-call-it-an-ending. Looking forward to the comics. #

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Link Archive

I used to keep a sidebar linkblog here, but I’ve long since stopped. These days I’m more likely to post an interesting link to Twitter, or just save it up for a later post. I figured the WordPress 2.8 upgrade was as good a time as any to clean out the old plugin.

Still, I hate removing things from the web, so here’s an archive of 2½ years’ worth of linkblogging from 2005-2007. Continue reading

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Twitpocalypse Tweets

  • Blaming Twitter for the #Twitpocalypse is like blaming the Gregorian calendar for Y2K. #
  • The Twitpocalypse Explained, in layman’s terms. #
  • Twidroid seems to have survived the twitpocalypse #
  • Schadenfreude: amused that Twitpocalypse hit iPhone’s Twitterrific but not Android’s Twidroid. #
  • Oh good, updates are done! I can go home now! And put on some music to get Avenue Q out of my head. #

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The Twitpocalypse Explained in Layman’s Terms

It’s a trending topic, but there’s a lot of misunderstanding about the Twitpocalypse. Here’s what’s going on, in layman’s terms (I hope).

What’s happening?

  1. Every Twitter post has an ID number that goes up by 1 each time.
  2. When a computer program stores a number, it sets aside a certain amount of space for it. Bigger numbers take more space because they have more digits.
  3. One common format is called a “signed integer.” It has 32 binary digits (1 or 0 only) with one digit set aside to indicate a minus sign. The biggest number it can store is 2,147,483,647.
  4. Twitter’s status IDs are approaching that number.

So what’s the likely impact?

  • Twitter itself can handle bigger numbers and will be fine.
  • Third-party apps that store the ID in a bigger format will be fine.
  • Third-party apps that store the ID as text instead of a number will be fine.
  • Third-party apps that store the ID in this particular format will end up with bad IDs as they try to cram a big number into a small space.

If I were to guess, the most likely breakage would be that replies might be attached to the wrong previous post — but again, only with apps that use this particular format for numbers.

Twitter itself will probably sail through cleanly (and has been planning to move up the schedule so that affected app developers don’t have to fix things in the middle of the night), so don’t expect any fail whales. Unless so many clients have problems that lots of people switch to the website.

Update: Not surprisingly, most Twitter clients are unaffected by the Twitpocalypse. I’ve used both Twidroid and Twhirl with no problems since Twitter passed the mark. I figured a few would get tripped up, but the real surprise is that it hit Twitterrific. One of the most popular clients on the iPhone? They do have an update, but a lot of people are unable to connect.

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Strange Sights of San Diego

Seriously, doesn’t this chair look like it was made of the material they were trying to find a use for in the first episode of Better Off Ted…and turned into a chair so irritating that it increased worker productivity because people couldn’t get comfortable? (You can see it — and the explanation for the post title — in the middle of this 10-minute preview.)

office-chair

It was the chair in our hotel room (the converted bank office with the impressive lobby). Fortunately it wasn’t nearly as scratchy as Viridian Dynamics’ “Focus Master.” (Incidentally: more Better off Ted episodes are starting up in a couple of weeks for the summer!)

Some graffiti on plywood in the Gaslamp District area:

And then there was this “You Are Under Surveillance” sign. Something about the combination of the sign, the stairway, and all the posters on the walls just looked interesting.

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