2 posts tagged “twitter”

I've been pretty quiet here at Trifle for a couple of reasons. First off, work has been pretty hectic, as we try to get a version together for a BIG customer. While my company is very very good at resisting long, involved changes for the sake of one customer, when a multi-billion dollar company really really wants something that is on your upcoming feature list, you tend to do your best to deliver it early, right?

I've also become something of Twitter-holic, especially since I added unlimited text messaging to our cellphone plan. As I've mentioned before, I have even received some timely help via my twitter "neighborhood", which is a feedback loop that is hard to resist. I've stopped using TwitterFox though. For one thing, Firefox itself is slightly too unstable, as it tends to crash about twice a day, so I figure I need to cut back on my Addons. Secondly, typing gets very very very slow. Not sure what that is, besides a general Firefox slowdown, but it makes it impossible to use.

So I've been beta (maybe even alpha!) testing phpitter, a PHP(!) app. It took some work to get it installed, but the SVN version is reasonably solid at this point. I suppose I should look at twitux. Or maybe write my own, eh?

But anyway, a couple of short takes on my time wasting efforts, besides Twitter:

• I read Debatable Space by Philip Palmer. A pretty long science fiction novel, it tells the story of some space pirates who kidnap a VIP and then proceed to try and topple the current galactic overlords. A little too much internal dialog by the VIP, and not quite enough action, but the book postulates an interesting future of limitless resources and "travel" by avatar, as the light speed speed limit is still obeyed. If you like "hard" sci-fi, I think you'll like this book. Just skip over all the interminable Lena reflections and you won't miss a thing.
  

• I watched Michael Clayton onDemand and was decidedly underwhelmed. Originally, I had no interest in the movie. Who cares about battle lawyers? But the previews I saw on cable made it look pretty intense, so I used my free coupon to "rent" it. The beginning was cool, with a very startling event punctuating a quiet time, but then it rewound time (which I generally like in a movie) and got dull. I just never understood why George Clooney's Michael Clayton suddenly got attacked by a case of the guilts. Some whacko lawyer friend of his decides that defending big business is right and he somehow infects Clayton, whose conscience bothers him after years and years of protecting the big guy. I never got connected with him and so the last 2/3rds of the film just didn't resonate. Oh well.
  

• Fever Pitch became available online at Fancast (a Comcast site), so I watched that yet again while "working" yesterday. Man, the 2004 ALCS still brings a tear to me eye. I wonder if any but heartfelt Red Sox fans can really "get it". It's not as painful as Game Six, as it has a much better ending, but still...
  

Narrator: Ben became one of God's most pathetic creatures - a Red Sox fan.
Uncle Carl: Careful kid. They'll break your heart.

Michael Clayton (Widescreen Edition)

Debatable Space

Fever Pitch (Widescreen Edition)

I've been a sporadic user of Twitter for a while now but I really didn't get into it. I would go through some phases of using it, but they were fairly short bursts, and prone to long lapses of quiet.

But lately I've been using it more. I installed TwitterFox (although I don't remember when!) and happened to notice it in my status bar. And it works very nicely, giving me an interface that I can understand (the Twitter home page had me a little confused - what can I say, I'm easily confused). Although lately it has been giving me trouble, as the popup window is appearing underneath web content on some pages, which is annoying.

So I've started "tweeting" a bit more. And it has actually paid off over the past couple of days, with some great information appearing.

First up was the notice from jamiei about Google App Engine, which is a way to leverage Google technological muscle to create web apps. Very nice looking, even if I can't crack the beta team. You can download the SDK and play with it locally until they open it up a little more. Here's an excellent hands on quickie tutorial for using it.

Then I tweet-complained earlier this morning that my Amarok had stopped downloading cover images. I figured it was my fault, because I had recently gone through "version hell" trying to get a libCurl update to work. libCurl is often used by programs to get web information, and I just figured I broke Amarok solving my update problem.

But nightrose came to my rescue just a few minutes later, pointing out a blog post by Seb, an Amarok developer, explaining that an Amazon API change broke Amarok's album cover download and it will be fixed in the next upgrade. Yay for instant help!

So maybe Twitter can actually be useful, rather than just another distraction. But I will not turn on audio notification of new tweets. Nope, I just won't do that...