Bit of a brain-dump, this one, but maybe of interest to social networking butterflies.
I’ve been on Facebook for a while now, and the things I like best are a) the photos (other peoples’ – I use flickr), b) the event organisation, and c) the status updates. It’s nice to see what people are up to. Twitter is the distillation of that idea: it’s just status updates, and it’s great. Why am I telling you this? You probably already know. Anyway, that’s not what this post is about.
The problem with twitter is that it’s flakey as hell. This is largely attributable to “too much success too soon” syndrome, although it might also possibly have something to do with their implementation platform (Ruby on Rails). *shrug* I also have no idea what their business model is, because they don’t advertise, and must send more SMS messages (broadcasting tweets) than they receive (from people sending tweets for broadcast). Maybe they get a big cut on the received ones. Anyway, that’s not what this post is about.
It’s tedious to update your status in two places, so it was nice that Facebook had the TwitterSync application, for pulling all my tweets through to Facebook. Unfortunately, twitter really is flakey as hell, and in particular for the last two months or more they’ve had a note up saying “We’re working to restore IM services to all users. Thanks for your patience!”. This refers to the API whereby tweets may be sent/received using instant messaging clients such as MSN, Jabber, etc. It’s been broken for getting on for as long as I can remember now, and TwitterSync relies on it — net result, my Facebook status hasn’t changed much in living memory!
Bash to the rescue. She told me about ping.fm, a sort of meta-status service which propogates updates to multiple social networking sites, including Facebook and Twitter. I’ve just signed up (let me know if you want to as well: I’ll give you the beta key) and yup, it works: I can update on the ping.fm website and it magically appears on both my Twitter and Facebook statuses. Nice.
I’m mostly happy to use the web interface, but of course one also often wants to update via SMS from a mobile. Ping FM doesn’t support that just now (”we are only a couple guys in a garage”), but searching their (cannily outsourced) online help we find posts tagged “mobile”, including exactly the question I want to ask. That’s the source of the “two guys in a garage” quote above (which of course makes one wonder how long this will remain a good idea, but hey, Apple), but also a pointer to these instructions on sending updates to ping.fm via SMS using what appears to be a public SMS->email gateway. I can report that at time of writing, this works. I presume I’ll still pay premium rate for messages to that number, but hey, I did with Twitter too and it didn’t seem to stop me.
Win.
While on the topic of updates via email (since that’s the basic mechanism used in the above), I noticed that ping fm will ignore signatures but only if they’re preceded by “—-”, ie four dashes. That’s stupid: everyone knows the standard is two dashes and a space. But it’s OK, because I am an early 1990s throwback and still use mutt for all my email, and it’s configurable to hell and back. I just add:
send-hook (myuserid@ping.fm) unset signature
to my .muttrc and any email updates I send to ping.fm are automatically sig-less. Sweet.
On the subject of mutt configuration and send hooks: how to set up sender profiles.
Nice vid, Dan. :-)
Yet people talk about programming as if it were a production process and measure “programmer productivity” in terms of “number of lines of code produced”. In so doing they book that number on the wrong side of the ledger: we should always refer to “the number of lines of code spent”.
Dijkstra, The Fruits of Misunderstanding, and also a similar sentiment (earlier) in “Why is Software so Expensive?” An Explanation to the Hardware Designer — quote spotted on reddit.
… and from the second (first, chronologically) of those essays, Dijkstra hitting the nail on the head with regard to aspects of some recent rumblings about higher education:
To the economic question “Why is software so expensive?” the equally economic answer could be “Because it is tried with cheap labour.” Why is it tried that way? Because its intrinsic difficulties are widely and grossly underestimated.
To any of my students reading this: don’t underestimate the difficulty of the tasks we’ve been educating you to tackle; thus, don’t underestimate your worth if you get good at attacking those tasks; thus, hopefully you’ll appreciate (if not now then one day) the value of a degree in (actual, not pretend) Computer Science.
My my, I’ve had a busy (by which I mean fun and not working at all) and sociable (by which I mean much ale and good food, including bananas, was quaffed with silly people) weekend.
It started on Thursday evening, when a whole bunch of us went out to celebrate my birthday at Wasabi, my most beloved local eatery. I mean we celebrated at Wasabi, not it was my “Wasabi birthday” or something. Anyway. Through a combination of the magic of Facebook and the strong appeal of sushi, some forty people chose to celebrate Gimboday with me. I actually turned up a few minutes late, having gone for a quiet pre-meal beer at the Uplands Tavern, and was a) gobsmacked at this crowd of people waiting for me, and b) without somewhere to sit. Oh, it was great. The food was super, although Wasabi really doesn’t seem able to handle large groups: we were split across two tables, and it’s not a gross overstatement to say that everyone on table 2 (which I was on) had received all of their food before anyone on table 1 had received any. Given that by its nature Japanese food tends to come in many small portions (just like Arnold J Rimmer’s love), that really doesn’t make any sense, and must have been hugely frustrating for the denizens of table 1. Anyway, everyone was lovely and I really must log on to Facebook and thank them all for coming more coherently than I managed to in the speech I vaguely remember making. If I tell you I got everyone’s attention for the speech by clanging together my (empty) sake flask and (empty) sake cup, you’ll get the idea. A few of us topped the night off at Mozart’s for good measure. Apparently. Photos here.
Friday was, by comparison, very quiet. I tried not to make too much noise, or be anywhere too noisy, all day. I’d like to say I enjoyed two episodes of BSG with Bash on the sofa in the evening, but in truth only one could be enjoyed, the other being an insult to all intelligent beings. Tedious predictable cliched crud, alas.
Saturday was banana day. There’s a photo of me on the cover of Mondays’ Evening Post, next to the headline “WORST CHILD PORN EVER”, so that’s nice.
Saturday night was the annual SUCS beach party, and it was the biggest yet. Despite thunder and heavy showers (and even a spot of hail) earlier in the day, it was a fine fine evening, and a beautiful morning when the sun arose “sticking her rays all over the place” as Dave delightfully put it. I may possibly have had a few ales as the night progressed, it’s really impossible to say. I certainly laughed a lot.
The highlight of the night was noticing a bunch of third years playing a drinking game based on my name. Well, to be fair I think they’d adapted a “bingo” drinking game, but anyway. The object of the game was to spell the word “GIMBO” by shouting out its letters one at a time, but if two or more people shout the same letter simultaneously, they have to take a drink. I noticed them shouting “G! I! M!M! Fuck! G! I!I! Fuck! G! I! M!” at which point I jumped in (literally, splatto on the sand) and shouted “B! O!” to cheers and a rousing cry of “And Gimbo was his name-oh!”. Probably one of the happiest moments of my life.
If anyone can remind of the context which gave rise to the following 8AM tweet, I’d be grateful:
Wondering why no-one calls their firstborn “Gimbowang”. Why do you all continue to defy me?
Update: camp-fire singalong video, rofl, etc. [via welti]
The weekend was rounded off beautifully by spending Sunday with my new friend Sioned, a fellow drummer, ending with a visit to Arthur’s Stone and The Greyhound for dinner. Awesome X.
At King Arthur’s Stone, seeing for miles, hearing nothing but tweets and bleats - lush. Next stop: The Greyhound!
another tweet, 7:20pm
Big Ideas (don’t get any) — Radiohead on the old-tech; awesome and then some [brunns].
Sinclair ZX Spectrum - Guitars (rhythm & lead)
Epson LX-81 Dot Matrix Printer - Drums
HP Scanjet 3c - Bass Guitar
Hard Drive array - Act as a collection of bad speakers - Vocals & FX
On a personal note, I’d just like to say what a joy it was once again to not only hear, but also to watch, a ZX Spectrum loading some bytes attached to an 80s television. It’s been too long…
UK CCTV used to create a music video [risks].
Unable to hire a production crew for a standard 1980’s era MTV music video, they performed their music in front of 80 of the 13 million CCTV “security” cameras available in England, including one on a
bus.
Also good, from the same RISKS digest: How not to use SSL, viz SSL-encrypt the page data, but send the credit card details in cleartext in the URL — win!
There are many, many reasons why you should never ever accept a job which involves programming in C++ [via TR].
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