Twitter downtimes… meh June 15, 2008

Some categories: ranting & raving. Some tags: , , . And exactly 3 rambling responses.

There have been a lot of complaints recently about downtimes over at Twitter, which I think is a little unfair. There have been accusations that the underlying system and script behind Twitter does not scale, some attacks towards them because they apparently only run three database servers and even the creation of a new web service to use when Twitter is down. Are we really this addicted? Is Twitter really this essential? Is Twitter a component of life as we know it?

Downtimes are bad, and everyone gets them, even the mighty Gooder. Of course, Twitter does seem to be especially skilled at lots of downtime, but their still up 90%+ of the time. Apparently that’s not good enough, because people complain about it. In my eyes, they are doing a great job, I can’t see how they make money out of Twitter (no ads, no premium, no nothing), but even if it doesn’t make money, they do a great job with it. Downtimes are to be expected, because they’re not like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft; they can’t afford a bazillion datacenters with trillions of servers across the world, yet they still run a good, reasonably fast service.

All in all I think the team at Twitter deserve a bit of respect from the public, rather than complaint after complaint. Well done Twitter, I love the service with the (very small) downtimes!

I give up on gmail April 23, 2008

Some categories: ranting & raving. Some tags: , , , . And exactly no rambling responses.

I’ve had enough of gmail. Sure, the interface is nice, and sure, it’s (almost) guaranteed to be online for my email. Although, since I route a lot of mail through the server, that doesn’t really have an effect (although I use pointlessrambler@gmail.com for emergancies). Anyway, why give up gmail!? Well, I’ll explain:

  1. Slow, gmail got really slow recently; and, although the speed has picked up a bit, it’s still pretty slow at times
  2. SPAM, the filter used to be my blessing, it always used to catch everything, thousands of messages a day. And it’s still doing it, but not enough. For some reason, google have failed to block out the clever backscatter method of spam. So now, I’m getting about a hundred (give or take) spam emails a day, how annoying
  3. Reliable (but then again, so is our server)

OK, so what do I plan to move to and how would I go about doing it? Well, hopefully within the next week (probably this weekend), I’m going to set gmail to forward all mail to nick at kerplunc dot com, but also keep its own copy (security & such), then, instead of having the server route mail to my gmail account (in which case it would just sit being emailed all around the accounts), I will store mail on our server. Take control of my own mail and it’s storage. All I need to do is install the wonderful RoundCube on cPanel so it’s our default webmail client. Lastly I will need to go through the latest gmail and finish tasks etc… Advantages?

  1. Mail is stored in two places, google and this server. What happens if our hard drive fails? Google has millions of drives, what would happen if one of those failed, and it happened to be our emails? But with the mail in two places, it makes a crash so very unlikely
  2. I take control, the main email control is within our server, I choose everything
  3. It’s a whole load faster than gmail :)

So there we have it, why I’ve given up on good ol’ gmail.

Why del.icio.us sucks April 16, 2008

Some categories: ranting & raving. Some tags: , , . And exactly no rambling responses.

Yup, time for a nice little rant on something thats been annoying me a whole lot for a long time. So, del.icio.us, that wonderful service where we can all dump our links in a huge list for us to share and access anywhere on the web. Hold on, did I say access? I think I may have got my words mixed up there. What I really mean is we can look at our links, in a totally non-accessable way.

A huge list of links in no apparent order is not useful or productive. Neither are tags. When I save a link, I want to stick it in a lovely folder or category, only one. Then I want to look at a page where links are separated by category, not in a great big splurge. The option of the splurge would be nice when I’m feeling like just going through random links, but normally I don’t have time for that. I want to look at a list of folders/categories, pick the target one and find my link, simple and effective.

Not only is the organization a mess, the whole social thing too, whats up with that? Stumbleupon and Digg are for that. Linkrolls too. Now, this is where del.icio.us is useful. It’s not so much a bookmarking tool as it is a linkroll tool.

Perhaps I am the problem, and I’m using del.icio.us for the wrong thing? I want a service to store my bookmarks everywhere, and if it lists everything in one long line as an option, thats very nice, but less important. I actually did a quick mockup of a design which might suit the category/folder layout, view it here. Ignore the top bar about a ‘Kerplunc’ service, because it’s not… yet. It’s really a personal project, but I’m going to tie it in with Kerplunc’s new application framework, just in case anyone else wants something similar. If you really like it or want to make a suggestion, go ahead and comment :)