Surf Roots, Software Thoughts

I finally got annoyed with all the damn #files# and files~.  Emacs users will know what I’m talking about.  Follow this guide on dealing with Emacs backups and autosaves to get them all to go into one directory.  Much better.

I read (yet) another post about Twitter’s performance problems, but this one unlike others shined light onto the technical difficulties that Twitter is facing. From the post it appears as though Twitter was created too rapidly with an underemphasis on performance. It’s very easy for software developers to be so interested in cranking out features that they disregard performance altogether. I think Twitter is one of these cases. Read the post for more details, but basically they were naive when developing their application and didn’t dig deep into performance bottlenecks and limitations.

Let this be a lesson that performance must be a factor when developing an application. Consider what will happen to your code if you experience an insane amount of usage, and understand the performance bottlenecks that you’ll have. Google is a good counterexample to Twitter. Larry and Sergey knew how difficult it would be to create a fast index of the internet, so they developed tools to deal with large data. I’ll bet the developers at Twitter are running around like maniacs, profiling, testing, and screaming profanities. Had they taken performance into account earlier they could have avoided their recent downtime altogether or at least been more prepared to fix the problem when it occurred.

There’s been a bunch of buzz lately about the relationship between Microsoft and OLPC, and Fake Steve’s post about it is by far the best.  All you need to do is read the title, though the rest of the post is pretty classic as well.

While you’re at it you should grab his RSS feed.

Apparently some Nalgene bottles are toxic.  I’ve been drinking out of a number 7 bottle for nearly four years now, so I took a trip to Big5 and bought a number 2.  It’s too bad that I’ll have to recycle the number 7 after so much history — backpacking, river rafting, cycling, snowboarding, etc.

Some friends and I have teamed up to create a blog about random, strange, and quite possibly dirty questions, comments, and situations. I’ve found many of the posts to be pretty fun (some samples below), so I thought I’d share the link here - the blog is called DirtyInq (like dirty inquiries). If you think you could give a good contribution, then send an email to contact -at- dirtyinq -dot- com. Hope you enjoy!

• How would you respond if you were told, “Your blog-prowess butters my English muffin?”
• What distinguishes prostitution from pornography? Both involve individuals getting paid and getting laid.
• Would you be grossed out if you found chunks of cereal inside your shirt from earlier in the morning when you sneezed into your shirt after eating?

It appears as though Google has beaten me to the punch again.  A few months back I wanted to create a user-driven, Q&A-style search engine.  Two days after I got my idea and started coding I learned that Google had done this in Google Labs and that Mahalo was already doing this.  Dang.

Another recent idea I had was to create an index of non-profit organizations in hopes of allowing people to become more aware of the organizations that are out there.  Google just announced that as well.  I suppose it’s better Google than me - they have huge traffic and will most likely generate a lot of donations.  If my non-profit index would follow suit with all of my other websites such as Helpd, which has somewhat of a similar goal, then the non-profits would get little to no donations.  Go take a look at what Google is doing, and donate if you want.  It’ll probably help out :).  I donated to Acterra.

I just wanted to note that the dudes from AGoodReed, Andrew Hart and Barry Sevig, are always commenting on my posts, so I wanted to share some love.  Thanks for all the love, guys.

As I was reading Michael Arrington’s update post on the Yahoo-Microsoft deal, I recalled another post from Steve Jobs (the fake one).  Steve calls on Ballmer to give up on Yahoo and focus on Windows.

I’m with Steve here.  It confuses me that Microsoft is this worried to compete with Google, while they’ve just releases what’s possibly the worst operating system since Windows ME.  Linux is gaining popularity, with Ubuntu at the forefront, and Apple’s computer sales aren’t slowing down.  Shouldn’t Microsoft be worried about their largest revenue generator, the product that they’ve spent so many years developing, the product that made them the world’s largest software company?  The product I’m referring to is Windows.

Take a look at this awesome link checker called Xenu’s Link Sleuth.  I tried to research why the guy called it Xenu hoping to find some comedic Scientology reference, but it seems like he just likes the name.  Anyway, you bootstrap the link checker with a single URL, and Xenu looks at every internal and external link in that starting URL.  For each internal link, Xenu parses HTML to look for other internal links and repeats the process on those other internal links.  Pretty cool, but it’s Windows only.  Here are some screens: