Shanti’s Dispatches

Just finished a great writeup on the Friendster flameout. There were a ton of issues that caused the great flameout.

One of the recurring themes that keeps popping up in articles about the debacle, is a feature on Friendster that allowed you to calculate degrees of networks, etc as you were browsing your friends of friends profiles.

Personally, I don’t even remember this feature. Yet I still loved Friendster and was on there quite a bit during its heyday.

Sometimes, we fall in love with certain features and make a bigger deal out of them than perhaps users of our own software / webapps.

If the Friendster engineers had made the difficult choice of “killing their darling” intensive network-calculation feature, could they have eeked out another few months and ended up #1? I don’t know. Probably not, but it could’ve helped forestall the inevitable.

I’m out in the bay area looking for a place to live for June 1st. If you know of anyone who is looking for roommates in the Bay Area, drop me a line!

Of course I’m checking the usual suspects - Craigslist, etc.

My #1 preference is somewhere up in the city, but at this point, I’m also looking at silicon valley, berkeley, etc.

I can’t remember 100% exactly how LinkedIn messaging worked before, but I do remember you could almost always reply directly to an email from LinkedIn, and it would reply back to the user sending it.

When I get invites to connect from people I don’t know, I often want to chat them up first to see if there’s any potential “synergies” between us. If so, I’m usually happy to connect.

It appears now that LinkedIn forces you login and reply using their communications system, instead of simply hitting Reply in your favorite mail app. This works similarly to how Facebook, MySpace, etc. do messaging.

Sure, it helps boost pageviews, Alexa rankings, etc. But it also drives your users crazy! (some of us)

I’d love to hear Seth Godin’s take on this. He always puts such a great perspective / spin on these types of somewhat boneheaded moves by companies, to increase profit / ROI / whatever, yet make their service less useful / enjoyable / usable.

Abygale and I got a chance in Portland to check out Ben Gibbard (front man for Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service) live at the Rosalind Theatre.

The show rocked! I’m not a big concert guy, but Ben has one of the best voices I’ve ever heard on a dude. The vibe was also incredible, even from near the back of the house up in the balcony!

You can download a whole stash of Ben Gibbard live mp3s here and find some of his live performances over at YouTube.

For downloading a whole smattering of mp3s on a web page, check out the DownThemAll plugin if you’re a Firefox user.

These guys didn’t get the memo that more lines of code does not equal more functionality / etc!

It’s the classic thing that manager’s want to optimize (”see, mr CEO, we have X developers craking out Y lines of code, oh how productive they are!”), but is probably off base most of the time.

Those of us in the trenches know that you actually want to minimize the # of lines of code, to a certain extent.

At the same time, you want to avoid trying to win some kind of obfuscation contest by putting everything in cryptic one-liners.

Re: the above link though, it’s clear that PHP is the #1 dominant web scripting language. I doubt RoR will ever eclipse PHP in terms of being a general web scripting language.

Work on my new WordPress plugin is on hold until I can figure out the SPAM problem.

I knew web contact forms (link submission forms in this case) would get spammed, but didn’t realize how much. I’ve been hit by at least 10 SPAMs in the past few days. The script already includes some rudimentary spam combating techniques, that were used in the WP Contact Form plugin.

Looks like I’ll probably have to break out the Akismet API for this.

In retrospect, I may have been a little harsh on Cox Communications. That post was fired off right after they switched my connection back on, after a 24+ hour outage.

They are just in a really unfortunate business at the moment — a commodity one.

If you still have a landline, do you ever pick up your phone and think, “Man, this dialtone sure is killer” or “I can’t believe how quickly Qwest puts through my calls, they must have some really fast operators plugging those cables into the right boxes to connect me!” or “This voicemail system sure is DA BOMB!”

No, chances are you don’t because it’s become a commodity, same as cable Internet.

You just want a big fat pipe out to the Internet that works 99.999% of the time.

You don’t care if it’s over cable wires of phone wires, fiber or power lines, so long as it Just Works and is Fast Enough (or more).

Irate Cox Communications Comment #1

Thank goodness somebody has had the same experience as me. I had internet completely out (and I pay for “premiere” 12mb/s service) for 2h one day and 1h the next day and sat through their assanine voice prompt system and I had not only known but seen and spoke to the flippin Cox people while they were out at my building and asked them what they were doing and they told me they were upgrading equipment - hence I was almost positive the issue was with the equipment they just replaced. I complained via phone and email and gave them a bill of my time, wasted trying to get them to send out a technician to check their NETWORK and not my setup, which has never failed me since I set it up 3 years ago when moving to my current location. I kept getting the same responses, “it was internet rush hour”, “you have wife at home so its slowing your network”, “you are using a splitter” (um, excuse me, but how the &**% can one get internet and tv over the single cable that Cox places into our homes without a splitter and since when does a splitter reduce a 12mb/s connection to basically zero?). After being irate, they agreed to send a technician to MY PLACE. So I had to be home during the window. I told the guy on the phone that I would be happy to have the technician come see my lovely home, but they better send them to their boxes to check their network because I was 99.999% positive the issue was on their side. The technician came and told me the problem was my flippin splitter. I told him Cox had installed it and it wasn’t the problem. Before he could bullshit anymore, he got a call on his cell phone and he hung up and told me they had located the real problem - the new equipment they had installed which served a 15 BLOCK AREA down town was missing a filter and so the signal strength was too high and was cutting out people’s modems. I got back to *&^ COX and told them they at least owed me a special thank you if not to pay me the several hours I spent with their assanine techs for resolving a network issue that was THEIRS. Well, they credited me 4 (four) flippin dollars. Thanks to my ranting and complaining and bitching, 15 city blocks had their internet restored/improved and I got $4 and not even a thank you.

What’s worse, the reason I found this blog is because I am once again pissed off that my 12mb/s connection (which usually measures up to 15mb/s) was crawling and almost dead for 1h. Internet rush hour? Screw you cox.

Irate Cox Communications Comment #2 (same guy)

Apparently he/she feels similarly, that the voice-automated Cox Communications troubleshooting “lady” is a “skanky ass whore.”

Oh and I forgot to add - screw that automated bitch. You cannot even hit 000000 to get a bloody human. For hesus’ sake, all I wanted to do was to ask a bloke if they were experiencing known network issues, but I had to sit with the bitch for like an hour doing all the unplugging and this and that before they transferred me. I kept getting “I can see your modem on the network but I didn’t get the right response from your modem, let’s try again”. Of course not bitch, the Internet is down. Duh you skanky ass whore. Sorry, sorry. Appologies.

Lol - I feel your pain, I do feel your pain.

Lourens Naudé has posted a Rails Memory Usage Case Study with some tips at the end on how to improve your Rails app’s memory consumption, etc.

One of Lourens’ conclustions:

If you spent the time developing and testing an application, why cut back on resources if a Dual Core box with 2GB RAM can be rented for $130 to $200 p/m at many respectable hosts?

Couldn’t agree more!

I’m experimenting with a new WordPress Plugin that I’ve just developed, code-named Cobra-LinkTradr.

It’s still in alpha — but it’s far enough along that I can use it for this experiment.

I know $10 isn’t earth-shattering or anything, but maybe it can buy you a domain name and your favorite charity can obtain a few small supplies out of the deal.

Contest Rules

1) One submitter will be picked randomly on Tuesday, May 22nd. They will receive $10 via PayPal, and can specify a charity of their choice to which a $10 donation will be made in their name.

2) One submission per individual, please. I don’t want to see foo.com/about/, foo.com/contact/, etc. Any multiple submissions from the same IP will be banned from the contest. I want to keep the playing field level, even for those who only have one blog or website.

3) Submit the URL below from a page on your website, where you have linked to this page and explained a little about the prize.

Preferably, add a sitewide link to “sablog.com” in your blog/website template. Then create a new post that links to this page, talking about the $10 prize and how it might help your favorite charity, or that you need $10 yourself to buy that used Bon Jovi CD that you’ve always been dreaming of - whatever.

More About the Plugin

If you’d like to beta test the WordPress plugin that’s powering this page (it does a whole lot more, too!), you can email me at:

shantibraford (at) gmail

It will be open source — there will be a 100% free Lite version, but the Pro version will cost $27 per license (domain-based), with bulk discounts available.

Good Luck on the Contest!

Special thanks to those sites listed below who are participating. Please show some clicky love and perhaps you’ll find a new favorite blogger or web resource!

Update: Contest on hold until I fix the vulnerability within the script to SPAM. Can’t do anything these days without including spam protection!

SoftwareDeveloper.com has a great roundup of RoR tutorials, links, etc:

Ruby on Rails is quickly becoming one of the most popular modern programming language framework combinations. Specifically, Ruby is a programming language that has been around for a few years and Rails is a framework for Ruby that is a bit newer and is just about the hottest thing in application and web development right now. Rails’ seamless integration into web servers and databases and its elegant framework make it the ideal candidate for every programmer wishing to develop the latest and greatest web application.

74 Quality Ruby on Rails Resources and Tutorials(hat tip: Rich McIver)