Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - twitter

Availability is hard it seems

2011-03-30T10:27:00+01:00

It's a mark of how reliable some websites are that the first thing you do when you can't access it you assume it's something up at your end. As it turns out the BBC has suffered a major DNS outage knocking all four of their DNS servers off the 'net. At a stroke anything with a bbc.co.uk domain name became inaccessible. It seems this was due to routes to the DNS disappearing (similar to how Egypt disconnected itself last month).

When major sites like the BBC go down it's real time services like Twitter that come to the fore. We spent a good half an hour chortling at a number of humorous tweets that exploded a minute or so after the outage. You can see the peak of activity on Google's real-time search. Of course the value of this real-time information quickly falls off as spammers and conspiracy theorists jump on the meta-tags to promote their own products and theories. This included rumours that Anonymous was responsible for bringing down the BBC.

It's a salient reminder for all the "invulnerability" of the Internet high availability is a hard problem to solve.

UPDATE: It's ironic that my post hasn't made it's way to my LiveJournal mirror yet due a separate outage that seems to have lasted most of the day.

Chromium Privacy Plugin

2011-01-10T14:50:00+00:00

Did you know every time you see a Facebook/Twitter/Social Media-de-jour button on a web-page it's reporting your visiting patterns to home base? If you thought Ad tracking was a worrying invasion of your privacy then just consider how much info Facebook has on you along with your browsing history?

While things like incognito mode have their place I'd rather reduce the amount of information sites collect on me by default. Enter the Disconnect extension for Chrome. Simple and easy to use it offers a single click button to re-enable those buttons should you want to "Like" something.

No Snow Yet

2010-01-06T10:43:00+00:00

According to the new live weather map we live in the only part of the country that has dodged the snow bullet so far. That's certainly the impression I get from seeing every ones various social media musings on the matter. No matter the platform we Brits seems to love talking about the weather.

I'm easy about it really, as I can work from home at the drop of a hat and I'm certainly not going to make my life difficult by struggling in if I don't need to. This didn't stop me from using the car to come in today though. It's comforting to be able to nip home in 10 minutes rather than face a 1 hour trudge through freezing water meadows, modulo the time it takes to defrost the car.

EDIT TO ADD: And right on cue the snow finally arrived at midday, we take things easy here on the Fens ;-)

Twitter Storms

2009-10-19T15:58:00+01:00

Last week there were two Twitter Storms that kicked off around the Trafigura toxic waste dumping and Daily Hate's predictable sewer journalism. I'm still to be convinced about the long term future of micro-blogging and prefer the more wordy proper blog as a vehicle for discussion and debate. With that in mind I can recommend reading Stephen Fry's latest blog post.

The things geeks think about....

2009-07-14T16:01:00+01:00

I've been thinking about the whole Twitter* thing recently having been trying it out for two months or so. I haven't much to add to my previous analysis other than spam will continue to be a problem in this new landscape and risks bogging it down.

From the start of the experiment I was keen to ensure I was insulated from the vagaries of corporate idea development. This is why I micro-blog on many different networks and prefer sites using open APIs that are compatible with free software. Unfortunately I walked into that trap when I renewed my subscription to last.fm earlier this year.

My current preferred music player is Banshee which had admirable support for last.fm until recently. Unfortunately without the original founders and new corporate interests it looks like it will be hard to get a license key for FLOSS software, being by it's very nature open to inspection. As soon as you need a document signing on behalf of a loose knit community things get tricky. I do have a fall back solution of running the Flash radio player in my browser but it's not the ideal solution as it puts me at the mercy of Adobe's Linux support and of course isn't open source**.

I think it is time to break out the scripts and start importing data into libre.fm just in case the rules get changed again.

* Other micro-blogging sites are available but I suspect #tweets have won the naming race.
** I know it's a shock I'm running Flash. It was all iPlayer's fault. I try gnash every now and again but I can't get even get YouTube to work though it is supposed to.

Floods of biblical proportions

2009-06-26T10:55:00+01:00

I can't tell you exactly what I was doing when I heard that retro pop sensation Michael Jackson had died however I did find out on Twitter which I'm sure will make the BBC happy. However that's all I have to say on that matter as I have been preoccupied with other things.

It was Fliss' birthday yesterday so we headed down to Le Gros Frank last night for a meal with Fliss' Mum, partner and sister. Despite a slightly shakey start from a lovely but nervous waitress (warm champagne, the horror!) the meal was lovely. We did however forgo desert and instead supped our coffees and desert wines back at the ranch.

The serving of such food was slightly hampered by the every expanding micro-fracture in the master pipework coming into the house. As a result 3 days after reporting the leak to the rental agency we currently have a rather leathal kitchen floor and ad-hoc towel based dam. In theory the plumber should be with us in the next half hour and then we can continue preparing for the BBQ on Saturday.

The forcast for the weekend is looking less than ideal but then I stopped believing the forcasts around here a long time ago. We shall have to see what happens on the day, at least it's currently drier than Glasto ;-)