The Black Tech Report

It seems that lately I have written more stories about twitter then my normal technical subjects. As I noticed this I had to ask myself why have I been so eager to blog about twitter. Could it be the fact that it’s slow, or the fact that it’s rated the worst social site for downtime by pingdom. I think all of this came about because I really LIKE…No shall I say…LOVE twitter. We have been dating since November 2007 and it seems as of late we have a kind of love hate relationship.

Twitter has been a productivity killer since my first post, it really went down hill when I expressed my LOVE for her. There were days where all I did was twitter in to the hours of the night, knowing damn well I would miss her until the next morning. My twitter love goes deep I have caught myself waking up at 3AM just to pick up my crackberry (blackberry) and check whats going on through my installed crackberry application twitterberry. I love her never mind that I have taken away from my daily activities at times OH how I have taken away.

I even had a twitter romance dubbed twittermance, don’t worry the domain is mine and your never gonna get it. With this love hate relationship I have noticed that there have been times where I hate her or just wished her gone. Like the time I deleted my account thinking I could just put her down like a smoker quits cold turkey. That little stunt backfired and with in 24 hours I added my account back (it took longer and I had to get the twitter folk involved but after a week my account was back up Yea!)

For now I just wanted to tell Twitter that I still LOVE her and hope she is doing OK, even tho we don’t talk everyday anymore.

Stay tuned

TBTR

So you thought you got away with a nice new Mac and other stolen goods. Here is a story that speaks to the heart of the digital age. A Mac users apartment was burglarized, normally you fill out the police report information, file the insurance papers if you had insurance, wait for the premium to go up oh, and just caulk it up as a lost. But now days we have so many ways of finding our laptops with factory installed programs and with .Mac service from apple. This user was able to use back to my mac software. Which is like a screen sharing program it enabled her to use the photo booth application on her laptop to take a picture of the thieves. Then a little trip to the police station, with picture and evidence in hand an arrest was made. So the moral of the story is 1.) Hide your Mac when company comes over and 2.) Pay for the subscription to .mac service…

Read the rest of the story here

TBTR

I got wind of a story about twitter today while I was viewing some articles in my google reader (da bomb btw). The story stated that the company Pingdom.com has been monitoring the up-time of social networking sites. Well it should come to no one’s surprise that Twitter.com is the worst out of all the sites listed. The downtime is to the tune of about 37 hours so far this year. The stats have only been recorded since January 2008. As I keep saying Twitter needs to get on the ball and fix the issues at hand cause we the users are feed up at the spotty sometimes unreliable stability of the system. I mean we are already subjected to 140 characters to say what we are doing, just make sure I can post when I want to please powers that be…. Someone at Twitter has to take the position of “Yes…I give a damn” and fix the issues, and while I’m talking about that, can the people who make changes to twitter stop doing things over the weekend that affect my usability. Maybe a couple of apple engineers from the UI department can help us with a better pleasing interface that does not change on a whim. One day I know they will get it right I just hope that happens before we start jumping ship….Please for the love of (Politically correct) who ever you think is the higher power in your life, not letting the other powers that people can thank of down.

TBTR

I ran across an article on Crankygeeks.com about Ruby on Rails. Warning this post might get a bit technical and thus not really interest you, but hear me out for a moment. I heard about ruby on rails, oh 2 or so years ago. Just like some of the other programming languages it has it’s good and bad points. Some would say it takes less time to code in RoR but others would argue your sacrificing something. If you have ever run code, or created code you know the computer systems have a hand in the speed. Sometimes people create code on the slowest computers and never try to upgrade the systems for lack of money, bloated code, or lack of expertise. As many of you know that Twitter has been very slow at times and while that is a burden when your trying to follow a conversation it also gives you a hint to get back to work instead of killing your productivity.

A week or so ago I saw a post from someone saying that a key employee at twitter was fired (The Guy on the Far Left) and no longer working with them. As my understanding this guy had been brought in to help with the spotty and unreliability of twitter in the past few months. To know the guy got fired was a bit dis-hearting to say the least, I mean I didn’t know the guy but for someone who was bought in at the beginning of the year and to be fired already says a lot to me. (btw his twitter account still works)

Twitter sucks as a company has the potential to be a great company and while I don’t live in San Francisco or California for that matter. I wonder if management is jumping to conclusion already about there new hires? Its plain to see that if you hire someone in January and fire them in March or April something didn’t mesh. It could have been a culture shock for both employee and employer but what ever the case. When someone is fired fairly fast it means something just ain’t right. I hope that twitter get a hold of the reigns it seems money is starting to talk and starts to pull in the issues they have on their plate at this time. If management does not get a hold of the issue at hand when the next darling comes along we will all jump ship. Don’t doubt that people won’t jump, look at the Lifecasting relm justin.tv, ustream, and others we jumped for features and reliability this could definitely happen to twitter if the parts don’t start to assemble properly.

Conclusion Ruby on Rails is great…RoR+Twitter=jury still out…twitter management might just need an enema before they lost traction.

Just my two cents (with run on sentences, misspellings, incorrect punctuation, and procrastination laced)

TBTR

Not everyone works from home, and for that matter not everyone connects to the Internet from home. Have you ever been at a place using free WiFi or at work and tried to log on to a Instant Messenger such as Yahoo, MSN, AIM or others? If you have only to be denied access a bit of help is here. While everyone probably knows about these IM clients the world over many people don’t know about the other IM services that are just as good and even better.

If your looking for a IM client that’s great and helps you log into all the other services such as AIM, Yahoo, MSN, and others Meebo is the one for you. Their website explains it best:

Meebo lets you access your buddies on all the major networks (AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber) in a single buddylist, right from your browser.

The main reason for this post is because Meebo has something new if your red bull addicted network administrator has locked down access and you can no longer use your IM client try Meebo. You can log in to the system through your browser, no download and at most companies this works perfect. Understand that on the off chance he or she has done a one up and gone even further. Meebo has now implemented something new called the Meebo repeater they explain it best here:

Meebo Repeater is a software download for people who want to chat safely when their IM access is restricted.

Just install the repeater on a computer that can access the Web freely, and then use that computer to bounce the signal to Meebo. It’s simple and secure.

Although there are other ways that Network Administrators can lock down access to these applications like AIM, Yahoo, and MSN, Admins can implement Group Policies that restrict the use of these applications, and also deny the installation of the programs. The reason why Meebo is great in my opinion is because it works inside of the Internet browser, as I understand it all the browsers from IE, Firefox, Opera and others.

This video shows a little bit about the Meebo experience, The last part of the video is about Meebo me which is online chat but that’s for a more experienced individual if you want more about that click here Meebo me:

No longer do you need to be denied access to your friends, and or clients you now have a real solution that works great. Just for the pundits who might say there are other sites that do this I wanted to link to them here although I have not tried them they are there none the less Miranda, Adium (for Mac Users), and Pidgin (Although I’ve heard reliability problems persist maybe not anymore tho)

TBTR