Ben Benner’s Blog

Every year about this time Austin is invaded by what seems like everyone. Last year I heard folks make a comments and there was even a twitter post to the effect of “The valley is empty, looks like everyone is at SXSW.”

Twitter is a buzz with all of the SXSW tweets going on out there.

Jeremy is one of the co-organizers of the AustinTweetup party tomorrow night. I will be attending, I am committing myself to the party, in that I have gone ahead and taken the following morning off. Which actually might work out as a two birds with one stone.

Len Edgerly of the Kindle Chronicles is in town for SXSW and has put the word out to all of his faithful listeners (like Gina and myself) that he would like to grab coffee while he is in town, around 10am or so. It would be really cool to meet up with Len. I think I will be able to make it to a 10am coffee, though it might be 10am BenBen time, which is more like 10:30am here in the real world.

I am surprised and yet not that surprised that Len also has a twitter account. It seems like everyone is getting into the groove of well, for lack of a better term ‘Social Media’. At a recent Tweetup, I participated in a brief discussion about whether Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook are all in the same space, the topic started with a reference to one being better than the others.

To me Twitter is not even remotely the in the same space as LinkedIn or Facebook. And I also do find it kind of funny that MySpace was completely left out of the discussion. If memory serves, everyone (and by which I mean mainstream media) was all about MySpace.

Businesses saw it as a way to advertise to the youth who had gotten hooked on it. And they began to create MySpace accounts. Then Facebook came out of being strictly just for college kids and opened up to everyone. LinkedIn had already been out by that point (I should do some fact checking, but I am fairly positive LinkedIn was already out and about before Facebook opened up to the ‘public’).

LinkedIn was basically a business networking site, oriented towards helping professionals network. While Facebook, in my opinion was originally oriented towards reuniting with old classmates (you know like say Classmates.com), except that Facebook also had that hint of ‘What are you up to now’ in it, not just a historical “I went to this school” aspect.

Maybe that “What are you up to now” was what helped them transition from a purely a college student site to a mainstream site. Their ‘platform play’ I think is what helped them attract and keep the businesses, the idea that Facebook was not just a networking site but a platform to build apps ontop of, to integrate with your business, that is a powerful concept.

Then you have Twitter, which to me is more about communication, real-time communication. While, both Facebook and LinkedIn (and MySpace, and Classmates.com or any othe social networking site) has built-in mail and even IM style clients. Twitter (to me) is about communication.

The term mico-blogging doesn’t do it justice, I think to say that it is a smaller form of another means of communication is crap (i.e. micro or small blog). Twitter is a new form of communication, much the same way that IM was different enough IRC to not be called ‘Person-Person IRC’.

Twitter has been growing in popularity for the last couple of years. The last few blog entries on Rands In Repose have been about Twitter. Talking about the finer points of how to write a tweet and whom to follow.

Anyway, I have been futzing with the Twitter API, in doing so I have been running a search on SXSW on twitter. In just a few minutes the number of NEW tweets about “SXSW” has jumped to over 700.

And with that, I close out the SXSW Madness!

Laterz

bdbenner blogs, twitter facebook, linkedin, myspace, sxsw, tweets, twitter

Twitter’s problems have even hit the world of InkTank, which is one of the web comics that I read. The artist who draws InkTank used to have a GREAT comic called Angst Technology, I learned a lot and have always wished that we had some IT ninjas (or that I was fast enough to snatch the pebble from master’s hand).

I have to say that the WordPress interface here is pretty boss, it is a bit more intuitive than the Serendipity interface (notably I am running an OLD version of Serendipity, but still I think WordPress wins).

I am likely going to have to try to roll my own header image rotater, which honestly I think will be a fun little project to work on. I tried out a couple of different ones last night, none of which gave me the effect I was looking for.

I have setup the main page of my new domain, Ben.Dominguez-Benner.com, with some temporary links to stuff. I am still not entirely sure what all I am going to post and do with this new domain, but it is going to be about me. I have found that even in the digital world I tend to keep to myself.

My blogging lately has been very sparse, I need to increase that, but I also want to share my thoughts on various topics that aren’t necessarily about what is going on in my life. Believe it or not, I can be quite opinionated, particularly about technology.

I had a great conversation the other night with a buddy of mine in Dallas, Bobby Goodwin, about the .NET and how it has some advantages over PHP.

Let it be known that I have always stated that .NET is a good structure for the Enterprise, for an environment where the users might be accepting of some downtime (do to an upgrade, or a mishap). However, from what Bobby has told me, .NET might just be ready for some real action on the Web.

Those are probably fighting words for the folks out there who the annoited accolytes of .NET. However, the one thing that I have seen time and time again with commercial and even OpenSource frameworks (or even blog packages), there is a certain crossroads when it comes to handling a web app in a multi-server environment.

And as Bobby stated that night, .NET can do all the stuff PHP can (and more apparently). My statements about .NET possibly not handling a multi-server environment (ie the same app running on multiple servers at the same time) is not about the programming language. I made the comment that night that the operating system would be a factor.

I think I have to retract that, because with some proper load balancing schemes (DNS load-balancing appliances, or a DNS service that does the load-balancing), then all the load balancing is done in an agnostic fashion to the operating system.

I think it is a bit of a culture issue, and honestly I am not sure culture is the correct word.

With enough money you can build out as redundant a system using Windows and .NET as you could using Linux and PHP. I think for me the idea of being able to buy a server, load a FREE OS, FREE Database, Free Web Server make me think about the architecture of a system (say like a big micro-blogging service that has been having problems) as merely a need to buy a few more boxes that can handle the particular part of the overall system that is innundated with requests.

In part because the cost of the hardware is very negliable these days. I mean for a small indie project $1,500 for a server is a killer (which really means they should be using $300-$500 cheapo servers vs say DELL), but to a company $1,500 for a server is ultra-cheap. But cheap is relative, back in the early days of my career the most stable UNIX like servers were RISC based, which meant IBM, SUN, and HP were your best bet.

They were also your most expensive as well, costing back in ‘98 easily $100k for something that could handle some load and in 2000 it was more along the lines of $30k-$40k. With cheaper and more powerful x86 servers out there and a stable (FREE) Linux OS you could begin to get POWERFUL servers for about $2000-$10,000 between like 2004-2007.

Today $10k will buy you a VERY POWERFUL server.

However, when you start tacking on Lincensing costs for the Operating System and a Database engine, the nature of your architecture usually changes, I belive you typically look for ways to grow your architecture vertically vs horizontally (ie buying BIGGER boxes instead of MORE boxes).

I have gotten way off topic here and should probably look to follow up this post with seperate posts on these topics.

In closing though, I find it funny that the issues that Twitter has had made it’s way in the InkTank universe, I also thought it was good timing considering that I had just made a post that made fun of the Twitter API stability issues.

Back to the grind.

Laterz

bdbenner InkTank, Technology, Uncategorized, newTechnology, webcomics .NET, AngstTechnology, architecture, comics, hardware, InkTank, PHP, programming, twitter, webcomics

FireFox is trying for a world record in regards to the number of downloads in a 24 hour period of their latest browser, FireFox 3.

I have been running their various FireFox 3 Beta version since they first released it. I had found that FireFox 2 was slow to open, and would ‘bog down’ when I had a couple of dozen tabs open. I also found that web apps that were very JavaScript intensive didn’t run quite as fast I wanted in FireFox 2.

Therefore, when the FireFox 3 Beta release was available I installed it without thinking twice on the subject.

Today at 10am Pacific they kicked-off their efforts to win the world record, or so at least I think they tried to.

Since Noon (here, 10 am Pacific) Jeremy and I have been trying to download FireFox 3. We have not had any luck. Their servers were getting just SLAMMED, presumably because everyone and their brother (and uncle, and cousin, and so on and so forth) have been trying to download the latest version.

The main FireFox.com site was not working, nor was the SpreadFireFox.com site either. However, the Mozilla Blog was still up and running. I checked there for updates, not until about 40 minutes after the noon hour did a post come through, confirming that the FireFox servers were getting slammed and they promised to get them working normally very soon.

OK, ummm… yeah.

I have been party to a few product launches in my day, so I feel safe to say “This ain’t my first rodeo.”

However, I am very surprised that the good folks over at Mozilla didn’t have their sh!t together before going for a world record. I mean spin up a few mirrors (servers) on EC2 @ Amazon or get RackSpace to help you out with a special for the 24 hour period, I mean I am sure RackSpace would have killed to be part of a Promo, something along the lines of “Our servers and network handled the load the world record setting release of FireFox 3.”

For a brief moment there both Jeremy and I were able to get to a very pretty looking screen that said it would let us download FireFox 3 via the SpreadFireFox.com site. However, when we finally downloaded from the ‘Download FireFox 3′ button, it turned out to be FireFox 2, not FireFox 3, suck!

Now when I try to go back to SpreadFireFox.com, I keep getting a screen that looks like the following…

Again don’t get me wrong, I love FireFox it is the best browser I have used in years (notably my default browser for everything I do, sometimes though I end up having to use IE)

Jeremy and I joked that maybe the FireFox guys were using the TwitterAPI and that is why they are down. (In case you didn’t know, the TwitterAPI has had problems recently — article1 – article2.)

Speaking of Twitter, Jeremy was able to find a link to download FireFox 3 that actually worked, because someone posted it on Twitter.

Back to the grind.

Laterz

bdbenner Technology, newTechnology broken, download, download FireFox, FireFox, FireFox 3, product launch, twitter, twitterAPI, world record