Twitter crapped out. Nice to see how many Ruby libraries they depend on. Maybe its time for… PHP or Python?

I realized over the last few days that Twitter is reaching an apex of sorts and will start devolving from this utopian paradise of geekdom into a normal online community. This means that the Twitterverse will start having TwitterSpam (happening already), Twitter Trolls (happening now, just witnessed one today), TwitterFits (saw one this weekend) and TwitterFlames (likewise, see TwitterTrolls).

I wonder how this community will self-correct, considering the focal point of the community is on individuals rather than common topic. This makes it a much more scale-free and complex network than say a message board about a band or a community around one topic, but I do wonder if the edges of the graph will start segmenting themselves into logical clusters.

When I did graph analysis of discussion boards, we found that “me too” posts would orphan themselves if you kept the edge weight inline with attention (ie, edges were tighter if people traversed them more). Without attention they died. Will it be the same with Twitter?

My Mac, which there is a picture of below, does a lot of work. It has two video cards in it, which are each double-height ATI’s. Its pumping out some BTU’s basically.

I have found that the Mac’s temperature sensors adjust the fan speeds OK most of the time, except when the ambient temperature of the office gets higher (ie, when my door is closed, on weekends, etc).

Enter smcFanControl . I made a profile in this to keep the PCIe and HDD fan at 2000 RPM consistently, and the CPU fan at 1000RPM. System seems to be more stable now.

I got a vintage 1974 Knoll Florence oval table for my new desk. Here’s how it came out:

This is not good timing:

Joyent Delivers Scale

Did you know the largest application running on Joyent’s infrastructure is aFacebook application that serves up over 700m pages a month and was built using Ruby on Rails? That’s right folks - Ruby on Rails DOES scale.

Friendship is a bizarre thing to me. Not insomuch that I don’t have any friends, but just that its weird when one actually thinks to sit down and define what the concept means. I say this because Sunday I reconnected with someone who I was friends with a while ago, and drifted apart from after we both left the company where we met. It was great to reconnect, but got me thinking about the hows and why’s of friendship. How it ends, fades, renews, starts, etc.

See, I never really had a huge amount of friends (fancy that!), but the ones I did have I’m still friends with. People I knew in elementary school or Jr. High, or in this case, from when I was 16. I think friendship though is so rooted in the situations where they begin that sometimes maintaining them are infinitely harder as situations change. The “falling out” period usually is predicated by circumstances outside of normal friendship, dependent thus on the outside influencers.

The Internet though has done something magical in that it roots the referent of discourse down to some form of commonality. Social networks, friend finders and the like have removed some of the “personal” from reconnecting, but rooted the act of reconnecting into something that is at once detached but cautiously optimistic. I went 8 years without talking to one friend, and longer with another, but when the mode of discourse and conversation is e-mail, its easier to put the “why” and “how” for the disconnect behind.

As I near 30 (2 years away really), high school and college are more distant, the person I was then is more distant. Its interesting then that the temporal distance abuts constantly with the removal of temporality brought by something as simple as a Facebook poke.