Category Archives: technology

twitter – the new chat system

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So i’ve been thinking about twitter recently and have pretty much come to the conclusion that twitter is/will be the new form of chat going forward.  In it’s current incarnation, i think mostly because of celebrities, it’s become generally a one way ‘status update’ system.  While it can still be used this way, many users are using it as way to have conversations with new people (@signsomeone), and have conversation around general topics (#hash).

If you think about it, it’s pretty much similar to the way chat used to be: IRC (internet relay chat, go look it up).  On IRC you could congregate around a specific topic (#hash) and talk to random people.  The benefit of twitter compared to IRC is that the topic chats have no formal rooms and everything is public.  Information around topics are also available to more people because of its public nature and are archived which oddly, allows for asynchronous communication, or better,  real-time (synchronous) communication.

I’ve found that the brands who use it best are the ones who use it as a form of this one-to-one real-time communication.  They are able to see what people are saying about them, since there are no “formal rooms” and are able to address them directly.  This provides a valuable source of what people are saying about them, and allows them to join in on the conversation about themselves.

Oddly, most brands however just use twitter as a form of one-way communication, broadcasting out “updates” to their ‘users’, which I believe is just a lack of understanding on their part of the medium.  Think about it this way… If I don’t care to visit your site, or follow your RSS feed, why would I care to follow your twitter feed?  It really makes no sense.

Going forward what I believe we’ll really start to see is more focus on grouping people together, which they’ve started with the #hash feature and the new lists feature.  I also believe the hashing and the lists can be a potential revenue model, similar to what youtube has done with their brand pages.    I may throw up a demo site to feature this thought in the future.  I’ve been already thinking of possible funny branding opportunities around #hash marks.

Anyway, anyone have any thoughts about this?

my love affair with rsync

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rsync –progress -r –exclude-from=./rsync_exclude.txt –delete -e ssh -p ./ user@host:path

- r= recursive

-exclude-from = exclude files txt file

–delete = deletes files that aren’t on target

-e = specify shell to use , ssh in this case

-p = preserve the permissions

a really easy way to deploy code to your web servers.  my rsync_exclude.txt usually includes my eclipse settings files and .svn

a really easy shell script would be to have this loop through your production servers to do an update.

try it out tell me what you think

apps on my mac

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I thought i’d outline the apps that I run on my mac, since im in the middle of formatting my hard drive because Adobe doesn’t run on case-sensitive drives (who knew!).  Anyway here they are in no specific  order:

- Office 2008 – for my standard editing, spreadsheets, work email (entourage)

- iLife – primarily for iphoto – i tried picasa and hated it.  i tried aperature, loved it until i found out the full cost

- Adobe CS3 – primarily for photoshop and flash

- textmate – for my quick editing of files – word is just too clunky for this

- eclipse – for my java/php/js/html/css editing

- adium – for my chatting – (gmail, yahoo, msn, aol)

- tweetdeck – for twitter + facebook (hey add 4sq!)

- omnigraffle – for my IA work that i need to do

- quickbooks – for my accounting

- quicksilver – this is probably increases my efficiency on a mac by 10%.  if you don’t use it, you should look into it.

- transmit – my ftp program

What apps do you use?  I’d like to hear!

edit : ooops forgot about couple of thinigs: Firefox (with web developer and firebug plugins) and Charles my proxy to help debug transmissions between applications

Thoughts on switching from symfony to codeigniter

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So i’ve been a long time fan of symfony, and have used it quite regularly on large projects.  It’s been pretty good and has helped me developed sites rather quickly.  However, i’ve felt that the framework has been getting too large and effecting performance, and recently they’ve also decided to switch to the Doctrine ORM, which i’ve found very unreliable for large data sets. For these reasons i’ve decided to switch to the codeigniter framework on my latest project and i’ve been quite happy with the results.

First, the code igniter framework is a lot less code than symfony (and much easier to install).   The result it seems, is a faster snappier website.  Additionally, digging through the code igniter framework to see what’s going on, is 10x easier than going through the symfony framework base code.  I know some ppl will argue that the caching on symfony should make it just as fast, but honestly, I dont see it.  I’ve tried many different caching strategies that they outline online and in the forums, but code igniter’s simple view template strategy seems much faster.

Code igniter currently doesn’t come with a default ORM.  Because of the lack of an ORM, pulling data from the database is much faster compared to Doctrine’s access.  I was running a 4million record database that linked to a 2 million record database.  Doctrine pretty much puked on this.  I haven’t seen an issue yet with this with the Code igniter database class.  I think the many abstraction layers that Doctrine has results in unnecessary classes which leads to slower results access and increases the chances of memory leaks.  Say what you may, but these are the results that i’ve found for my website.