In a few minutes I’m off to the airport. I’ll be in the San Francisco bay area (my original home) for five days, spending time with friends and family. But I’m also going to be meeting up with a lot of people and companies, trying to figure out what the best place for me to go next is.
If you’re around and want to meet up, drop me an email!
Bam! Third Wheel!
For anyone that ever reads (or read) Maddox (aka: thebestpageintheuniverse.net), you might appreciate what I found yesterday while in Seattle:
Yup, apparently someone actually took Maddox’s idea for rendering the Segway Human Transport obsolete seriously and sold it to the Seattle police department.
We’re hearing this from multiple sources: After nearly two years of high profile scaling problems, Twitter is planning to abandon Ruby on Rails as their web framework and start from scratch with PHP or Java (another solution is to stick with the Ruby language and move away from the Rails framework).
Former Chief Architect Blaine Cook famously said scaling Rails was “easy” in April 2007 (see image to right), but problems persisted after Cook claimed to have conquered the problem. The service most recently had a three day outage affecting their largest users.
Other massive Rails sites include Scribd , Hulu , and the popular Facebook app Friends for Sale . CrunchBase , our tech company database, is also built on Rails.
Switching off Rails may not solve all of Twitter’s problems. They have nearly two years of infrastructure built up and would face many more growing pains if they switched frameworks or rolled their own. As Twitter considers moving away from Rails, some companies are doing the opposite: last year, Yellowpages.com scrapped Java for Rails, and is now second on the unofficial Rails 100 wiki .
Rails has always bred controversy. Developers have argued that it is fundamentally flawed and unscalable; others have argued back saying the opposite (see here , here , and here ). Earlier this year, one of the core community members and creator of the popular Rails web server Mongrel abandoned rails and trashed the community .
CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBaseCrunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
The Apple duo is the worst, since you have to buy the movies, but that is likely going to change in a week or two.
The Unbox stuff is pretty crappy quality, but oh so convenient. A few weeks ago I rented a movie while at a basketball game on my iPhone via amazon.com and had the movie waiting for me on my Tivo when I got home. The experience was great, but the quality sucked.
The Xbox system is actually getting better. The quality is by far the best, but downloads can take a while. It has improved since my first try, however, which took 5 days to download!
The biggest problem, however, is selection. Unless there is a huge library of new releases, it won’t be useful to me.So I downloaded the evaluation version of VMware Workstation so I could create my own Linux VMs. I chose to use Fedore Core 4 as my Linux OS, so I downloaded the 2.6GB DVD ISO provided by RedHat. Much to my surprise, I didn’t even need to burn the image to a real DVD. VMware has a feature where you can bind a virtual optical drive to any of your physical drives… or to an .iso file on your desktop. Installing Linux has never been easier!