Tools for people to create content of any kind are widely available since a long time. Still it feels rare when there is something like this.
I found this to be interesting with a great list of sources that illustrate the history of bubbles. Bubble History by Caslon Analytics
Let’s see if people are interested in getting updates about INTERDUBS via twitter:
Having seen meme’s come and go together with their tools I am extremely neutral on any new technology that comes up. Does not stop me from seeing if it could be useful.
As usual I try and then see what happens. Easier to ‘do’ and then see instead of having endless evaluations and discussions about something.
Four days of intense work for less than a percent of improvement sounds not like a great use of my time. But I am actually very happy about the outcome: I was able to increase the success rate of clip meta data detection in INTERDUBS by 0.8%. This is great since it went up from 98.8% to 99.6%. Or looking at it from the other end: two third of all flawed detections were and will be corrected with the improved code. One of the benefits of having 100,000s of clips online is to be able run simulations and stats while improving the code. There is a wide variety in what people like to use as their encoding and file format. I’d rather do some more -invsible- work on the backend than to lecture my clients on how exactly they should encode their files. There are recommendations. Sure. But why fail if you don’t have to?
Even though this application of Grubers Broken Windows is seemingly invisible, in the end it certainly is not: A well running system just needs less support per client. Actually so far I was able to decrease the total time spent on support. Despite the fact that the client based tripled last year.
Couldn’t read the keyboard under the current lighting conditions. And manual controls for changing it did not work. Enter: Lab Tick.
45 seconds later it’s all good again. Very nice when stuff just works.
INTERDUBS supported the iPhone 40 days after it came out. Last week Wiredrive came out with their iPhone support. Graphically that looks like:
I don’t think that much can be gained by not acting quickly. At this point my clients have already solid experience with their clients in how to use the iPhone, and how not to. We could make good use of those twenty months.
In an act of ‘active procrastination’ (aka as coding things that nobody needs / wants in order to avoid real work) I wrote a view on my database that would sum up the number of INTERDUBS clients over time.
I was very suprised to find the (somewhat smoothed) result to identify so clearly both growth phases that INTERDUBS had so far. In the beginning I did have only a very very rudimentary public website and growth was only word of mouth. This was intended so that I could spend enough time on the needs of everybody that came on board.
Once what people needed was pretty well covered I made the public site a bit more meaningful and growth increased. Nicely enough support efforts have remained on a constant level: New users need a hand here or there. Often enough it is possible to avoid issues from being repeated by adjusting the code to what the users do expect.
In server admin after I had turned on the NFS service I still found a status like:
nfs service is: running
nfsd is: stopped
portmap is: stopped
rpc.lockd is: stopped
rpc.statd is: stopped
Turns out that the other daemons spring into action once you share the first Volume.
shells keep a history. The default seems to be to keep 1000 lines. I have not found a reason to make this huge. And while at it time stamp it as well:
HISTFILESIZE=2000000
HISTSIZE=100000
HISTTIMEFORMAT='%F %T '
export HISTTIMEFORMAT HISTSIZE HISTFILESIZE
in your .bashrc will keep 100,000 lines (2MB “omg” ) of history around and will also time stamp it nicely. That and the grep command make for some nice shortcuts on memory lane.