Twitter On Life Support; Gets Ready for Apple WWDC
Well Twitter has gotten itself on a life support machine as it gets ready for the inevitable traffic surge during the most anticipated Apple Worldwide Developer’s Conference which kicks off tomorrow. Twitter, which is widely known for its downtime issues than what is is actually good for, says it has done some tweaking, fixed and implemented some changes to the architecture to handle the traffic surge.
We’ve moved much of the load off our database by utilizing more memcache, employing more read-slave servers, and by fixing some bugs for improved efficiency. This work is in intended to help handle the load and keep Twitter up and running while Steve Jobs talks about all the new products and services Apple has planned. Of course these improvements will continue to serve Twitter beyond the WWDC as well.
Even though Twitter say that these changes will carry it beyond tomorrow, it still shows the changes are just a work-around of the problems they have had rather than a ground up re-architecture of the infrastructure.
if the In the event that our estimates and preparations fail, we have designed a way to keep Twitter updates moving quickly through the system to their respective recipients…Should it become necessary to shed incoming load quickly, we can turn off features such as stats, pagination, and several others to preserve the reliability and timeliness of your Twitter timeline.
If the problems have been solved then there will be no need to turn off features if traffic spikes. Well it looks like just papering the cracks; hence being on life support.
BE AFRAID COMCAST: The Dawn of Free Internet Access?
It’s the sort of news that ought to scare the pants off Comcast executives. FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has proposed the commission auction off a portion of the 25 megahertz spectrum with a free provision — meaning that whoever licenses the spectrum must provide internet access to people for free.
read more | digg story
YouTube Add Video Annotation Feature
YouTube have just made videos on the site more interactive by introducing a new feature that add annotations to videos. Called Video Annotations, will enable video producers to add interactive commentary to videos such as some background information, a small narration or add links to other YouTube videos, channel, or search results page from any point of the video time line.
Video owners do have control over their annotations and how many they want to add to the video and also the good thing is that if viewers find your annotations annoying they can turn them off from the player.
Metal Gear Solid Now On N-Gage
Great news to all gamers who love Metal Gear Solid on their consoles, now you can play Solid Snake while on the move on your mobile phone. Thanks to Konami who have agreed with Nokia to start publishing mobile games and also bringing existing Konami titles to the N-Gage platform and the popular game Metal Gear Solid for mobile will come out first. It is not just a dumbed down version of the original but maintains the same 3D artwork and in game camouflage system too.
Image: N-Gauge.com
Robert Scoble: Most Overlooked Power Player of the Web?
Robert Scoble. Is he the most unsung heroes of the web? Most overlooked power players the web has ever seen? Most of you guys, especially those of you who follow tech, you must have crossed paths with him before and you might not have known it. Robert Scoble is everywhere in the social web. Like his takes on web tech and social media even though sometimes with an odd post in there. Here is one blog’s take on Scoble and his influence on what is called The Scoble Effect.
Picture: Wikipedia.org
Ballmer (almost) Gets Egg On His Face
I have just stumbled upon this funny video on Silicon Alley Insider that shows a protester in Budapest trying to throw some eggs at Steve Ballmer and doing some yelling at a conference. Boy it seems people just LOVE to HATE Microsoft or just HATE to LOVE Microsoft. My is guess some of them don’t even know anymore why they HATE the BIg M… Here is the clip.
Firefox 3 Release Candidate (1) Available for Download
Well the wait is almost over, Mozilla have have announced that Firefox 3 Release Candidate is now available for download. As usual with release candidates, it is not recommended for normal everyday usage as it STILL has unknown and just fixed BUGS and thus intended only for developers to test it and get community feedback.
Firefox 3 Release Candidate has some major improvements in memory usage, performance and speed, includes new features added (listed below). The goal being testing the core functionality brought on by new features and changes.
New features and changes;
- Improvements to the user interface based on user feedback, including changes to the look and feel on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux.
- Changes and fixes for new features such as the location bar autocomplete, bookmark backup and restore, full page zoom, and others, based on feedback from our community.
- Fixes and improvements to platform features to improve security, web compatibility and stability.
- Continued performance improvements: changes to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimization continues to improve performance over previous releases as measured by the popular SunSpider test from Apple, and in the speed of web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office.
So far I have been giving a test drive on my Windows XP x64 (which has all major browsers installed on it) and have yet to encounter any problems. But I wont be doing any money transactions on it.
If you want to give it a go, download it from here but keep in mind it is NOT the stable version yet and might cause some fatal errors.
