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Building a Simple PHP Twitter Client Without Twitter October 18th, 2008
Part One – Getting to Grips with GNIP
Okay so now I suppose I better start doing some geek stuff as its been far too long. What I’m going to try and accomplish is to build a simple Twitter client using PHP and GNIP and as little help from the Twitter API. Sure this may fail badly but we’ll learn something along the way. Why Twitter? Well I do lots of stuff with Twitter data, so why not. But I also want to demonstrate the power of GNIP to you as well as showing that there are ways to be friendly to Twitter & other providers without having to hammer their API’s.
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The Utility Web September 11th, 2008
I’m watching the TechCrunch 50 and its great. Ustream.tv are doing a great job streaming and its a very impressive demonstration of their abilities.
I can’t remember who said it, but someone critiqued a company for not being the next FaceBook. This got me thinking about a David Heinemeier Hansson video from StartUp School 08.
I constantly keep hearing about someone planning to be the next Face Book or YouTube, all it seems to be about now is this beast that is the Social Web. While this is great I keep thinking the same thing.
WHAT ABOUT ALL THE OTHER COOL STUFF?
In particular, what about the Utility Web?
What is the Utility Web I hear you say? Well its a mixture of all those cool web applications that sit quietly in the background actually doing something useful while you are buying someone a Han Solo on Face Book.
To be specific, they are apps such as Freshbooks, an online accounting package for freelancers and small business, our own Rush Hour and Oggim DNS service, Amazon AWS, data exchangers like Gnip or as in the Tech Crunch 50 case, Ustream.tv. This list is endless.
The thing about a utility web company, is that they are generally quite focused on solving a problem that exists and focus on one or two areas. They are not wanting to be the next Face Book, they don’t even want to be a Face Book for their given domain, but just good at what they do and profitable.
To use Hannson’s example, 2000 people paying you €50 a month equals €1.2 million in trade. Getting 2000 people to use your utility is the hardest part after you’ve built the killer app.
So don’t get hung up on trying to be the next Face Book, the real money is in being a utility provider to all those web 2.0 social startups.
No more 5K phone bills. September 8th, 2008
Ask anyone who knows me and they will tell you I like to talk. I hate typing, I hate having to individually write each word. it interupts my stream of thought. This fondness for talking however has its drawbacks. Mostly is people switching off or me talking too quickly for them to understand what I am saying. Thats fine, I can live with that. But there is one thing I can’t live with;
€5123.00 MOBILE BILLS
I am lucky with my job, I get to travel from time to time. Mostly to the US and France, where we host various bits of infrastructure. But this willingness to talk costs when you are abroad. Our mobile provider, like so many others, knows that when I am away on buiness I am gonna be pressed for time to get the job done. They know I am gonna have my phone, be in a secnario where I need to use the 3G connection to collect my mail or check something out quickly. Heaven forbid you use a mobile mail server like Intelisync or Exchange for Mobile….
Its because the MSP’s know that I am at their mercy, they can get away with charging crazy prices for roaming data and calls. It really sucks when you come back from doing a job well only to have it highlighted that your expenses are crazy because you used you phone too much. But this is what we’ve trained staff to do. If there is a problem tell someone, don’t run and hide it, shout it out, get in touch with the person to have it fixed, not ignore the issue and don’t call them because it’ll cost a bloddy fortune!
However, all this now appears at an end. Recently we discovered something called MAXRoam, from another Cork based company. Why we’d never picked up on this before I will never know. We have 70 consultants who all do their fair share of globe trotting. Can you imagine what our monthly mobile bills are like?
This is where MAXRoam fits nicely. First things first its great to support another Irish company, second, its every better when they have a product that saves your company a lot of money. Their idea is simple. You get a SIM card, you divert your calls and map all the numbers you can be contacted on to it, jump on a plane, land in destination and wait for someone to call. When that ringer goes off, pick up the phone and talk away for as long as you want knowing that you are paying a very fair and reasonable price for your call while aborad. I mean its so much cheaper that using your own service provider whomever they be. Lets put it into cold hard numbers. If I go to the states with my Vodafone sim, its gonna cost me €1.09 according to the text I just sent Vodafone (Text 50221 ROAM USA to check for yourself, its free). So a five min call is €5.45. Using my MAXRoam sim, its gonna cost me €1.90 for the same five min call. Thats only 0.38 per min. WOW! DOn’t tell me this does not make financial sense. If your a startup and you want to save thats a lot of cash.
Now for the big news, Pat Phelan has just announed MAXRoam V2, that now as well as passing great savings on voice calls, saves you on your data charges too. More twittering, more email more surfing all for less. WOW!
I’m glad to say we’ll be siging the entire company up shortly, its quick, painless and saves you a tonne of cash, and in these times every bit helps.
Tweetrush detects its first million tweets in one day August 28th, 2008
Its been a busy day for both Twitter & Rush Hour powered Tweetrush. Thats right, the first million barrier has been busted. Check out the Tweetrush stats for 27th August 2008.
While congrats go to Twitter for coping with the extra traffic while the DNC was on, congrats also go to Gnip, our feed provider and the Rush Hour team for desiging such a stable system considering the traffic and data we get and analyse. Its no mean thing to do, and I see the DB’s that are involved so its certainly a lot of fun.
I’m off line for a few days while I attend a family event, however I promise to respond to all RH mails when I come back. In the meantime here is a another great article on a use for Tweetrush.
Tweetrush.com is live …Thank You to… August 25th, 2008
Well, what an exciting few days it has been here. TweetRush.com, the first Rush Hour proof of concept site is up and running along and so far seems to be holding fast. I’m taking a break tonight and actually sleeping for a change but rest assured all mails and tweets will be answered.
What is TweetRush about? Well its a demo of a new product we’re building that aims to take the pain out of stats for web app builders and is based on actions and events. But more on that will be released as we get closer to things getting out the door.
We put TweetRush up to get an idea of how well the engine would perform against a high volume site. Sure there are few issues mostly around the fact that we don’t get a direct Twitter feed, but over all its not bad. We hope once all is calm, to establish a good contact with Twitter and maybe a XMPP feed and see what we can both come up with. Do remember, this is still a work in progress 
Now Rush Hour and the Tweet Rush spin off are not just my babies, but also James, Walter, Grzegorz and Slawomir babies too. We have all equally put a massive effort in to get this far. Its been great to be part of a very talented team. There is also Adam, but he was busy doing marriage or something crazy so we excused him for a while, no escaping us now Adam now that you know we mean business Without all of these great people involved we would never have gotten this far at all.
I am also delighted to say we featured on TechCrunch, thank you for the exposure Michael Arrington! Thats another first I think for all of us on the team. Well since then, we’ve been inundated with greetings and well wishes as well as many questions too. Site accesses have gone through the roof (and a big thank you Donncha for the advice on what to expect DB wise). All feedback has been great to get, allowing us to enjoy the moment, but also to look deeper into our application and the Tweet Rush implementation to see what else we can do to improve its accuracy as well as seeing what peoples expectations are.
Finally there are four other people I must say thank you to as without them, nothing would have happened either. Patrick Buttimer of Eirteic Consulting for being just absolutley great. Justyna for being there and not walking out after I deserted her for weeks to work on systems and code. She’s a babe that rocks! Damien, of Mulley Communications, the PR was excellent, and support through the highs and lows, nerves and all has been second to none. Finally the growing legend that Pat Phelan of Twitterfone/Max Roam/ … (endless list of great businesses) is. His advice via tweet tennis (Is that a new term Damien?) and help in reaching people has been great. A real genuine gentleman.
Okay so sleep beckons now, I’m really hoping nobody diggs us now, being TC’d is enough for the one day More to come on Rush Hour later after I sleep.
P.S. For the PHP peeps, of course Tweetrush was written in PHP using the Zend Framework Seriously it rocks.
Interesting Graph August 10th, 2008
Stats from Rush Hour
These stats were captured via the impending Rush Hour engine that myself and a few others have been developing. More info on where they come from later in the week, or eary next week. For the moment, lets just say big DB’s rock, even bigger machines rock harder and see if we can guess where they come from.
For every action there can be an equall reaction!
Impresive MySQL stats August 3rd, 2008
So I’m doing something that relies on MySQL a lot. Last night I had to test a rebuild process that we would use if there was a failure in our systems. Worst case secnairo would be we would have lost about a weeks data and need to reinsert the whole lot.
So I wrote a quick and nasty PHP script with multiple nested foreach() loops, yeah I know what your thinking, but as I said, it was a quick and nasty script. Basically all this script done was parse a directory full off XML files and based upon the content, perform multiple SELECT, INSERT or UPDATE based on the data per element in the given XML file.
So, on my little iMac (24″, 4GB RAM, 1TB Drive) the following are the stats from the completition of the script.
Total Processing Time: 4975.59566307 seconds.
Total DB Inserts: 1,961,000
Total Selects: 12,035,743
Total Updates: 10,465,071
This all translates to;
Inserts Per Second: 394.12
Selects Per Second: 2,418.95
Updates Per Second: 2,103.28
Keep in mind, I was watching a movie at the same time and that there has been no optimisation carried out on the server at all (Although the DB is fairly well normalised). Table format was MyISAM.
Now imagine what MySQL could do on an optimised Linux server with custom optimisations to make it faster. I am quite impresed given the workstation I was working on and the complexity of the queries we are doing. Pat on head for MySQL. Well done.
So much for a global company. How Apple & Others treat Europeans July 15th, 2008
Reading Pat Phelan’s blog yesterday about Apple and how it restricts the rest of the world as to what it can purchase through iTunes got me thinking. I’ve long known that Apple deploy such practices as do many other organizations. I don’t think its right at all, yet have thought I would have been a crackpot for thinking same. If I buy an iPhone to have access to all the applications and Games, that means I want access to ALL the games and applications and not a limited subset. Alas they (Apple) cannot be fooled by the use of a mere proxy server, you need to supply a US address too, thus making it impossible for us Europeans to but such games as “Insert desired super cool game not currently available in Europe”.
Another thing Apple engage in which I am also not a fan of, is over charging or taxing their European customers. For example, I recently bought an iMAC 24″ With the 3.06 Proc. Its US cost is $2,199.00, yet its Euro Price is €1,919.00. If the exchange rate were taken into consideration it would be €1,377.43 Euro (15th July 08 – 08:00). This sort of thing is not confined just to Apple, recently I’ve experienced the same sort of practices with Adobe, so I am guessing there are others too.
You could argue that its not possible to keep track of exchange rates. I say balderdash. I know many smaller companies that deploy either daily adjustments or realtime adjustments in order to be as competitive as possible. Yes, Apple don’t need to be competitive to an extent, however they do need to start looking after their customers in Europe and not discriminate against them based simply on where you are coming from. Currently a European customer in not as equal as a US customer to Apple it would appear, from my recent use of iTunes anyhow.
I don’t subscribe to the content licence argument either. If it could be arranged with the music companies it can be arranged with the TV,Film and Software houses. Then Apple may be really disruptive, changing EU broadcasting too.
Calling for a boycott of such products from their vendors is at best a pipe dream. Yes I know they are discriminating against me, but I still want to use their products, or indeed in some circumstances I may need to use them. So how do we register our complaints, how are we heard? Is blogging about it going to be enough? I don’t know, is my answer, but hell I’ll give it a try and add to the growing choir.
So back to the thinking, here is one for someone with a bit of time on their hands. Setup up a buinssess selling proxy serivces Not only web based proxy services, but also real world proxy services, where people order stuff they can’t get in their location so the end up purchasing through you. Yes it would be a pain, to do, but then again I don’t care, I just want my cool iPhone game…. NOW!!!!!!
Network Manager & Open VPN Servers On Port 443 Fix May 16th, 2008
Now, after yesterdays post, I decided to play a bit more and set up an Open VPN connection to a remote site. Luckily the site was running the excellent IPCOP with an Open VPN service, however it was configured to run on port 443.
Searching high and low in the Network Manager applet on Ubuntu Heron, I could not find an option to connect on a specific port number. Bruised, I dumped my Open VPN config into /etc/openvpn and brought up the link manually.
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Installing the Groupwise Client on Ubuntu Hardy Heron May 15th, 2008
So we use GroupWise obviously. However for the most part, I spend my time on Ubuntu these days as I like XFCE4 and Ubuntu as a whole. This is not to say I don’t use my Novell Suse Enterprise Desktop, I do, quite a lot, but its also nice to have a bit of a play with other distros from time to time.
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