Aug 2008 28 th
Tweetrush detects its first million tweets in one day
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.
Add a commentAug 2008 25 th
Tweetrush.com is live …Thank You to…
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.
1 CommentAug 2008 10 th
Interesting Graph
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!
Jul 2008 15 th
So much for a global company. How Apple & Others treat Europeans
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!!!!!!
Apr 2008 18 th
Running Confluence on port 80 or 443 using mod_proxy_ajp
Okay, I use Confluence a lot, and think despite some of its failings in the UI department (Although they are being addressed as version 2.8 shows) its a excellent Enterprise Wiki.
Now, not wanting to arse around with Tomcat all the time, I use the standalone build generally as its quite sufficient for my purposes. The problems arise when we have remote workers, whom are behind restrictive firewall policies. So that means I have to provide the service on 443. Now you could spend a bit of time configuring Tomcat to run on said port, but thats not recommended, plus you may want to use other technologies such a PHP etc. So here is a quick how to on getting confluence up and running on port 443 on Suse Enterprise Server 10 (Al tough the same applies to most Linux distros with the exception of the convoluted config Novell apply to Apache). This post presumes you already have installed Confluence standalone and its running fine.
Recent Comments