Blue Screen of Duds

About a year ago, I had moved to a Macbook Pro and had to set up my development environment on it. It was far from straight forward and involved a bit of work.

A year on from that time, I have moved laptops again and this time I have a Macbook and OS X Leopard Version 10.5.5 and there is a world of a difference out there.

I am not sure whether it was something that I was previously doing wrong or if the packages are now being better maintained towards OS X, but compilation and installation has been a breeze this time.

The only thing that I had installed before I got started was Xcode from the install DVD.

If your Xcode package is not the latest and greatest, do get to the Apple Developer Connection and grab it.

The list of software we will finally end up is something like this:

• Apache (2.2.10)
• mod_python (3.3.1)
• MySQL (5.5.1.29-rc)
• PostgreSQL (8.3.5)
• Memcached (1.2.6)
• PHP (5.2.6)
• CouchDB

All the packages are installed in such a manner that they are installed into /usr/local/{software-name}-{version}, from which it is symlinked to /usr/local/{software-name}.

This will enable us to keep track of all the package versions and also switch between the versions in case of any trouble.

Time to start the process:

The all-time favourite topic of "where will Twitter make any money from?" is back on the table now with the recession (officially approved, that too!) and Ev commenting that their target to make money off the service has now been pre-poned to 2009, than 2010. My own previous thoughts on the matter are here, so this is the updated version:

1) Text Messages: This is the most obvious option, but it is the least mentioned too. And I would really be surprised if Twitter is not making some money off this already. They do have dedicated short codes working in various geographies and in a lot of them even incoming messages are billed to the customer.

At least as early as April this year, Twitter was reportedly doing over 3 million messages a day. I am assuming that this number is again the total number of messages created than total number of messages sent across the system, which will a considerably higher number. A percentage (possibly, small) of this number is represented by users on SMS and each one of those messages represent a possible revenue opportunity.

My gut feeling is that Twitter already has enough volume of updates flowing in via 'txt' that is enough for them to swing minimum-guarantee deals with the service providers.

Once upon a time, I used to work in a company called Times Internet Limited. For the uninitiated, TIL runs the content part of the business for Bennett Coleman & Co Limited, which runs websites like Indiatimes, Timesofindia.com, economictimes.com and so on.

During my time there I had started a couple of things like the blogging service o3, RSS feeds and run some other nicknacks. The reason for this post? Well, I happened to stumble on one of the pages I used to maintain there -- on RSS services available on the website, which is hosted here: http://info.indiatimes.com/rss/ .

The page has largely remained the same, including design and content since 2005, when it was launched, until sometime this year (post February 2008) when the considerably expanded Terms of Use and other legalese were added to it. This may have something to do with the incident, where TIL wound up blocking all crawlers and it is likely that they wanted to add the clauses to cite violations. I have to clarify, though, that there is no foolproof way to determine the dates involved in the changes.

But, this post is really not about practices in the internet industry in India, I have ranted enough and more about in previous posts. This is more about some of your more, let us say, 'interesting' parts of online history staying there forever.

And if you though that page was bad, you should check this out: http://careers.indiatimes.com/ . I really do have a bit of trouble explaining the copy on those pages. There are things you do and then there things you do!

The pie is half its size, get over it: Yes, every possible metric will report in considerably worse or at least lower than any comparable previous reporting segment. The global economy has been wiped out of a huge chunk of its size and value. If you think that won't show up somewhere, keep drinking the funny stuff. Else, get over it and find what life lies beyond it.

Another certainty is that It will continue to be that size for a while to come. In light of that stunning revelation, rethink your business, rethink your personal expenses, rethink your life. Rework every possible number you can get your hands on and get your team/organization to see it and get on board with it.

Ceiling meets shit, but there is more to come: Even though the financial sector has already been mauled very badly, there is no certainty that we have seen the actual extent of the damage yet from other segments. There is apparently an equally bad disaster-in-waiting in the credit card segment and closer to home the real estate sector is primed for a massive collapse any time soon, which will be borne by the banks because of the loans that were bankrolling the real estate firms and their outlandish plans.

For me, the browser is the primary productivity suite. I use it for everything from email to keeping documents, workflows and many other things. Even to the extent that my browser instances can run for close to a week without being restarted, that is when they don't wind up being sluggish like a drunk mule, which happens way too often for my liking.

I started with Firefox when it was called Phoenix and did not have an installer. I have tried all sorts of browsers, K-Melon, Opera, every version of Internet Explorer till version 7 and many more that did not last for more than a couple of days at the best on my computers. But if there is anything that has been constant with all of them, it is that they have grown progressively worse with every release in terms of resource utilization.

Now, that was not so much of an issue when I moved to a Mac about a year ago. It was a Macbook Pro that sported 2 GB of RAM, which leads you to kind of be pretty okay with the RAM-tastic excesses the browsers tend to indulge in. My development environment, including Apache and the various databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL and CouchDB) and other nicknacks had about a GB to play with, while the browser itself could use 500 MB of RAM and I could not give a damn.

It is a different story altogether that even with 500 GB of RAM, the venerable Firefox would slow down with usage, and even in the stock-install extension-free mode, it would still consume memory much worse than a lifetime AA member knocking back glass after glass at an open bar. I loved my extensions, but seriously, this was getting to be way too much, with or without them. I had to find a new browser and the move to a Macbook with just one GB of RAM made it even more urgent.