As Ayaz commented, my life is turning into an episode of Seinfeld…

We spent a great day at the Monterey Aquarium. Really very nice.

On the way back it started raining pretty seriously and I realized I might not be able to make it back to the car rental place in time. We called Avis and they were clear: the car had to be back by 8:13pm or we’d pay a fairly substantial extra fee.

Getting back by 8:13 was basically impossible – we had to go to my brother in law’s house, drop everybody and everything off, fill up the tank, and drive to the airport.

We made it to the house by 7:47pm. Still impossible, but I decided to give it a shot. We rushed everybody out of the car, dropped off everything handy, and headed out. The rest was clockwork: I filled up the tank by 7:54, got on Sam Thomas, and headed down. Everything was working out – it was almost a movie. I made every light, got around every slow poke, and pulled into the rental place by 8:10pm. I was pumped.

It was raining fairly hard at this point and the car check-in guy was in no hurry to leave his shelter. Finally he lumbered over and started fumbling with the equipment. Meanwhile were were inching closer and closer to 8:13.

After much deliberation he declared that his machine was faulty and I’d have to go inside to get processed. Fine – I had made it in time and was ready for anything they could throw at me. I gathered up the 50 odd items we still had left in the car, somehow balanced it all, and headed to the Avis office.

Well, it turned out I had nothing to worry about. Their whole system was having trouble and would be down till 10pm.

Beautiful. Basically I could’ve come back anytime and I’d have been fine. 8:13pm my ash.

Anyway, I had made it and had a smile on my face. I called my brother in law to let him know where he could pick me up. As it turned out he was almost there – in fact, I could see his car driving up. I told him to go around, keep going, keep going, ok, now turn in. Right there. Turn. Turn please.

No turn. He went around and disappeared around the bend. What the?

My phone had run out of battery at exactly the crucial moment. I had heard him just before I told him to turn, and apparently that’s exactly when it ran out. Three times I thought I saw him, gathered up the 50 items in a precarious balance and walked out into the rain, only to find it wasn’t him.

Anyway, eventually it all worked out. To complete the night we got dinner from a Chinese place where they didn’t speak any English, but of course that’s another episode.

Sudanese man is caught in a compromising position with a goat. Owner of goat catches him, takes him to the council of elders. The elder’s ruling:

“They said I should not take him to the police, but rather let him pay a dowry for my goat because he used it as his wife,”

They ordered the man, Mr Tombe, to pay a dowry of 15,000 Sudanese dinars ($50) to Mr Alifi.

Beautiful. And just in case you don’t believe in happy endings:

“We have given him the goat, and as far as we know they are still together”

Via Dilbert.

Responding to this warspire post about the Twitter-Rails-Scaling broo-ha-ha here since the warspire site throws a 500 error when I try to comment there:

…

What are you trying to say here? You seem to not like statistics, ok. You mention 3 categories of perceived performance (though you list 4), ok. Then you spend some time on how performance, scaling, and load can mean any variety of things.

What is your point? In the case of twitter, they’re talking about real performance impact – as in usage of the site is increasing (load), and the user response times are getting impacted in real ways that can be measured (performance). For example, you can call one of their APIs and measure how long it takes, and see that it takes longer now than it did 2 months ago.

The caching comment is totally random. Yes, caching is good. Twitter is using caching in several places.

“only metric that matters at all: what does the person using the site think?” – how is this not measurable? If your site gets slow, people don’t like it. There are plenty of studies on this. Are you saying a slow site can’t be distinguished from a fast one? That impact of css and javascript load times can’t be measured? Since you’re a front-end developer surely you’re familiar with Firebug?

“we can’t possibly measure the single metric that matters for performance” – this just doesn’t make sense. Nobody’s talking about a single metric translating to performance. Let’s go with your definition of the single metric – perceived performance of the site. Twitter is trying to fix this very problem.

If your argument is that there are multiple definitions of performance and therefore we can’t really comment on performance, then you’re wrong – we can comment on each definition of performance and pick which definition is most important to us (to use your analogy, is it zero to 60 or top speed).

If you’re saying the true definition of performance (user perceived performance) can’t be measured, then again that’s not correct. You can get fairly decent measures of performance as perceived by users.

So help me out here: what exactly is your point?

The in-crowd’s persistent chatter about twitter didn’t convince me to try it, but my sidekick dying and leaving me without a viable mobile messaging solution did. So I tried it.

I also found out I have unlimited SMS messaging on my phone, and suddenly twitter is very interesting. I’m using it more than I’d expected. Here’s a sampling of the poetic, deep thoughts you’ll find on twitter.com/parand:

Tweet tweet 07:42 PM April 08, 2007 from txt
Feast indeed. Fat and happy now. 09:30 PM April 07, 2007 from txt
Dinner at mom's. It's gonna be a feast. Which is good cause i'm starving. 07:42 PM April 07, 2007 from txt
Traffic! This sucks. 05:59 PM April 05, 2007 from txt

Nabokov, eat your heat out.

Here’s the thing: there’s no cost for me to post a message, and I don’t care who (if anyone) reads it. It’s a small chunk of thought (140 characters max). If I’m sitting in traffic with nothing to do, I might as well post something. There’s no mental effort either – a blog post takes a little bit of thought, while a twitter post takes almost none.

It potentially could be useful, for example for getting a lunch group together. If more of my friends used it I could post “I’m going to XXX for lunch at noon”, my friends would be notified, and I’d have a gathering with no effort.

But they don’t. Nobody seems very interested in it.

…

Getting back to the original topic: twitter has very nice, very simple APIs that allow you to do almost anything with it. This is very useful – a scalable, free, fairly reliable SMS gateway that can be accessed programatically via the Web. I’m already using this for various and sundry, but could see expanding it to do all kinds of other neat things.

To sum up: go sign up for twitter and play around with it. SMS gives you access to a bajillion handsets out there, and programmatic access makes it a fun area to play with. Also, we could have lunch.

I’d like to a do couple of desktop apps with reasonable UIs. I’d prefer to do them in Python. I’ve tried PIL, SDL, and PyGame. They’re ok, but I keep thinking, why not flash? It looks better, is available on every platform of interest, and runs in browser or out.

I could pick up ActionScript and the various Flash authoring environments, but I don’t really want to. I want to write the thing in Python.

So how about it – how about Flash as the UI for Python, Ruby, or whatever? Is it possible to dissect Flash such that it can be connected up with various dynamic languages?

Note – I’m not talking about the ability to generate a canned flash via Python. I’m talking about an interactive app where Python is integrated into the Flash execution loop.

Wife calls the gardener to come tomorrow morning to plant flowers. Gardner speaks very little English. Lack of communication ensues – the gardener has no idea what my wife is saying.

Wife calls sister-in-law to call gardener to speak with him in Spanish. She speaks to the gardener. He’s still very confused.

Wife calls back the gardener. The gardener doesn’t know where we live. Huh? He comes here once a week…

Wife gives him our address about 15 times. Still complete confusion on his part. He gives the phone to his daughter who speaks better English, but is probably 7 years old. Wife gives me the phone. I speak to the daughter, give her our address.

I speak with the gardener. He has our address, still has no idea where we live. This is ridiculous. I describe our area. Give him the name of our neighbors, whose yard he also attends to.

Nothing. He’s still clueless.

I’m getting as frustrated as my wife – this guy is just unreasonable. I describe where we live several times. What the heck is wrong with this guy? I just saw him 2 weeks ago and we chatted in the front yard.

I give the phone back to my wife. She wants confirmation that he’s coming tomorrow. He says yes, he’ll come. Confirms the address once again (what the heck?), and promises to be there bright and early.

Half an hour later my wife uses her cell again to call someone else. She’s going thru the numbers, and …

Wait, isn’t our gardener’s name Domingo? I wonder why I have two entries for him in my address book. Why would I have “Gardener” and “Domingo” separately?

Yup.

Gardener is some other guy. Not our gardener. Domingo is our gardener.

We hassled some poor guy for 20 minutes, acting like total idiots, asking him to come plant flowers at our house. He had no idea who we were – he’s not our gardener! I can’t believe how nice he was, given how clueless and impatient we were.

The most embarrassing part was calling “gardener” back and apologizing for being idiots.

Post-script: Turned out “gardener” was in fact the very same person as “Domingo”. We had two different numbers for him. I have no explanation for why he was so clueless about who we were and where we live, nor on why he managed to confuse everyone so much. Interesting guy. He showed up at 1pm (had promised 8am), but did plant the flowers.

Bill de hOra comments on WSFED and WS-*:

I found myself strangely unmoved, unsurprised, unshocked, unconcerned [by the criticism]. I saw that a firestorm has not been lit across weblogs, as would have been the case not even a year ago. It seems that no-one cares anymore, and WSFED will be consigned to irrelevance and along with it, much of the promotion around WS-*. WS-* as a process, as a technical means designing systems , as a way to generate ‘future business value’ now lacks credibility.

I largely agree – people don’t care anymore. At least I don’t. It’s sad in a way – I had such high hopes for Web services back when it started.

It is important to note, however, that real people are quietly doing real work with SOAP and a few of the related technologies. It’s not going away – in fact, I’d say there is more adoption now than at the height of the hype. At this point the distinction seems to be between those who prefer a tool to generate their RPC wrapper (SOAP+WSDL) and those who are willing to roll their own (REST, JSON, etc). Perhaps WADL will even out the score there. SOAP also has a more “enterprisy” feel to it while REST is more “mashupy”. I think the distinction is more psychological than technological, but it’s there.