I’m starting to make use of Twitter more, in the sense that I’m starting to actually follow random people and read their updates once in a while. 

My twitter stream breaks down into people I know well and would like to keep close contact with, and the general *find nice way to say twitter loud mouths here*. I’d like to see every update from the former group and I’d like to pay attention to the latter group whenever I have the time and interest.

This is pretty easy in RSS – I have different folders for my different feeds and read them as I want.

I haven’t found an effective equivalent for Twitter. Is there one? Or am I holding on to an antiquated concept?

Maybe I should whip up a quick Twitter to RSS feed converter and stay blissfully stuck in my yesteryear habits.

Btw, I’m Parand on Twitter, follow me if you want to know what the most recent flavor of cheese I’m trying is.

The topic of public transportation and the proposed high-speed train comes up often whenever Alex is around. I voted against it, but I actually would take a 3 hour train from San Diego to the Bay area that cost the same or less than the plane because practically speaking with security and such the plane ends up taking 3 hours anyway, and train time is actually productive while plane time is wasted.

What do you think? Would you realistically ever take the train, or always opt for the plane?

Some time ago trouble with the Time Warner DNS service led me to search for alternatives, which quickly led to OpenDNS. I remember setting it up and immediately noticing significantly imporved performance in everything internet – it was as if someone had magically hit a turbo button. 

Tonight RoadRunner is having more trouble so I setup OpenDNS again and I’m having the same wow reaction – everything is suddenly much faster.

OpenDNS seems to be an excellent service and if there’s a catch I haven’t found it. It’s very easy to setup, just make it your DNS provider and you’re done.

I use jQuery because it’s sickeningly efficient, beautiful, and succinct. I use YUI because it has well tested, well designed, well documented Web UI components. 

I use them both together, but I feel a horrible sense of waste as there is so much overlap.

YUI 3 provides jQuery like selection and chaining capabilities, but I’m so sold on jQuery I’ll have a hard time dumping it. 

I feel jQuery taught me intelligent javascript, and to leave it would be to stray from a growing path of knowledge.

So here’s my javascript pony wish: YUI should adopt jQuery as its core engine and write YUI 3.0 on top of it. 

Wouldn’t that be fantastic? Best of both worlds. I don’t think it’s that far from possibility actually – the YUI 3.0 base looks a lot like jQuery. 

I brought it up with the YUI folks at the Yahoo internal conference last year. They of looked at me funny, as in why would we do that?

Hmm. I’m still wishing for that pony.

I’m sitting here with Alex chatting about iPhone various and sundry. He’s got an incredible amount of insight on the ins and outs of not only writing apps, but also getting them approved and getting success in the app store.

He’s giving a talk at SDSIC on Feburary 19th. It’s sold out, but I’d still recommend you try to get in.

I was thinking about what book to read next and it occurred to me to ask you nice people. I’m in the mood for something factual but interesting – something like The Prize, if you’re familiar with that. I was intrigued by Fiasco but I haven’t looked into it.

So what do you say, what should I read next?

Due to aforementioned OS X stupidity with the Home and End keys, my new favorite Eclipse hotkey is Ctrl-Q. It takes you to the location of your last edit. So next time you hit the End key to go to the end of the line but end up at the end of the file and curse Jobs and his cult, remember to hit Ctrl-Q to go back to where you should be.

Looks like I’ve finally converted Alex to Python as well. “This is actually shorter than perl and still makes sense”. Be forewarned – if you code with me, you’ll be doing Python in no time.

Why on earth does the home key take you to the top of the file and the end key to the bottom? How often do you actually want to do that versus go to the start and end of the line? Is there a way to remap the keys to go to the start and end of the line?

Is this one of those one-button-mouse things that make no sense but apple is committed to preserving?

And MacFuse has corrupted my windows disk not once, not twice, but three times so far. 

Bah. Humbug.

The title pretty much says it; I’m planning an SJC/SF trip next week, if you want to meet or chat drop me a line – Darugar at gmail.

Nice and detailed article from Jesse Noller on concurrency, threads, the GIL, and Python. Worth a read; I learned a lot from it.

For the record I’m one of the people who doesn’t think threads are the true solution to the concurrency problem.