Disturbing….
I do recall that MS DOS 5 was a big deal… there were some features I was definitely excited about. But, this video would have been incredibly embarrassing to watch even at the time, I’m sure. What were they thinking?!?
Sep
6
Another fine google tech talk, this time on Quicksilver (the mac utility):
Quicksilver’s one of those apps I’ve heard about a lot, and have been meaning to try out forever. Just haven’t gotten around to it yet.
Jun
25
Apparently, so many that even Microsoft can’t tell the difference between linux and windows 
If this video can be believed, this person used linux + wine to fool Microsoft’s validator into thinking a genuine copy of windows was running. Funny…
Apr
18
Problem
Some feeds are updated rarely. For these, however often jaiku wants to poll them is just fine. Other feeds, though, like last.fm feeds, can be updated very often. Jaiku seems to poll my last.fm feed every 10 to 12 hours (or maybe it just feels like that long, but it’s often several hours), which means lots of songs never get sent posted to my presence stream. Some twitter-users are very prolific, as well, which means that when you see their updates it’s always bunched together in “and 19 more” form.
Solution?
It seems to me that you could set up an adaptive structure like this:
- Define some range of poll rates (say, minimum once per day and maximum once per hour, or something)
- When you poll a feed, note whether there was anything new to post
- if there was something new 3 of the last 5 times, then move to the next higher poll rate
- if not, then move to the next lower poll rate
- repeat, adjusting the poll rate to track the update rate of the feeds
So feeds that change a lot will get polled more often, while feeds that do not change will get polled less often. And, most importantly, jaiku would adapt to feeds that are updated in spurts. So, for instance, twitter and last.fm feeds will naturally update a lot more often when people are awake, and then go dormant when people are asleep.
Maybe a different algorithm would be better to capture the irregularity of the update rate:
- When a feed has updates in it, bump this feed up to the highest poll rate
- When a feed has no updates twice in a row, move to the next lower poll rate
So, in this scenario, say a last.fm feed has no updates all night. So, over the course of the night, jaiku polls their feed less and less often. When the user wakes up and starts listening to music, their feed will have updates again. The first time jaiku pulls the feed, it sees the changes and bumps the feed up to the “once per hour” poll rate. Each hour, there continue to be updates, since the user is awake. Once the user stops listening, jaiku will poll the following two hours, and not see updates. Then it will start polling every 2 hours, then every 3 hours, until an update is spotted again, and the cycle starts over.
For feeds (like most people’s netflix queues, for instance) which are usually updated once a day at most, the algorithms would usually not poll the feed very often. It only really affects the feeds that do get constant updates.
I haven’t done any research or modelling… probably there are some adaptive algorithms out there that would work better than these two ideas. But, it seems like it would improve the user experience…
Update: further ideas
Perhaps in addition to the above: when a person makes a jaiku post for the first time after a long break, schedule a person’s feeds for a couple test polls starting 30 minutes after that. The idea is, “this person maybe just woke up, or came back from some offline break, and is now active again.” This would help catch the start of an active period for their feeds quickly, since the poll rate might have gone down quite a bit during the downtime (which would mean a lag of up to 3 or 4 hours before jaiku would notice their feeds are active again).
Apr
14
It’s all coming together… I’ve seen that jaiku has IM support on the way in the unspecified future. I’m assuming jabber at least, but am hoping for AIM support as well.
Until then, because I want to be able to use jaiku on the go, I was gathering info on how to create a Blackberry app (have never done it, but is based on J2ME so shouldn’t be too terribly hard). I would have cobbled together just enough to make presence updates over JSON and view my overview RSS feed. But, as I was looking, I came across this project aiming to make a jaiku mobile app in 24hrs! So, I guess I can wait a few hours and see if this app will take care of my needs! The screenshots look cool. It’s neat that it’s being developed jaiku-style… with constant jaiku posts on the progress here.
This will be the final nail in twitter’s coffin, for my use. I had been continuing to use twitter over IM when I was out and about with my blackberry. With mobile access to jaiku, I don’t see any reason for me to use twitter anymore.
As I mentioned recently, though, twitter is servicing (or at least attempting to) many more requests per second than jaiku is… so maybe as jaiku grows the stability I’ve been enjoying will start to falter. The main reason I looked for a twitter alternative was all the outages and slowness. The reason I’ll stay with jaiku, even if it suffers under load, is commenting. Commenting rules.
Seriously, now that I am used to the enhanced jaiku features, twitter is starting to look a bit lame. They have a much larger user base, but if they don’t fix their stability issues it will start bleeding away. Web2.0 users are fickle…
Mar
21