The Errant Reliability of Twitter
It can’t have escaped your notice (if you’re a Twitter’er), that the back-end of Twitter blatantly sucks. Now, I’ve heard all about them moving to a new architecture, and that’s needed, but the service being provided at the moment is incredibly shoddy.
Over the past few weeks, a large number of different things were disabled on Twitter. A week or so ago, IM updates were disabled for 3-4 days; earlier this week, Jabber updates were disabled; and today, even pagination (of your feed) is disabled… as well as IM (again). What on Earth are Twitter playing at?
Twitter Without Pagination!
I like Twitter - I’ll let that be known. I enjoy using it to keep up to date with friends, and even some aspects of news, just as much as I enjoy using it for my own status updates. There is, however, one thing I can’t stand - this lack of reliability. Surely the folks behind this ‘innovative’ service have figured out that too much load = bad? But instead of disabling things like custom backgrounds, lots of little pictures, etc. they disable key features like pagination and IM Twittering.
On top of all of this “feature X disabled” issues, the general service is appalling. Even with (seemingly) everything disabled, my connection to twitter.com frequently times out or just plain won’t load. These periods of “downtime” last for anything from 5 minutes to 2 days (and 5 days in 2007). You’d have thought they’d have solved the issues by now - especially considering they’ve been around for over a year and a half.
I’m sure everyone will tell me that the huge growth of Twitter is causing the developers problems - and I’m sure it is - but continuing to accept that huge growth, whilst not expanding your architecture enough to meet demand, is a rookie mistake.
What should Twitter do, then? Simple - disable things.
Okay, I hear you, I’m complaining about disabled features and recommending disabling features to solve the problem? That’s exactly what I’m doing - but how about disabling non-key features, like profile images, or those funky backgrounds (as I said above), and maybe even (shock-horror) new registrations? Taking away key features like pagination and IM Twittering just isn’t the way to solve your architecture problems.
At the end of the day, there’s no substitute for actually doing the job properly. Twitter needs a new architecture to cope with the growth - but until it actually makes that move, the guys over at our favourite micro-blogging site need to arrest the growth, and give their current users some level of (working) service.
TrackIR
A week or so ago, I was sent a TrackIR 4 Pro, by NaturalPoint, to review for RaceSimCentral. Over the next week or two I’m going to be ‘living with’ the device, and seeing how it affects my gaming and sim-racing pleasures - but I thought I’d give you a sneak peek into how I’ve been getting on.
My first impression was of how tiny the TrackIR device itself is - only a few centimetres wide and tall. I’m not sure why I was expecting something bigger, but I was.
After setting the TrackIR up, the installation process was largely painless (a simple case of dropping in the installation CD, running the installer and plugging in the device). The TrackIR itself comes with a reflector clip which is intended to be clipped onto your average baseball cap and worn whilst using the device - it provides the light sources for the infrared camera to detect movement. Of course, this doesn’t perform so well when direct light is visible to the camera - so that’s something to beware of.
After fiddling with the various options for the amplification of head movements, I managed to get in-game (with the ArmA: Armed Assault tactical shooter) and had my first look around… what a fantastic piece of kit. Somewhat difficult to get used to, granted, but the impact on shooters (and, also, on sim-racing… but that’s the topic for the forthcoming review) was absolutely astonishing.
The device provides the full six degrees of freedom (6DOF): Yaw, Roll, Pitch and movements along the X/Y/Z axes. You probably won’t use all 6DOF in any one game, but usually 4 or 5 come in handy at once. In ArmA, X-axis movement was bound to leaning, whilst Yaw, Roll and Pitch were bound to simple head movements.
From what I’ve had a chance to experience so far, TrackIR is an essential piece of kit for anyone who really enjoys the immersion factor in shooters, racing sims and flight sims (I’m struggling to think of many other genres that would benefit dramatically).
I’ll keep you updated, and post the full review when I’ve posted it on RSC.