I’m not going to talk about the way social networks (Twitter, mostly) have gradually killed blogs as personal publishing platforms. Simplicity. Flexibility. Ease of use. Limited formatting. Networking.

I’m not going to talk about the fact that it’s by now proven that social networks (Twitter, mostly) often become the first source of breaking news (lacking accuracy and reliability – but hey, we like it short and direct).

I’m also not going to talk about Twitter’s lack of scalability and stability. It’s often usual to see the smiling fail whale whenever the two facts I mentioned before combine together.

Today, Twitter was down for one hour or so.  My first thought was “what in the world is happening capable of bringing twitter down to its knees?”. But the stupid whale wouldn’t say a thing.

I’d later find out it was some “sudden failure”. But I bet it was the combination of two episodes. A new earthquake on Haiti and @billgates (what took him so long?) joining Twitter. These were the trending topics the minute Twitter came back up and they stayed like that for some time.

(edit: the first episode would lead to a quite quick humorous response by @workforfood: an appropriate blue whale of death)

So, Twitter, here’s an idea. Next time you fail whale on me and something is happening in the world, get a static page with the top trending topics so we get a general idea of what’s happening. Either it’s #billgates, #earthquake, #haiti or #obama, we’d like to know. Kthxbye.

(spotted on a HP/Compaq 440716-001 WXGA Laptop LCD Screen)

My first contact with Codebits was on its second edition, when most of the portuguese technology related folks I followed on Twitter were attending it and filling up my timeline with insights, private jokes and reports on the event. I remember watching a few interesting sessions online and missing a few I’d like to see because they were not being broadcasted live. That’s when I made the promise I would try and attend this year.

Given the hectic state of things at work lately, I made sure I had the days off when I signed in, mostly because I wanted to pay attention to things and attend as much sessions as possible. When the first session plans showed up, I already had a pretty tight schedule and almost no free slots, but I think this might have happened to too many people and these “popular” sessions would soon be moved to other stages and timeframes. Which is nice.

I came to Codebits with zero ideas about projects and the whole spirit of the thing. If last year the focus had been on RFID and location based apps, this year would surely be the social networking year, something which the Pond launch kinda confirmed (and later the project “score” would, too).

One of the things I liked most about the 2008 edition was the quiz, a series of small web based puzzles and riddles which would, properly evaluated and scored, rank a number of users giving them access to the “real” quiz show during the main event.

Coincidentally, when the first quiz came out, I was with a couple of friends on a bar musing about improbable things, drinking caipirinhas and toying around with Google Wave. In an adrenaline rush I hadn’t felt for a while, we cracked the thing in less than an hour and had quite a few laughs based on the subject. Whenever a new quiz was out, we’d join forces on Skype, Google Wave, email and IM solving the riddles.  That’s how most of us got on stage. That’s how some of these folks ended up in the same large team to develop our “project”.

Of course, when things got hardcore (javascript golf? brainfuck?), we fled. We have a life too. Some of us. Sometimes.

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YMMV

Forcing a NIC to negotiate at a certain speed/mode is simple, as long as you have the right tools at hand. After trying 4 different packages in Ubuntu with mixed results, I got a killer combo.

root@coiso:~# ethtool -v
ethtool version 6

ethtool eth0
ethtool -s eth0 speed 1000 autoneg off
ethtool -s eth0 speed 100 autoneg off
ethtool -s eth0 autoneg on