Here we are in Cincinnati on a 3-hour layover on the way to Green Bay: Vacation in Wisconsin 

Now we’re at the lakehouse, hanging out with Uncle Frank, doing some cooking, and enjoying the lovely weather.  I tried to create a video showcasing all of these things, but my internet is just too spotty!  Bummer, i really wanted to post a lot of video during the trip.  Maybe when we go into town there will be better access.

More to come…

Ride Home 1 
Ride Home 2 

UPDATE:  This set of instructions is for Version 1.0 of the plugin

In your WordPress admin panel, click “Plugins”, then click “Edit” next to the Seesmic plugin.  Now you’ll be presented with the code for the Seesmic plugin.  All you really need to do is find all instances of “clear:both;” and remove them entirely.

The problem is the way that some themes are written.  It has to do with how your sidebars are implemented, that is, if they use floats or not.  The “clear” CSS attribute causes your Seesmic videos to appear below your sidebars, which generally means it just slams a huge amount of whitespace above the first Seesmic embed on any page.

Clear out the “clear” tags, and its gone!  (make sure to clear them ALL, or some strange things will happen)

UPDATE:  This set of instructions is for Version 0.1.5 (the latest version at this date)

They’ve moved the “clear:both;” stylings into the seesmic-wp.css file in the base of your Seesmic plugin directory, and that file isn’t easily editable from within the Wordpress interface.  You still just need to find and delete them all, but the process will be dependent on how you do your FTPing and file management on your server.  Probably you’ll just want to open the file on your local machine and reupload it.

Sorry I had my facts wrong, I had no idea they had updated the plugin!

I’d still like to get some feedback from the developers, because we technically shouldn’t be going into plugin code and changing things willy-nilly like this, but this hack seems benign enough.  The official place to talk about this is the Seesmic tech support page at Get Satisfaction, and Loic himself assured me (in the comments) that they will take a look at this, so perhaps some feedback is forthcoming!

Happy video chatting, everyone!

What this means is that, above all, the point is to learn and teach, not to immediately get rich (but someday!)  So we necessarily create a lot of great artifacts, such as stock presentation videos and investment guidance commentary, so now we have a place to put them.  We even share a spreadsheet with all of our current and past holdings!  (We’ve been beating the market for more than 2 years, by the way…)

We would also like to eventually get around to opening up more information about how to start an investment club yourself, such as incorporation, choosing good members, managing the funds in various accounts, and basic stock research methodology.

I am particularly excited about the blog because it gives me a better platform for my stock videos than just leaving them on my channels at YouTube or Vimeo.  Not that there’s nothing wrong with those sites, it just makes good sense to have all of our videos about stocks in one place.

So what are you waiting for?  Go grab the RSS feed and stay ahead of the market with BenHur Investments!

I haven’t had time to cover this week’s podcast, but i wanted to post it anyway.  Marty’s coverage here.

Here’s me talking about it:East Atlanta Beer Festival 

And here’s what the action looked like last year:

Can’t wait!

A major strain on their system is power users. For example, people who are followed by tens of thousands of people, and avidly post (Robert Scoble.) The math doesn’t scale well at all, so when you overlap these “power-user” qualities, you clearly get an exponential explosion of activity. I can see how this is nasty to scale. Now imagine what’ll happen when the mainstream finally figures it out! (Hint: it’s happening. Have you seen @comcastcares?)

“Twitter could be down for months.” They’re discussing the fact that they have a plan for fixing their scaling issues, but that the plan won’t be in place tomorrow. They’re complaining that the users won’t accept “months” as an answer, but they really didn’t give any details. I’d really like to hear about their proposed architecture! Will they ::gasp:: shed Rails? Adopt the cloud?

“The ratio of downtime this week is better than last week.” Apparently Twitter has been undergoing immense growth. March was South by Southwest, which is where Twitter was born 2 years ago, meaning an enormous uptake of usage and users. In fact, according to Evan, users doubled in the March-April time frame. They made it through all of it without a crash, supposedly due to some recent optimizations. Of course, the growth has continued (i guarantee it is exponential and the rate is exponential) and further changes are required.

“‘Why don’t you drop Ruby already?’ That’s not exactly a solution…”

“We have a lot of money in the bank, money in the bank doesn’t make the servers run better.”

“We haven’t had serious talks about open-sourcing our software. We have a small group of smart people who haven’t solved this kind of problem before… We have some great advisers… Senior Engineers at Google… too many cooks in the kitchen [if we add more] at this point.”

“…we turn off the really expensive parts of the site so the site will stay up.”  Found that out the hard way recently, haven’t we?  I call them “brownouts”.

“API requests are 10 or 20 times as much traffic as web requests.”

Talking about a stream: “Lots of copies on cache, only one copy on disk.”  Sounds like a nightmare, but i’m sure he doesn’t mean “no backups” or anything so sinister.

“When we built Twitter, we didn’t know what it was.” This quote totally nails the power of Rails! I have to consider Twitter a Rails success.

Talking about what Twitter developers are capable of: “I can break this whole thing [Twitter], it’s fragile. It shouldn’t be, but it is.”  Way to be candid there, guys.

Why don’t you just stop taking new users? “That’s a possibility…”, but new users aren’t nearly as expensive as maturing users, basically, so it isn’t terribly effective.

“Twitter was a side project at Odeo.” 4 guys worked on it on the side “as a lark.” This is why they didn’t build a huge infrastructure up front. Frankly, it wouldn’t have gotten built at all if they had stopped to think about scalability.  (Rails definitely helped here.)

“Sometimes you have to build a prototype to get the point across.”  (Rails again.)

About spammers: “We look a lot at the ratios of users’ activity.” Apparently people are doing “traditional email spam” with Twitter by unfollowing and re-following to keep triggering the “You are being followed by SpammaJamma” emails, over and over again, i suppose in hopes you follow them back.

Any of my Tweetin’ audience have thoughts?

Pixel Blender is a technology Adobe rolled up for After Effects CS3, originally. It basically gives the developer a lot of easy access to image (bitmap or vector) and video manipulation functions. If you are a hardcore type and you download Flash 10 Beta, then you should check out the Pixel Blender Exchange for a lot of demos showing you what things are possible with it. Here’s a video to show some of it off, as well:

Now let’s talk about the hardware acceleration. This should be a great addition that makes everything just gorgeous, right? Actually, no. It seems that it actually doesn’t speed up your traditionally optimized Flash apps, in fact it slows them down.

Does that seem counter-intuitive? Maybe it is, but it’s no real surprise to most game developers. 3D graphics in general is hard stuff, and as a community we’ve had to invest major amounts of time and money iterating our skillsets, toolsets, platforms, and teams to get to the point where we are today. This will also be the case with Flash 10, though the timeframe will be massively compressed (think 1 year instead of 10.)

There are already some amazing 3D libraries for Flash that actually work really well for us hardcore developers. But Adobe’s press release says that those options are “reserved for expert users” and that Flash 10 will make the functionality “available to everyone”. So does that mean that these frameworks will be able to actually just bootstrap the new hardware acceleration and get better seamlessly? Or is Adobe posturing this technology to compete and cause dreaded fragmentation, here? Eventually i think the point will still be moot, though (in a year the tools will be settled, regardless.)

As the confused juggernaut of Microsoft approaches this space with its usual lumbering pace and lack of direction or solidarity with Silverlight, it looks like Adobe is taking the appropriate steps to keep their 98% slice of Flash-enabled web browsers fully geared up, and its developers fully tooled up. Expect these improvements to trickle down to Adobe AIR rather quickly, as well. And if Google’s announcement yesterday is any indicator, i’m sure they’ll be keen to get some 3D acceleration in the browser as well…

Special thanks to Nick for turning me onto this bit of news.

And that’s why I took notice today when MissingMethod announced the release (MIT License) of CommunityEngine, a social networking plugin for Ruby on Rails. But this isn’t just another Rails social framework (like LovedByLess), it’s actually less than that, in a “less is more” kind of way. You see, CommunityEngine is just a Rails plugin, so it’s (supposedly) easy to just add some social networking functionality to your already-running Rails app.