LuckyDonkey

... I have no idea how to fix twitter. I know this sounds incredible but it is true, there I have said it, it's out in the open.

I use twitter every day to send out really quite boring messages. "I've had some chocolate" and "I like lossless encoding" are all stunning examples of how boring my twitters are. Sometimes they don't appear on twitter for hours... occasionally they don't appear at all.

As an engineer I think I have a fair idea of how twitter works BUT I have a code base full of my own problems. I tend to spend my time thinking about those rather then fixing twitters by proxy.

So I'm asking the internet, can you all just shut up about fixing twitter. I am sure they are aware of their deficiencies and how it would be better if they didn't do X or did do Y. Let's leave it to them to solve and if they don't I'm sure one of the genius twitter fixing bloggers can make his own distributed erlang über resilient systems that only blogger can create.

Here endeth the rant!

As a programmer and all round geek I spend a lot of my time thinking about user interfaces for normal people. This is probably the hardest aspect to programming.

Putting yourself in the place of a normal user is, basically, impossible but every programmer/ui designer attempts to do this EVERY day.

Why am I talking about this? Well my dad's hotmail account was hacked over the weekend and of course I was called to look in to it. Of course my first thought was that he had a weak password. So I ask him "How good is your password, does it contain numbers and puntuation?". He paused and said "No, it's a word, they asked for a pass WORD".

Now it's easy to think that this is my dad's fault. But when you think about it, he did exactly what was asked of him. He entered a pass WORD a single word. A word from the dictionary, that's where words come from for normal people.

No one programmer or designer has failed him. An entire industry asks to world for passwords. To the industry, this is normal. It knows what it means by password but to normal people it means a word.

With this in mind I've raised a ticket for New Metal Army to change the word password to pass phrase (after asking my dad what he thought it meant of course).

Some friends of mine have been working on a 'breakout' style game. I put breakout in quotes because it's not just a simple copy of breakout. They've added a lot of cool stuff to the game. It looks stunning and the demo I played about 5 months ago played really well. I've not played the latest version but I am sure it's only got better.

Check out the video!

You can read more here