Next Friday (17th June)will be crunch time for many Twitter users in what has been said to be the next millennium bug. Each Tweet is assigned a unique identifier which started with the first Tweet, “just setting up my twttr”, from founder Jack Dorsey kicked things off with an id of 20 (the first 19 were used for testing. Each new post since then has incremented this id by one. With a sudden explosion in the use of Twitter this number has rapidly risen to over 2 billion.
The problem is that identifiers are stored as a 32-bit integers which allows values up to 2,147,483,647. The number of Tweets is rapidly approaching this number and it is anticipated that it will be exceeded on Friday 17th June at 17:26:08.Is it a coincidence that it falls on the same day as the iPhone 3G S?@dcaunt thinks not.
So what?
Whilst Twitter have hopefully taken steps to solve this by just using 64-bit integers many third-poarty apps could have problems. These problems could be anything from Tweets being displayed in the wrong order to not being displayed at all.
With so many thrid party apps, from desktop programs liek Twhirl and TweetDeck to the many many people who use the Twitter API it is inevitable that there will be problems.
The official advice from Twitter is simple “A friendly reminder: we’re nearing the http://www.twitpocalypse.com/. Ensure you are storing status_ids as unsigned integers.”
Or will it be simply like the Millennium Bug and be a lot of hype for a minor issue?
Back in April Virgin Media wrote to me to tell me the exciting news, all their 2meg broadband customers would automatically be upgraded to 10meg. This sounded too good to be true so I read the small print and it said that the price plan would also be upgraded by £2 per month to just short of £20. It didn’t look like I had a choice and I was quite pleased at the prospect so I was quite looking forward to it.
I followed the instructions in the email and switched to online billing (as after May paper billing would incur an extra cost!). May came and went and a few speed tests later I was running shy of 2meg. Checks of my new ebilling showed that my price plan had been upgraded though and the extra £2 per month was being taken.
I have just finished on a 50 minute call to various Virgin Media staff in various countries. It didn’t start too well when I was asked by the automated system which type of music I would like to listen to whilst on hold! Of course I chose pop and sadly they only have one song ‘Love Story’ by Taylor Swift. After 8 loops this started to grate.
After finally getting to speak to a ‘human’ I was told that accounts are not automatically upgraded and you have to do it manually by visiting a web site. The reasoning was that they needed to check that my modem was capable of 10meg speeds! I followed the link and was asked to sign in with my Blueyonder email address. I have never used Blueyonder for email so couldn’t sign in. I even though I might be able to use my Virgin ebilling login but sadly not. I had to then be passed to technical support for them to reset address to allow me to login. Logging in was then simple and my relatively new Virgin modem passed the test, surprise surprise.
I finally managed to get a promise that the connection would be upgraded in the next 24 hours (better than the month I was initially told) and got a whopping £4 refund for the charges I have already paid for the 10meg service I haven’t got.
It is appalling that Virgin Media will quite happily automatically start charging for a ‘new improved’ package without actually delivering. Bring back Telewest
Hilarious rap and even better dance moves with Swine Flu Skank. Much more entertaining than the official government videos and the advice is much more memorable. Just Catch it, bin it, kill it and do the swine flu dance
With the whole world is on the brink on panic about the Swine Flue pandemic I have stumbled across a light-hearted game in which you must save the world from killer pigs.
The game was launched on 27th April 2009 when just 9 people played the game. By the 3rd May this number had soared to 3.2 million. This game is certainly proving to be a lot more virilant that swine flu itself!
I picked up a message earlier asking if I could forward someone a mobile number I had. Before I had my iPhone I have always had Nokia phones where you can simply send a contact via text as a business card. This can then be easily saved in the recipient’s phone. Sadly Apple don’t like to make things easy. The following procedure had to be taken:
Equipment: iPhone, Pen, Paper, 5 minutes
1. Go to the main iPhone screen and tap the ‘Contacts’ icon
2. Search or scroll to the contact whose number you want to send
3. Take you pen and paper and write down the number
4. Return to the menu and open the SMS application
5. Compose message
6. Search or scroll to contact you want to send number to
7. Select body and use numeric keypad to copy the number from your piece of paper
8. Tap send
Hopefully the recipient will have a phone that will let them save a number from the body of the text otherwise they will have to write down.
Saving a number someone has sent to you:
Open the text message
Tap the number in the message (which should be blue and underlined)
You will now be asked if you want to call this person. Tap ‘Call’
Quickly hang up the call as you don’t really want to talk to them
Go back to menu and go to phone app
Select ‘Recents’ and you will see the number you have just called
Click the blue arrow to the right of the number
You will now get options for that number. Tap to ‘Create new contact’
Enter contacts name and save
Answer the phone to that person asking why you have just ‘pranked’ them
Been following the Mexican Flu (or Swine Flu) pandemic with great interest from a medical point of view but also how it is being covered. Stumbled across a great Google Maps representation of all the cases so far and their outcomes. We seem to be doing ok in the UK so far but only time will tell.
As the world goes crazy for Twitter Slate V offer some light relief with their mockumentary about the new nano blogging environment, Flutter. with ‘Flaps’ limited to just 26 characters (a full alphabet set) you can really cut down the amount of time it takes to read and write ‘Flaps’. The service is likened to a hummingbird with it’s wings flapping so quickly, much faster than a regular bird tweets.
“I think a lot of people don’t have time to Twitter. It just takes too long to compose a message with 140 characters, and then you start getting bombarded by a few tweets and it’s like hundreds of characters that you have to read.” , CEO Zak Ryman.
Stumbled across a great little web app to share bits of code. Snipt is really simple to use and quickly share code with co-workers and the world. It’s geared up to being used with Twitter and produces a short url of your code.
Check out the great piece of PHP code we found in the source of a site the other day, This Array
@dcaunt @designjones I dreamt about SVN last night. I found the solution to all my problems (well some) tweeted about 2 hours ago
Safety first. New eye wear for playing table tennis in the sun. Complete with HUD to improve his game http://twitpic.com/9174m tweeted about 13 hours ago
Next Friday (17th June)will be crunch time for many Twitter users in what has been said to be the next millennium bug. Each Tweet is assigned a unique identifier which started with the first Tweet, “just setting up my twttr”, from founder Jack Dorsey kicked things off with an id of 20 (the first 19 were used for testing. Each new post since then has incremented this id by one. With a sudden explosion in the use of Twitter this number has rapidly risen to over 2 billion.
As the world goes crazy for Twitter 
Stumbled across a great little web app to share bits of code.