Superman don't need no seat belt. [Comment to flight attendant, who replied, 'Superman don't need no airplane, either.']

- Muhammad Ali

I’m not sure exactly how long I’ve been on Twitter, but it is a decent bit. I know I am the 7943052 member to join, because that is my user id, and Twitter uses a simple auto-incrementing integer to assign member ids. You can find your user id, by checking the RSS link at the bottom of your Twitter home page. Here’s mine:

http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/7943052.rss

Feel free to follow me on Twitter if you like:

http://twitter.com/CJCraft

 

Not too long after joining, I decided I wanted to use a client application to access Twitter instead of the Web page. I decided to use Twhirl.

It’s a great little app, and it really does a great job of solving the “Accessing Twitter on the Desktop” problem. The only problem I have with it is for some reason after a certain amount of time passes the application disappears, and its tray icon disappears as well.

This has been really bothering me for a couple months now, and I haven’t been able to find a great solution for it. Up until now my solution has been to open the Windows Task Manager, and kill the process and restart it manually myself. This always works but is a bit of a pain, and means I could miss messages since client Twitter applications can only pull messages so far back.

I decided it was finally time to do something about this problem, or either find a new Twitter client.

After a little research, here is what I learned:

I learned on GetSatisfaction.com that this was a fairly common problem, and there wasn’t a great known solution for how to fix it, except on a Mac.

Apparently this an issue with Adobe Air and not Twhirl directly.

It amused me the solution was to right click the tray icon and select “Reset Windows”. Too bad I can’t see the tray icon on my system, lucky Mac users with your visible invisible icons.

People must REALLY like Twhirl because one user rebooted their computer 20 times, and then reformatted their disk to get Twhirl again, and they were upset with Adobe for this.

Here’s how to fix it

I decided to try Process Explorer. I had a feeling it would have an option to help me make the invisible visible again.

Process Explorer Official Overview

“Ever wondered which program has a particular file or directory open? Now you can find out. Process Explorer shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded.

The unique capabilities of Process Explorer make it useful for tracking down DLL-version problems or handle leaks, and provide insight into the way Windows and applications work.”

Process Explorer is to Windows Task Manager what Superman is to Clark Kent. In other words, it's the bomb. It’s actually useful.

All I had to do once I had Process Explorer installed and running was find and right click twhirl.exe, then click Window, and Bring to Front.

If you click on the Process Explorer image it will open a larger full sized version.

 

 

 

 

 

I hope this helps others in their fight to be able to use Twhirl once again. I only wished I had picked up my boxing gloves sooner. Hope to see you on Twitter soon!

 

He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.

- Muhammad Ali

I noticed today that Twitter has been very stable lately. Actually, I really hadn’t noticed any downtime in almost a week. I decided to check http://status.twitter.com/ and find out if this is true. From what I saw, there has only been 104 minutes of unscheduled down time in the first 11 days of July. That’s less than 10 minutes of downtime a day. Good job, guys!

Twitter really has a lot of potential to bring people together by making us more transparent to each other. For example, if you only know me from my blog, then there is a lot about me that you don’t know. Friend and family know me in some ways, and coworkers know me in some ways. Depending on what I decided to share on Twitter, my friends and family can learn a lot more about what I am working on at work, and my coworkers can learn a lot more about what is going on at home. All of this in easy to digest 140 maximum character messages.

My Twitter URL: @CJCraft

As much as I like what Twitter can do, it wasn’t long ago that I was become very irritated with the frequent “Twitter Blackouts” that were occurring on an almost daily basis. A lot of people were considering leaving Twitter, and the thought crossed my mind a couple times. I was really started to get frustrated with Twitter, and I wasn’t the only one:

Without Twitter many people had to resort to drastic measures to fill the void. One poor soul even had to the leave the side of his computer, and actually build a real life version of the Twitter Fail Whale.

Others made online portals dedicated to the phenomena: http://failwhale.com/

And to top it off, you can even follow the Fail Whale on Twitter: @FailWhale 

 

Yeah, I “failed” for it too. I couldn’t resist, so I made a Twitter photo mosaic that is composed from all the friends pictures of the top 100 most popular Twitter users. 

 

 

 

Resources I used in creating: Too Many Tweets: A Twitter Photo Mosaic.

• Ranks the most popular Twitter users.
  • http://www.twitterholic.com/ 
• Get File Name from URL (C#/.NET)
  • http://www.thejackol.com/2007/04/10/get-file-name-from-url-cnet/
• Where is my Twitter ID number?
  • http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/topics/where_is_my_twitter_id_number
• Scott Hanselman: The Weekly Source Code 22
  • http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheWeeklySourceCode22CAndVBNETLibrariesToDiggFlickrFacebookYouTubeTwitterLiveServicesGoogleAndOtherWeb20APIs.aspx
• Change File Extension
  • http://bytes.com/forum/thread486309.html
• How to make your own photo mosaics
  • http://www.engadget.com/2004/10/19/how-to-make-your-own-photo-mosaics/
• Twitter is over capacity
  • http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3045/2567701776_89cd1ca33e_o.jpg
• Twitter fail whale
  • http://www.coolest-gadgets.com/20080630/twitter-fail-whale-kinetic-sculpture/

Let’s have some fun today. And do an application that is just for kicks. I had a really hard time coming up with a Friday the 13th themed mobile application. I finally thought of one: The Pocket Death Calculator. Yeah, it’s a bit crazy, but it’s good not to take yourself too seriously. There are lots of these Death Clocks on the Internet, here’s a famous one: The Death Clock.

 

Pocket Death Clock

This application is about how many lines of code you can write. It shows how a simple idea in a good looking package can really charm a lot of people. Most people enjoy a surprise, or something unexpected, something to break the day from being ordinary and routine. Sure you can write the next great mobile financial planner package, or you could write a quick “fun” app to put a smile on someone you know’s face.

The UI is really simple just a background image file, but it is a good looking background image file. And that is pretty much what is pulling off the application. I thought about putting glowing red eyes on a timer and having their visibility randomly change, but decided to leave it as an exercise for my readers. Try it you’ll be surprised how much it really sets off the application. And makes it stand out.

The death calculation engine is straight forward: we take the user’s age and gender and modify the average human life span appropriately. Then we subtract the users present age from their expected life span. Next we calculate the number of seconds in a year. We use our cryptographically strong random function to pick a random second in that year for the user to “die” on. Now we have our death date. It’s a simple matter to calculate the number of seconds the user has left. We put everything on the screen and update on a timer.

There you have it.

Possibilties:

Simple applications always have the best possibilities. We talked about adding glowing eyes. But you could also add random death quotes. You could also ask the user more questions and better guesstimate their death date. You could also “guesstimate” where and how they would die using data easily found on the Internet.

Always good to know you have less than a million seconds before you are going to die from a shark attack in Quebec. Plenty of time to pick up some shark repellent.

 

 

 

 

Download executable: pocketDeathClock.cab

Download Source Code: pocketDeathClock.zip

Feedback:

I think this is our first humorous application, not counting Mobile FX, what did you think of it? Would you like to see more of these types of applications, that are creative idea based, or more of the technically focused applications? I like to keep a good bit of variety to show all the possibilities, so I hope that is working for everyone.

If not, share your idea for tomorrows application.

I got to check out the city some today. I heard that it was supposed to be a nice warm sunny day, but I guess the sky had other plans for today, like rain, rain, and rain. :D

Pretty cool hotel, I at the Renaissance, right down the street from the convention center. One weird thing is there is a light switch that controls the power to my desk lamp, AND the router for my Internet. There another "light" switch by that one, but I haven't figured out what it is for yet.

I've been hoping for some big things to happen in Mobility and this year seems like a good year for some of them to take place. Hopefully, there will be some non-NDA announcements that I'll be able to share with everyone. If not, then there's always the weather ;)

Well, how cool is this, the Lower Alabama .NET User Group, or as I'd like to call them, the Mobile .NET User Group which of course is located in Mobile, Alabama.

And I thought we were cool with the Pee Dee Area .NET User Group, or as I like to call us, the PDA .NET User Group.

 

People like to ask, "What is a Pee Dee"? So, in case you been wondering, here's everything you ever wanted to know and more about what the Pee Dee is: Pee Dee - Wikipedia. Since we meet in Florence, SC a lot of people ask us what is Florence famous for? Without further delay: Florence, SC - Wikipedia.

One thing Florence County has is "one of the few instances of a dropping of a nuclear device on a civilian community in the United States and the only site where a civilian structure was destroyed." [see Mars Bluff - Wikipedia]

Growing up I always loved Mad Magazine, and one of my favorite parts were all the Mad Fold-Ins, in the back of the magazine, that Al Jaffee created.

The New York Times has a special online article that has many interactive Mad Magazine Fold-Ins on topics ranging from Presidents, War and the Military, Pop Culture,  to Sports.

Fold-Ins, Past and Present - The New York Times