The Deal

From Flickr

I recently made a bold statement on twitter that may cost me my dignity in the near future. I said that if I got 500 people to retweet the following tweet I would panhandle holding this sign with all money going to GSO Urban Ministries. The 500 rt’s have to be made by midnight Sept the 19th. So if your interested copy and paste the following into twitter:

RT @davidbates: the deal: rt this and I will hold http://tinyurl.com/nv7h3u for charity donations to http://bit.ly/21Ysqj must get 500 rt’s

Below is an easy way to track the number of retweets so far. Please copy and past above text instead of using retweet buttons below. Thanks

Thank you
David Bates

First Air Application

I have been pondering about Adobe’s Air product for some time. I currently use tweetdeck which is an air application I use to handle my Facebook and twitter accounts. I really enjoy it and decided I would make my home security system an Air application. But I needed to start somewhere.

I remembered a clock tutorial from Adobe’s Devnet and decided it would be a cool place to start. So I opened the example (time2) and modified it to have a transparent background and added an event listener so you could drag the clock around the desktop… Give it a try and let me know what you think…

Download The Clock
You may need to install Air first, Do that here

Thanks for reading
David Bates

Madison has Gang Related Shooting

Today I learned of a gang related shooting in Madison from DigTriad on twitter. It happened on Fern street which is a little ways from my house thank goodness. When I told my wife about it this afternoon she informed me that she saw the filming crew at the police station (which is two doors down). I hope that the Police have captured the gang members involved and hopefully I won’t have any news like this for a long time…
It is scary though to know that such a small town has gangs in it… Hopefully they would never be stupid enough to try and bother me, smith, and wesson

Source
Thanks for reading
David Bates

Twitter not accepting Tweets anymore

Dear Twitter,

Over the past few weeks I have been unable to rely on you as a collaborative platform.
First there was the attack on August 6th that went all day. I forgave you for that as it was probably some russian 16 yr old hacker with a bot-net his daddy gave him for christmas. Then there was the blackout of all apps, exept tweetdeck thank goodness. But now you have greyed out my submit button on twitter.com and have turned my tweetdeck application into mush.

Further you have not posted why this has happened on either blog.twitter.com or status.twitter.com where you told me before to look for information. This time I believe it to be your fault as I can get to the website and browse around but cannot submit tweets.

Please know that this in now way means I am leaving Twitter. I love the service when it works. This note is a simple request to try and understand why this is happening and hopefully understand how you are going to better your service so that this does not happen again.

Now to try and figure out how we published post around before twitter… oh yeah I’ll Digg it!

Thanks
David Bates

update: at 10:30 I was able to tweet again… It looks like this storm has passed! let’s hope it doesn’t happen again.

Twitter has Denial of Service Attack

I was humming along nicely this morning, knee deep in an SQL stored procedure when Frank Sandoval IM’ed me and informed me that both Twitter and Facebook was down. I quickly took a look at both sites to confirm and sure enough he was correct. My instant reaction was that it was probably something like the Twitter Takeover that happened a few days ago on FaceBook. It turns out that the problem was much more sinister than that. Twitter reported on their blog that they where actually combating a denial of service attack. For those of you that don’t know what a denial of service attack is. It is when an attacker floods a url with so much information that the url can no longer recieve normal request.
I would say that Twitter will likeley have this resolved soon. so by the time you get to read this it will probably be safe to hit the tweet this button at the bottom of the post

Thanks for reading
David Bates

UPDATE:
Looks like twitter came online about 12:40EST but then went back down shortly thereafter. I hope they can combat the attacker.

UPDATE#2: This story made CNN! Twitter is back online but dog slow.