Brian Daniel Eisenberg

Ahhhh! Now that answers a question I've had for quite some time. Nice catch! - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

Thanks Brian. Yeah, this was really bugging me. - Hutch Carpenter

So what determines when a service such as Twitter stores the actual character, and when it stores an alternative such as ampersand-g-t instead? Or should I just assume that only numeric digits and English-language letters are stored as single characters? - Ontario Emperor

Ooooh...good question. Any HTML/ASCII/database experts in the house? - Hutch Carpenter

Ontario: it shouldn't be this complicated, but a good reference is: http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/co... I'd put money on quotation marks, ampersands, and greater than/less than signs counting, and I'd hedge on the other special characters listed on this page. - Mark Trapp

Ontario - saw the sallyfield URL as a traffic referral to the blog. Love your List. - Hutch Carpenter

This bug is bad. The HTML encoding shouldn't count against the user's 140 characters. Thanks for the heads up. - Alan Le

Mark's right. Any characters that are reserved chars in HTML or scripting languages are likely escaped. - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

Honestly, and this is the backseat programmer in me, the fact that it counts towards your total is pretty amazing. Most developers take any input and only escape during output, not the other way around, precisely because of situations like this; their database should accept UTF-8. I wonder why they thought this way was better. - Mark Trapp

All the kids are doing it these days: http://github.com/bgolub/blog/... - Benjamin Golub

No Tom, there is width and height, and you can add media:group to display many thumbnails at once - directeur

@Benjamin: Nice! You know, one of these days I should just convert over to using your code ... it's clearly better than mine and would save me a lot of time in the long run. But part of me likes researching this stuff and figuring it out. - Tom Stocky

Definitely keep your own! 90% of the fun I get out of my blog has nothing to do with actually blogging. I just like building it. - Benjamin Golub

@directeur: Is that the what most Media RSS consumers do? They look for multiple <media-thumbnail> entities within a <media:group> and choose the one of the size they prefer? - Tom Stocky

Tom, actually the "normal" behavior would be to choose only one thumbnail per content. To have many thumbnails per post. You should wrap your thumbnails in groups and specify a width and height for each thumbnail. Like I'm doing here for eg. http://friendfeed.com/e/3f58b6... - directeur

Really? So you need a <media:group> wrapper even when there's only one <media:thumbnail> element? - Tom Stocky

Yes, it allows to gather many "versions" of the *same* content. in other words, groups are not intended to gather different contents. More info here: http://search.yahoo.com/mrss :) - directeur

Hm, according to http://search.yahoo.com/mrss <media:thumbnail> is listed under optional elements, which it says "may appear as sub-elements of <channel>, <item>, <media:content> and/or <media:group>." I think you only need <media:group> when you're dealing with multiple thumbnails. - Tom Stocky

Tom: I agree, if you only have 1 thumbnail there is no benefit to using a group. I'm keeping things simple for now. - Benjamin Golub

Love this quote by Ev "We will make money, and I can't say exactly how because...we can't predict how the businesses we're in will work." WOW - Susan Beebe (Santa Claus)

I would like to know why people care so much about where Twitter's revenue is going to come from. I don't particularly care how any site makes its money if I'm not a shareholder. - Erica Baker

Erica, my guess is people want to rely on the service but not pay for it, so they fear it may go away. (Or that the revenue approach may be overly intrusive as to make the service unusable.) - Louis Gray

I care because I want them to remain a viable product; furthermore, we can learn from smart innovators and shape our products to best fit what their building. They've got tools and I want to leverage them. I also care on a personal level. I love twitter! :D - Susan Beebe (Santa Claus)

Maybe it's the MBA mentality...everything has to be "monetized" or else it's worthless. There's also still, even among some Twitter users, that spending time tweeting is a waste of it. I don't agree with any of this, mind you! - Ben Turner

The original Google datacenter in '99 :) - Paul Buchheit

One of the consequences of factoring in component failure in your every move: you can save the cases, stuff's going to break anyway ;) - Mustafa K. Isik

This design turned out to be somewhat nightmarish. It was eventually cleaned up (we had a "cabling fest") and by now the designs are quite slick, though still very unconventional. I wish Google would publish more about their hardware, because it's very interesting. - Paul Buchheit

i have! it was even color coded, cables of different colors - Joelle Nebbe

WHEN CABLES GO BAD! I used to have a similar problem and the only way to trace cables was to put a small binder clip over the wire and push it along. - Stephen Pierzchala

Cables Gone Wild! woo hoo! gees that is bad. Paul YES I too wish Google published their IT Infrastructure / hardware info - Susan Beebe (Santa Claus)

pretty sure their current IT infrastructure involves genetically-modified human brains soaking in some kind of nutrient bath. - Karim

Personally seen much much worse. - Chris W

yap i seen so much worser than this pic .... :D - zos

BTW, I believe this is the same generation of hardware found in the Computer History Museum (they have the jj rack, as I recall). - Paul Buchheit

Paul: I've been inside a Google datacenter. They are a thing of beauty now. I've always wanted to interview the team that is responsible for doing those and get some video. - Robert Scoble

That's how it would look if it was set up at my house. - Gabe

I worked in a server room that look like that too - all those spagetti cabling craziness. - imabonehead

Robert - YES do video interview with Google DC Infrastructure brains! :) - Susan Beebe (Santa Claus)

How long would it take to fix if you pulled out just one cable?Or plugged it into the wrong socket? - Alistair

Neatly labeled I see ;) - Cam MacRae

I've seen worse, much owrse - Amit Morson

Spaghetti anyone? - Håkan Dahlström

Here are some pics of a datacenter I put together for a client back in 2003 with some pretty insane cabling. With this much cabling, it was too hard to manage without automation. So I built some tools that allowed me to plan for rapid growth (i.e 20 server SAN jumped to 120+ while we were building out) http://bit.ly/9Q7O - Jauder Ho

Grunt: OK boss, I've got a new cable crimped. Where do you want it? Boss: Server 99,9999 port 1. See it? I'll see you in a week. Grunt: &^* - Shane

"Employees dismantling sections of Google's original data center discovered the decaying corpse of an engineer tangled in a web of network patch cables, police reported today. The mostly-skeletal remains have not been conclusively identified, though the victim appeared to have been wearing a 'Banyan Vines' t-shirt. While forensic tests have yet to be completed, the County Medical Examiner has estimated the date of death to be 'sometime around the 1999, 2000 timeframe.'" - Karim

"A police spokeperson said foul play was not suspected, adding, 'Unfortunately, this is not the first time we've seen this. The Internet was growing so rapidly back then, these things just happened. Someone goes in to work on a patch panel, and they get tangled up. It's sad. And I don't blame Google for not noticing -- their headcount was growing rapidly too. One or two engineers go missing, nobody notices. I bet the poor bastard is still getting direct deposit on his paychecks.'" - Karim

A spokesperson for Google referred to the grisly discovery as "a regrettable loss, but not a single point of failure," and added that engineers are currently required to use "the buddy system" to work in pairs when cabling servers. - Karim

Karim, you owe me a keyboard sir! - Stupid Ninja (aka Tina)

Looks like spaghetti. - Rochelle

I've seen worse. Karim, that was funny! :D - AJ Batac (ninJA)

We'd like to see FriendFeed's datacenter pics! - AJ Batac (ninJA)

Datacenter is the new black - Burak Arikan

why not? :) - Zee.

let it be known that i was the inquisitr's first friendfeed connect member...what do i get? :) - Zee.

what happens next btw? - Zee.

Done! - Mel.Buckpitt

Cool! I'm in! OK, now what happens? - Hutch Carpenter

Thanks. Gives me a chance to learn a little about Google Friend Connect. - Rolf Schewe

Thx Mel,Zee and Hutch. Zee, Hutch: I don't know what happens next, that's the part I'm trying to work out :-) - Duncan Riley

ok, one thing I've noticed: you can click on each avatar/ image and it takes you to a list of page/ links for each person. No idea if they share Google juice or not, but its another way of sharing links with people, so I'm cool with that immediately. - Duncan Riley

Done - Mo Kargas

Note on the links: you need to set up your Google profile with your pages for the links to show. Zee, you've got none showing. - Duncan Riley

thx Mo - Duncan Riley

** Goes to check his avatar-less Google profile ** - Hutch Carpenter

Another site running Google Friend Connect is Orl Yakuel's http://blog.go2web20.net/ - Atul Arora

Atul, Orli was site number 1, the very first site to get it when it launched last year, and I've met her a couple of times as well, I can't speak highly enough of her. - Duncan Riley

works well dunc - AJ Batac (ninJA)

GFC is pretty darn quick for me. Profile updates are immediate. - Mo Kargas

I'm here. - Kate Foy

Nice. Now what? :-) - Alan Edgett

I think I want this on my site....but I'm not sure what the point would be...LOL - ♫ Rahsheen ™ ★

thx AJ, Kate and Alan. Alan + Rasheen, that next part I'm not so sure :-) It shares links as long as you've got them in your Google profile, and the cool part is its all inline. Beyond that, time will tell..... - Duncan Riley

Duncan, thank you :-) and congrats! This gadget improved a lot since last year and Google's FC team is doing a wonderful job listening to feedback. It will get even better in the future. . - Orli Yakuel

Orli, no probs at all, and I hope one day to visit you in Israel and check out the local tech scene - Duncan Riley

You should! I've added lots of new Israeli-based companies to Go2 (http://www.go2web20.net - "Israel" tag) lately. It's amazing how the tech industry is growing here (still). - Orli Yakuel

Like the implementation. Looks good Duncan - Charlie Anzman

Love it Duncan! Just joined your site. - Larry Kless

interesting. the widget is not rendering for me on my old funky browser here at home (firefox 2). Will try to remember to give it a go tomorrow at work. - Laura Norvig

last! - Will DeLuca

dunn done ;) - mike "glemak" dunn

Joined - Alan Le

Donald Rumsfield? - Mohomed=genieyclo

What? - tehKenny

@Brian guess i was right...funny how quotes like that stick with you... - Mohomed=genieyclo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... - tehKenny

I thought it was just a quote from Boondocks...but now that I know where it came from....I'll be back...I need to ROFL for about 20-minutes.... - ♫ Rahsheen ™ ★

Gin Rummy = Rumsfeld, Wuntzler = GWB - tehKenny

So much I don't know... - ♫ Rahsheen ™ ★

I don't know how Rah turned into Rummy, but now I'm scared - Mo Kargas

Many other solar panel startups are now aiming at costs of $1/watt. Thin-film companies including Solyndra, Nanosolar, Miasolé and HelioVolt, which make copper-indium-gallium-diselenide films, also known as CIGS, have raised a lot of money. So have giants like Honda and Shell. - Mitchell Tsai

Potentially, CIGS panels can harvest more electricity from the sun than cad tel panels. Experimental CIGS panels at NREL hit 19.9 percent efficiency while the best cal tel cells peak at around 16.5 percent efficiency. - Mitchell Tsai

Many also say that putting CIGS thin-film solar cells on thin substrates, like metal foils, is easier. First Solar puts its solar cells on glass, expensive to buy and heavy to ship, although it is trying to develop thin substrates. And there are now new cad tel solar cells coming to market, such as AVA Solar, which just raised over $100 million in VC funds. - Mitchell Tsai

But given today's poor economic climate – and the growing maturity of First Solar's relentlessly efficient manufacturing, represented by the company's $6.3 billion current backlog of sales – startups will have a hard time trying to match First Solar's recipe in the short term, said Jeffrey Grabow, with Ernst & Young's high technology practice in San Jose. - Mitchell Tsai

http://greentechmedia.com/arti... The thin-film solar panel maker posted a profit of $99.3 million, or $1.20 per share, compared with $46 million, or $0.58 per share, in the same period a year ago. The Tempe, Ariz., company also posted a third-quarter revenue of $348.7 million, up 54.4 percent from $159 million in the year-ago period. - Mitchell Tsai

I want! - Mo Kargas

The company expects to generate $2 billion to $2.1 billion in sales in 2009. - Mitchell Tsai

Earlier in the day, First Solar announced it had invested $25 million in SolarCity and has agreed to supply thin-film panels to the solar financer and installer. The deal calls for First Solar to deliver 100 megawatts worth of solar panels to SolarCity over five years beginning in the first quarter of 2009. - Mitchell Tsai

SolarCity, based in Foster City, Calif., installs solar-power systems on residential and small commercial properties in California, Arizona and Oregon. The company also offers leasing options, paying part of the upfront cost of a system, which could set homeowners back roughly $30,000. - Mitchell Tsai

The $25 million in funding is part of a $30 million round the company raised, with investors including JP Morgan, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and DBL Investors. The round brings SolarCity's total capital to $56 million. - Mitchell Tsai

FSLR trading today at $116.12 ($9.42 billion market cap), down -63% from high of 317.00 ($25.7 billion)...better than the 88-92% drops in the Chinese Solar companies. - Mitchell Tsai

It's a sign that there's some serious money being placed into alt. energy - Mo Kargas

Mo: I think there's about $120 billion being invested in solar. I'm reading the solar energy articles right now, but solar stocks have cratered since Sep 2008. I'm thinking about supporting the solar companies & buying some stock. (Warning: Some of my friends have lost lots of money this year trying to buy cheap alternative energy stocks. Yingli was Down 94% = Down 50% x Down 50% x Down 50% x Down 50% ---> much worse than the S&P 500.) - Mitchell Tsai

http://news.moneycentral.msn.c... UBS analyst Stephen Chin said solar's residential segment is suffering from a global recession and tight credit markets, but he considers First Solar a preferred pick in the industry. - Mitchell Tsai

Is that just due to the overall climate though Mitchell (plumetting petrol prices, overall market performance) ? - Mo Kargas

"We favor First Solar given our view that the company will sustain the industry's lowest cost/watt and continued manufacturing production outperformance," Chin wrote in a client note. - Mitchell Tsai

Lazard Capital Markets analyst Sanjay Shrestha rates First Solar a "Buy" with a price target of $265. He said the company should be able to leverage the solar industry's long-term growth by continuing to reduce costs and improve efficiency. - Mitchell Tsai

Arcuri maintained a "Buy" rating on the stock but more than halved his price target to $205 from $450. - Mitchell Tsai

the facts and figures are simply astonishing, and the way the levels will be constantly moving is just breath taking! - Mohomed=genieyclo

beautiful!! would love to visit there - Susan Beebe (Santa Claus)

Me too. Too bad it doesn't auto copy to clipboard. I'll stick with the bookmarklet in my FF Bookmarks toolbar. Cool idea though. Would be nice to have a keyboard shortcut in gmail to auto-shorten urls and copy to clipboard. - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

no worries, it's being a bit buggy for me at the mo - hopefully they'll improve it - Zee.

Preach! - Daryl aka Lil Trumpet Boy

Derrick++ - ♫ Rahsheen ™ ★

The fact that I have a MFA degree I'm quite proud of, but in a field I don't want to really work in is a major suck. But I'll make lemonade out of the lemons I've been handed, but damn if I can't pay this sucker off and be rid of it. It will be YEARS. :( - Derrick

Amen brother - Louis Simoneau

I hear you, D. :/ - Anna Haro

No kidding - Rodfather

Don't worry, Derrick. The student loan market is probably the next major collapse. Think about it: when money is tight and you can't pay all the bills, student loans are near the bottom when you list your bills by priority. - Mark VandenBerg

I only have about $10k in loans left, but I could go for a bailout. - Ninjitsu Jason Huebel

Write. Your. Congressional. Representatives. - Chuck LeDuc Díaz

I wish I could get it too. - Mathew Ballard

hellzyeah! what I could do without that ball and chain dragging down my ability to stimulate the economy, and the home market.... - RudĩϐЯaЯïaȵ

i'll be dead before i pay that shit off. - Orphan Spinster Librarian

darn straight - Caleb Elston

I swear, I know people making high five, close to six figures, living with roommates cause they're student loans are so off the hook. :( - Derrick

I paid for my tuition as I went, but my husband had student loans. They weren't that bad, but it was like neverending. He finally paid them off 4 years ago. If either of us had gone to grad school, we probably would have hefty loans right now. - Anika Malone

Anika, grad school is what killed me. Are you familiar with that little art school up on the hill in Pasadena? - Derrick

I think I'm going to cry when my wife's dental school loans kick in in a few months. I thought mine were bad. Now that we're married we've got hers to worry about too. Ouch. - Daryl aka Lil Trumpet Boy

Hurray, now I can fix my code :-) <media:group><media:thumbnail /></media:group> got it - Jason Wehmhoener

What did you do? - Dave Winer

Dave: Every media:thumbnail wrapped with media:group AND specified the width and height of thumbnails. - directeur

Dave and Paul: Tell me, btw, is content-length that "required" for audio enclosures? I mean, the doc says so, but I see that friendfeed, my desktop feed reader and google reader do without it. (It takes me a headers fetch in my blog to include an enclosure, and I'll be happy if I haven't to fetch the content's length for every enclosure :) - directeur

Congrats, You did it! - Michael Fidler

Indeed, trickery. The cool thing is that adding new keywords only involves adding the FriendFeed search results URL to the proper Google Reader tag/folder. Results then automagically appear back on FF. - Mike Reynolds

Would that be niftery? - Lisa L. Seifert

Whoa indeed. - Juan Pablo González

Good idea Mike, I was trying to figure out how to bring ff searches into a list, but of course, they don't allow their own feeds to be put into rooms/lists. This should solve the problem! The ff search is very powerful. - Kelly Johns

i don't begin to understand what you said, or what it would be good for - Gregory Lent

Gegory, it provides a way to constantly see things that match your search criteria within FriendFeed. So you can see all the posts and comments that mention "economy", "lolcats", or "rickroll" and have them appear in a feed. - Chris White

ah .. i like to search for mentions of "consciousness", say, so this would save me the effort of doing a search? - Gregory Lent

Yes, the benefit is having key searches available with one click. - Mike Reynolds

I did that for FOOD - my own "search" dumps as an imaginary friend - my "food" buddy --- dumps into a ROOM....yummy place - Susan Beebe (Santa Claus)

Clever, Mike. I've been searching for something like this. - Sean McBride

Don't feel bad Gregory. While I generally understand why something would be useful, I wish I were geek enough to do actually implement these fancy things myself. http://www.growmap.com/can-a-q... - Internet Strategist

By the way, I dropped into this conversation from a search at http://www.ffholic.com - Internet Strategist

:) i always like morton's posts. and "like" many of them, too. :) - edythe

I like when Morton runs out of *Likes* and has to go into manual *like* mode :) That's dedication! - Brian Daniel Eisenberg