Archive for April, 2007

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My First Adsense Check

Saturday, April 28th, 2007

Wohoo! I just got my first adsense check in the mail. It’s a free $120. :mrgreen: With what I pay for hosting this site, this check will almost cover the whole past year, not including the domain name registration fees. Awesome! Let’s hope my check won’t bounce.

Thanks to everyone who clickered my adz or white listed me in their adblock.

Several people asked me this so I figured I’ll share it here: this site usually earns me $30-40 a month. For example I earned $40 in March and about the same amount in April so far. In February I think I got around $30 and January was $20 something. Some months are better, and some are worse. It’s not big bucks but it helps to pay for hosting. :)

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Posted in meta | 9 Comments »

Posting Twitter Updates using Java

Friday, April 27th, 2007

As you may or may not know, I’m working on a Java based Twitter client recently. Sending and getting data from Twitter is really, really simple. Here is how to do it in Java.

Let’s assume that we are trying to post an update to twitter with the following data:

String username = "someone@example.com";
String password = "password";
String status = "Look! I'm twittering using Java";

Twitter uses basic HTTP authentication which requires you to send a username:password pair encoded in base64:

String cridentials = new sun.misc.BASE64Encoder().encode((username + ":" + password).getBytes());

Now let’s create a HTTP connection:

URL url = new URL("http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml");
URLConnection conn = url.openConnection();
conn.setDoOutput(true);

Authentication is activated like so:

conn.setRequestProperty ("Authorization", "Basic " + cridentials);

Now we can send the update by simply writing to conn’s output stream:

OutputStreamWriter wr = new OutputStreamWriter(conn.getOutputStream());
wr.write(data);
wr.flush();
wr.close();

Finally, if you wand you can grab and print out the XML response sent back to you by Twitter server:

BufferedReader rd = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(conn.getInputStream()));
String line, output = "";
while ((line = rd.readLine()) != null)
{
System.out.println(output);
}

That’s it – that’s all you need to do.

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Posted in java, programming, technology, twitter | 7 Comments »

Ruby on Rails doesn’t Scale Well

Friday, April 27th, 2007

Ruby is a really great language with some awesome features, and Rails make it even better. But it appears that it does not scale well yet. Twitter is a great example of using RoR to run a website with millions of users hitting your server few hundred times a day each. Amazingly enough, it seems to be running very smoothly lately, but they did have many rough spots in the last few months when the sites performance was really poor.

It seems that their issue is not the execution speed, but the Rails design itself. In a recent interview a Twitter developer Alex Payne said:

The common wisdom in the Rails community at this time is that scaling Rails is a matter of cost: just throw more CPUs at it. The problem is that more instances of Rails (running as part of a Mongrel cluster, in our case) means more requests to your database. At this point in time there’s no facility in Rails to talk to more than one database at a time. The solutions to this are caching the hell out of everything and setting up multiple read-only slave databases, neither of which are quick fixes to implement. So it’s not just cost, it’s time, and time is that much more precious when people can[’t]reach your site.

Emphasis was mine. The lack of support for multiple databases seems a huge bottleneck issue for high traffic sites. Most of us don’t even think about stuff like that when considering using a platform to build our applications with.

I still think RoR is a good platform. It just might not be ready for the enterprise scale apps like Twitter. Most of us however will never experience this issue – unless of course we get slashdotted or something. I’m confident that the Rails team will use the Twitter problems to improve scalability features in future releases.

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Posted in ruby, technology, twitter | 4 Comments »

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