See, this is why I love Twitter. One of my gripes with Firefox is that it automatically assumes any RSS or atom feed I enter into the address bar is one that I want to subscribe to using some sort of feed reader like Google Reader. While this is true 90% of the time, there is that occasional instance where I actually want to see the plain text of the feed. I posed my question to the Twittersphere and merely moments later, somebody replied with just the right solution: ...

The best time of the year to visit Croatia, at least for me, is sometime in May. The crowds aren’t too thick, the weather is just right and not too hot for this Seattle guy. Definitely not too bad. I went to Split at the last minute to take advantage of a long weekend. The picture above was not at all the image of Croatia that I had in my mind when somebody on Twitter suggested I visit there for the weekend. One hour after Googling “Split, Croatia” and seeing some of the results on Google Images, I had my ticket and hotel booked within the hour. ...

***** This is a hack. This is not guaranteed to work. Twitter may change their website at any time. I am not responsible if something breaks or you decide to delete all your DM's. Nor am I responsible if your friends get mad at you for deleting your sent DM's from their Inbox. ***** That being said, I’d like to introduce my DM Whacker, DM Deleter, DM Sniper, whatever you want to call it I created a tool to delete your direct messages en-masse on Twitter. After the recent debacle regarding direct messages being exposed, I definitely saw a need amongst some Tweeters do delete their direct messages. ...

OK, I figure it’s time to throw my hat into the ring. I’ve posted in the past about Twitter spam and I run what I think to be a pretty fun website about Twitter Stats, but there seems to be a lot of conversation recently about Twitter and the noise ratio. Obviously, people are trying to figure out how best to use Twitter given its recent surge in popularity and accompanying spaminess. Louis Gray made a blog post about his noise ratio and Stowe Boyd followed up with a post about the noise ratio and conversational index, but there’s one thing that seems to be common across both these posts: ...

A brief update - top 3 things that can be done to help users weed out spam: Make the block functionality more accessible - did you find it underneath the "Following" legend? Provide basic stats about a user in the notification email - location, bio and some ratio information Use backend monitoring/analysis to `killall -9` spammer accounts (block ratio, usage trends indicative of automation, etc) As with any social network, spammers appear to take advantage of the collective masses that are gathered and interacting with each other. This is no different on Twitter, where numerous people have complained recently about massive follows from spam accounts. These accounts typically take the form of a high following:friend ratio and a low number of updates. There is even a site devoted to Twitter spam, twitterspam.com. There’s quite a bit of other information we can examine, but let’s tackle this in order of the two main types of spam I’ve come across. ...

I’m nearing the end of my first six weeks in Germany, and I’ve really enjoyed it so far. I feel like I should be better versed in German, but I’m quite satisfied with the simple ability to walk into a restaurant, order and pay in German (both in language and custom) and be able to understand most of what is said. I’m familiar with greetings, some common phrases, and know my numbers relatively well. ...

This is going to be a quick post, mostly because I’m tired from working on that other site and I really need to get some sleep. I’ve been doing some serious pcap analysis lately. You know the type…where you’ve dumped numerous pcap’s with tcpdump and the wonderful -C parameter. Being the type of guy that I am, I wanted to visualize the traffic I’d captured to identify what was going on. Here’s a few argus commands I used to get the job done. Note I’ve used back slashes () to separate the commands onto multiple lines ...

So imagine you’re cruising along somewhere in the middle of nowhere Germany. You pulled some directions down from Google Maps, but the problem is that it’s not always obvious where to go. When you don’t know the language and have the town names look the same to you, it’s very easy to get turned around. Combine that with the lack of directional assistance on signs in Germany and distinct lack of knowledge about the geography, I had a little fun today. ...

So nearly a month to the day after releasing my Twitter Stats perl script, I finally made a webified version. You can check it out over at TweetStats.com. This was really more of an engine for me to get up to speed on Ruby on Rails (RoR) than anything. I’ve been wanting to play with Ruby for a while now, but really just didn’t have the motivation. I’d like to keep making regular updates to the site as there are several features I’m hoping to add such as dynamic graphs that allow you to zoom in on your timeline, an auto-follow bot that will keep your stats constantly up-to-date, and a widget you can put on your site if you so desire. Although I’ve enjoyed working on the site, I would like to relax for a little bit. ...

Well I’m back off to Germany again. I’ve been super-busy (and sick, blech) so I haven’t had much time to do things like call my family lately (sorry) or be of much use otherwise. Hopefully I’ll have some time to catch up once I get to Germany. Until then, auf wiedersehen!