Can Hardly Contain Myself

Went out this evening to visit the Contain Yourself geocache. It's next to a brook behind the Container Store in Paramus. Another park-and-grab, but this time, I met up with lostwoodsrambler and trulve at the cache site.

After that, I went to the CompUSA closeout sale, which was just up the road. They haven't increased the discount from last week, but I got one more book at a 40% discount. Then I stopped at Popeye's to use one of my last few coupons on fried chicken takeout.

Twitter has been experiencing growing pains because of an order-of-magnitude increase in the number of users just over the past week. Two days ago, the Twitter servers started losing some messages, either because of a bug or because they were overloaded. The message post would appear to succeed but the message would not show up in the timeline. So I started to brainstorm ideas on how to make a Twitter client more fault-tolerant.


I settled on the following approach: Take an existing client and modify it to put each message on the clipboard before submitting it. If I couple that with a clipboard manager like Ditto then I'll have a saved history of all my tweets and I can resubmit any tweets that fall through the cracks. Unfortunately, the better Twitter clients are not open source and I didn't want to have to write a new client and GUI just to add this one hack.

Finally, I came across Visual Twit, which does include source code. I got a bit more than I bargained for because I had to fix a number of bugs before adding the one-line hack. In addition, I learnt a thing or two about Forms Designer.

So far, it's working okay, although there are still two things, one message encoding fix and one improvement, that I need to do. On the other hand, perhaps I should try rewriting this in Perl/Tk, with which I'm more familiar than VB.NET and Windows Forms.