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Making my Fedora friends proud (sniffle)

I'm happy to report that, as promised, FiveRuns has launched fiveruns.org, and launched its first two open source projects.  I would like to thank kwade, gdk, max, spot, mom, dad, jessica, my agent and the Fedora academy for teaching me the power and beauty of pure open source.  Without you, this wouldn't have been possible.

Actually, truth-be-told, I had very little to do with it - Bruce, Adam, Brian, Eric, Mike, Steve and Oliver are the horsepower here.  Here are the projects... check 'em out:

FiveRuns TuneUp Panel - this is a wicked-cool Rails plug-in that provides all kinds of useful performance data for developers and has a UI that makes me blush like a pre-teen at a David Archuleta concert (so I watch Idol - what's it to 'ya!).  It also connects with the FiveRuns TuneUp service that allows developers to post performance data and code snippets to a public or private online community to get feedback.  It's just like Facebook, but, um, a little smaller and more for developers, and, well, it's not really like Facebook at all, actually.

FiveRuns Instrument - "this is a little utility library to get useful information out of methods with a minimum of fuss, and without having to dig into code to add debugging output."  Bruce wrote that.  I really don't know what it means, but if you're a developer, you're probably salivating right now.

Seriously, I'm really proud of what FiveRuns has accomplished in such a short period of time, and I'm lucky to be part of a company that is both the leader in Rails performance management AND now a leader in open source contributions around Rails performance and instrumentation.

2.0 things are always better than 1.0 things

...except, of course, New Coke. But I digress.

FiveRuns launched the public beta of Manage 2.0 today. We've learned a lot in a year, and have plowed that knowledge back into a Rails monitoring service that now has a tiny client footprint and a much better user experience, among many other improvements. Check it out, and let us know what you think.

Kudos to Steve, Bruce, Adam, Mike, Eric, Brian, Oliver, and our friends Rich & Chad, for making this happen.

Twitter moves to 139 characters, saying "Rails just won't scale to 140 anymore"

Dateline: Thursday, May 1st, 2008 - The day Rails scalability was the news.

In a sharp response to TechCrunch's erroneous report that Twitter was divorcing Rails because of performance issues, Twitter management responded, "No, that's just not true. However, we have decided to limit users to 139 characters, because 140 is just taxing the system."

Furious Twitter power-users didn't hesitate to respond. A common comment was, "How am I going to punctuate my tweets?". From another user, "Oh, I thought that number meant I had 140 seconds to finish my tweet". Finally, James Buck, maybe the most famous Tweeter of all, said, "Sure, my first tweet was one word. But my second tweet was the name of the Egyptian prison I was in, and it took all 140 characters... I still might be there if it wasn't for that 140th character."

Twitter also promised additional changes to the UI, in response to all the alleged performance issues by the press. Said management, "We are taking a bit of a sharper tone with users, in hopes that they will stop the bitching."

In other news, Lew Cirne launched his new Rails performance start-up today. Welcome to the party, Lew.