It's even worse than it appears.
Writing on my blog is more like Twitter than WordPress. #
I look forward to Dropbox Classic. A web-based way of accessing my Dropbox files without all the corporate groupware they've tried to layer on top of it. The clutter is getting epic. #
An algorithm for finding news bots on Twitter. Write a response to a political tweet that's getting a lot of flow. For each snarky one-line response from an account with 24 followers, block. Repeat.#
  • I am having a discussion with an old friend.#
  • One of us says driving to Blockbuster back and forth to rent a DVD is more energy-efficient than watching the movie on Netflix.#
  • Which do you think is more efficient?#
  • Here's the Twitter survey.#
  • Most of the time Dropbox works, but today, sometime just after 11AM Eastern, it got flaky and basically stopped working. Usually it's something I did, so I started checking things out. #
    • I have two accounts, neither is close to out of space. One is using 178.85 GB of 2.1 TB. The other is using 11.68 GB of 2 TB.#
    • I thought perhaps my desktop computer wasn't synching. I tried creating a folder, and it took a very long time for it to show up in the dropbox.com file browser, but it did eventually show up. But it does not show up on the server it's intended for.#
    • My desktop computer says it's been synching for a couple of hours. That's when I started looking. Maybe it was going on a lot longer. I don't know. #
    • The way I first experienced the outage is that updates to the app I'm working on stopped appearing on the server. Before that I was making changes, and they'd take the usual amount of time, a few seconds, to appear on the server.#
    • I checked their status page, and it says everything is good. I looked at the Dropbox support account on Twitter, it says it's closed until Monday.#
  • I'm kind of stuck. No idea what the problem is. Is it my problem? How can I tell. It doesn't seem like it, because if it were, all my desktop computers and servers would have to be experiencing the same problem. It could happen. But it doesn't seem likely.#
  • Yesterday I posted a query about using git for code distribution. This was a new idea for me. In the past I've done it lots of different ways. #
  • They all work well and scale since they're static. I did one method that wasn't static, using XML-RPC. That method had problems as the installed base of Frontier grew. Static distribution is the way to go. #
  • As I waited for a response to the query about folder-level sync with a git repository, I went ahead with the brute force method, which works as follows.#
    • When it's time to sync, first we clone the whole repo into a temp folder. Then compare the destination folder with the sub-folder of the downloaded repo, copy the new or changed files. Then delete the temporary repo.#
    • The assumption is that the repo is relatively small. We burn a bit of bandwidth and temporary disk space. And the job gets done. #
  • The overall system I'm working on will also support one-way sync with an S3 location and perhaps RSS-based delivery later. But right now having git-based distribution working, I can proceed. #
  • As with previous installments, this contains spoilers. #
  • I watched the last two episodes of Breaking Bad. #
  • I think I had only watched them once, when they first came out, but I remembered almost all of it. And it's amazing that so much happens in the last episode.#
  • First I want to say that my previous report is one of the sloppiest bits of writing and editing I've ever done. It's practically incoherent. Sorry.#
  • The point was this, even though I hate Walter White, his humanity comes through, and his broken heart. Even more so in the finale. No one wants his money. His son wants him to die. He admits now he wasn't doing it for his family, he was doing it because he's good at making meth and being a crime boss, and he likes it. #
  • In the end he forgives Jesse. And he spends his last moments in Jesse's meth lab, and he's happy in the only way Walter White, having passed on the family business, ever was happy. #
  • Was it a great show? Yes. No reservations.#
  • I got started on this exploration by watching the Breaking Bad movie that just came out. I was wondering if there was anything they could have done with two hours that would be respectful of the show. I haven't figured that out. I'll let you know if I do.#

© 1994-2019 Dave Winer.

Last update: Saturday October 19, 2019; 6:42 PM EDT.

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