Feb 25, 2008 | blog
I’ve been enjoying some of the Adobe AIR apps during it’s development over the past year. Among several Twitter clients that have popped up in the last few months running on AIR, I’ve really enjoyed Twhirl.
Now, if you’re a Twitter user, you know that its a great way to share links and more. Works great – except when you’ve set a browser other than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as the default web browser. I happen to be partial to Firefox, and use it constantly, so when an Adobe AIR based app launches IE when I click a shared link – it’s upsetting.
Luckily in the final version there is an Adobe KB article with instructions on how to fix that problem. Personally I think their reason that it doesn’t work in the first place is lame:
Windows Vista does not make the required additional registry entries correctly when a browser other than Internet Explorer is set as the default browser. When an attempt to load the URL is made, Adobe AIR uses Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) to connect to an open instance of the browser registered for URL requests. If that fails, Adobe AIR falls back on Shell Execution.
Other non-Microsoft (and Microsoft!) applications have consistently and successfully launched the correct browser for me. Why not AIR?
At any rate, here is how to fix the problem.
- Launch “Default Programs” off the Vista Start Menu
- Click on “Set Program Access And Computer Defaults” in the Default Programs dialog
- Select “Custom” from the list and choose your preferred browser from the list of recognized installed browsers.
- Click OK and your done.
Next time you launch your AIR app, you will be able to follow links and have them load in your preferred browser.
Jan 31, 2008 | blog
Yep, again.
Not sure what’s going on this time either. I’ve tried the web, Twhirl, and via IM (Google Talk). Nothing is connecting, though oddly, IM is showing that Twitter is “online”.
Moving on… reading feeds instead. Will try to get more writing out of the way tonight.
Jan 31, 2008 | blog
I have to immediately thank Dave Delaney (Twitter: @davedelaney) for this tip. Revealed in his 5,000 tweets and counting post earlier today, he suggests the following to find your first tweet:
- Browse to your Twitter profile page
- Click on the “Archive” tab
- Scroll to the bottom
- Click on the “Older” button
- Notice that the URL is now something like http://twitter.com/rickmahn?page=2? Change the “page=2” to “page=200”
- See anything? Start decreasing that number until you find your first post.
- Or, if you’ve been especially productive, you may need to try higher page numbers! 😉
Mine just happens to be on March 4th, 2007 at 1:13pm (found here) where I tweeted the very informative “Reading RSS feeds” to the world.
So, thank you Dave for that tip, and congratulations on crossing 5,000 tweets. I had been curious about that first tweet lately because I know I was starting to get close to a full year on Twitter. Just over a month to go!
Technorati Tags: Twitter, Dave Delaney
Jan 30, 2008 | blog
Doh! Again?
Earlier today when Twitter went offline, I was only marginally annoyed. Mainly because I had a lot of work to get done. I’m quite surprised tonight when I pop on to check out what’s been happening for the last several hours.
Hmm, now I’m frustrated. First time I’ve felt that way towards Twitter. Not sure I really like that either.
Come on guys, this has got to be addressed.
Jan 30, 2008 | blog
Ok, I’m just keeping a record of when Twitter is down. Like now. The Twitter home page at this time:
This is the kind of thing that everyone is worried about when talking about Twitter. It’s becoming an extremely useful tool, to the point that some people will claim it to be crucial to their daily communications.
Reliability is a key requirement, and I do know from posts on the Twitter Blog and from news that their looking for staff to monitor and maintain solely from the reliability perspective. As an IT consultant & engineer/architect, I can be patient, I can understand the problems that scaling and massive growth can put on a platform. However, many simply see these outages as inability to compensate, or worse, neglect.
Twitter’s engineers and management team will prevail, of that I’m sure, but it’s the timing that I worry about. Even many of it’s most prominent users are becoming more vocal in their concerns about the service. Shel Isreal posted An Open Letter to the Twitter Guys on what Twitter needs to address.
With all the talk of how simply useful Twitter is, the “Twitter Guys” need to take note of how important it has become to hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people world-wide. I believe they know, but suggest as Shel does, that they need to communicate more directly, and with more information on what their doing, especially when they’re having some stability problems. Like today.