tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-117898432024-03-14T00:19:47.251-07:00BuddyGopher BlogWhere we mainly talk about Development and Behind-the-Scenes software stuff.Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084465442514843932noreply@blogger.comBlogger27125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11789843.post-1129731609800245892005-10-19T07:13:00.000-07:002005-10-19T07:24:17.913-07:00Buddy Info page - BETA from AOL<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:120;"><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">HUGE</span> <span style="color: rgb(255, 102, 0);">NEWS</span></span><br>
<span style="font-size:50;">AOL has released their <a href="http://buddyinfo.aim.com/">Buddy Info page</a></span></div>
<p>The <a href="http://buddyinfo.aim.com/">Buddy Info page</a> is very similar to <span style="font-weight:bold;">BuddyGopher</span> - it shows you all of your friends away messages in one window. But AOL takes it a few steps further, and allows you to comment on your friends away messages -- as well as their profiles!</p>
<p>So, to recap- the <a href="http://buddyinfo.aim.com/">AIM Buddy Info page</a> allows you to see all of your friends current away messages, profiles and Buddy Icons on one screen. You can also add comments to someone's away message, or add a comment to their profile (like, "<span style="font-style:italic;">Nice lyrics - did you write those yourself?</span>").</p>
<p>Kudos to the AIM team for finally embracing the decade-old habit of reading away messages!</p>Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084465442514843932noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11789843.post-1124844744681043132005-08-23T17:47:00.000-07:002005-08-23T17:52:24.686-07:00Fall HolidayWe are taking the BuddyGopher servers down today for an indefinite period of time. Please visit our friends at <a href="http://www.buddy4u.com/">Buddy4u</a> for extended <a href="http://www.buddy4u.com/">AIM profiles</a>.Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084465442514843932noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11789843.post-1124252988753817712005-08-16T21:24:00.000-07:002005-08-16T21:30:16.766-07:00Away Message Partners Needed<p>Your buddies history page now shows her <span style="font-family: trebuchet ms; color: rgb(255, 0, 0);font-size:180%;" >*15*</span> most recent away messages.</p>
<p>Theoretically, we could show you unlimited pages of away message history for each buddy. Our database currently stores over 15,000,000 away messages from 200,000 buddies on the AOL Instant Messenger network. Our servers usually collect a new away message within five seconds of a user switching to <A href="http://buddygopher.blogspot.com/2005/04/presence-indicators.html"><strong>Away</strong> status</a>.</p>
<p>BuddyGopher was built to scrape AIM user content using the OSCAR protocol. We have been running 5,000 simultaneous OSCAR connections for over eight months now with nearly 99.999% uptime. If you are interested in putting AIM user content on your website in a legal and timely fashion, you should <a href="mailto:buddygopher@gmail.com">e-mail us</a>!</p>Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084465442514843932noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11789843.post-1124252506553714322005-08-16T21:19:00.000-07:002005-08-16T21:30:35.446-07:00Server Updates<p>Pageviews might be slow and your BuddyGopher home page might not be opening in the AIM Today window. We are aware of these problems and do not have an immediate solution.</p>
<p align="center"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1133/115/1600/watch.gif"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1133/115/400/watch.gif" border="0" alt="" /></a></p>Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084465442514843932noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11789843.post-1123023735871176902005-08-02T16:00:00.000-07:002005-08-02T16:02:15.873-07:00RSS feeds for your AIM BuddyList<p>BuddyGopher serves RSS feeds of your AIM Buddy List away messages. Look for the "<span style="font-weight: bold;">Enable RSS feed</span>" button on the bottom of your home page.</p>
<p><span style="font-style: italic;">We actually launched this feature a few months ago. Kudos to Marek for implementation and <a href="http://www.zachklein.com/">Zach</a> for the pushed suggestion!</span></p>Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084465442514843932noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11789843.post-1123023616703143492005-08-02T15:50:00.000-07:002005-08-02T16:02:52.896-07:00Servers Restarted Today<p><span style="font-weight: bold;">Has BuddyGopher been slow or unresponsive during the last few days?</span>
Marek vacuumed the PostgreSQL database tables several times today and re-signed on our entire array of AIM screen names. There are over 12,700,000 away messages in our database now, but home page loads should be dramatically quicker.</p>Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084465442514843932noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11789843.post-1118684226036020342005-06-13T10:31:00.000-07:002005-06-13T10:37:19.130-07:00A BuddyGopher Stats E-Mail,or <span style="font-style:italic;">What Alexa Doesn't Know (or Care About)</span>.<br><br>
<font color="#666666" size="2" face="Courier New, Courier, mono">Hey Nick, </font><font face="Courier New, Courier, mono">
<p><font color="#666666" size="2">I checked the query stats once again, and:</font></p>
<p><font color="#0000FF" size="2"><query_count></font><font color="#666666" size="2"><br>
<day id="2005-160" count="647219"/><br>
<day id="2005-161" count="650676"/><br>
<day id="2005-162" count="715400"/><br>
<day id="2005-163" count="122136"/><br>
<font color="#0000FF"></query_count></font></font></p>
<p><font color="#666666" size="2">(the last record is from today, it's just 9:43
am there)<br>
Also, </font><font color="#666666" size="2"> the # of messages being collected:</font></p>
<p><font color="#666666" size="2">2005-06-13 <strong>29769</strong><br>
2005-06-12 <strong>187654</strong><br>
2005-06-11 <strong>171867</strong><br>
2005-06-10 <strong>171402</strong><br>
2005-06-09 <strong>179001</strong></font></p>
<p><font color="#666666" size="2">Yesterday, there were nearly 14,000 messages
in one hour during the peak<br>
time. Here is the hourly breakdown.</font></p>
<p><font color="#666666" size="2">away | 4859907 | 2005-06-12 21:00:00.207647
| 9972<br>
away | 4849935 | 2005-06-12 20:00:00.701177 | 12836<br>
away | 4837099 | 2005-06-12 19:00:01.20629 | 13834<br>
away | 4823265 | 2005-06-12 18:00:02.535994 | 13889<br>
away | 4809376 | 2005-06-12 17:00:01.316456 | 13627<br>
away | 4795749 | 2005-06-12 16:00:00.490273 | 12390<br>
away | 4783359 | 2005-06-12 15:00:01.790025 | 11932<br>
away | 4771427 | 2005-06-12 14:00:00.575841 | 11791<br>
away | 4759636 | 2005-06-12 13:00:00.877939 | 8465<br>
away | 4751171 | 2005-06-12 12:00:00.352284 | 10956<br>
away | 4740215 | 2005-06-12 11:00:02.504937 | 12193<br>
away | 4728022 | 2005-06-12 10:00:00.643144 | 10652<br>
away | 4717370 | 2005-06-12 09:00:00.988379 | 10153</font></p>
<p><font color="#666666" size="2">We have 99,766 live buddies in the array now.</font></p>
<p><font color="#666666" size="2">Marek</font> </font></p>Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084465442514843932noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11789843.post-1118206035512689212005-06-07T21:31:00.000-07:002005-06-07T21:49:35.903-07:00Other Frequently Asked Questions<blockquote><span style="font-weight: bold;">user95</span>: is there anyways to get messages of buddies who change their message, when they are still away?</blockquote>
<p>We have been running a light-weight BuddyGopher away message crawler to manually check away messages of every <span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-family: courier new;">online&&away</span></span> buddy in 90 minute intervals. This is in addition to our OSCAR array that always collects your AIM buddies new away messages. Manual away message collection helps to ensure the accuracy of our status database, and it increases our live content accuracy. Hooray for standards!</p>
<p>We use a lot of Perl, <a href="http://www.sleepycat.com/products/db.shtml">Berkeley DB</a> and PostgreSQL to accomplish this big data collection on our present node.</p>
<p>In the summertime months, one might question this extreme dedication to unique micro-content.</p>
<p>BuddyGopher ~ <span style="font-weight:bold;">We Love Away Messages</span></p></span>Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084465442514843932noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11789843.post-1117688857763377882005-06-01T21:57:00.000-07:002005-06-01T22:07:37.766-07:00Mahlen works for eBay now!<p><a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2005/BUSINESS/06/01/ebay.shopping.reut/">EBay pays $620m for shopping site</a> <span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-style: italic;">SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -- Online auction site eBbay said Wednesday it agreed to buy Shopping.com, which enables consumers to compare products online and to read consumer reviews.</span></span></p>
<p>This is also a great excuse for an update to our Development Blog.</p>
<ul><li>Marek recently helped to add some <span style="font-weight: bold;">RSS feeds to your BuddyGopher BuddyList</span>. Look for it at the bottom of your Home page of current away messages.</li></ul>
<p>Otherwise, <span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(51, 204, 0);">all systems go</span>. Thanks for keeping up with us and using our software to read your friends away messages.</p>Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084465442514843932noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11789843.post-1115849769247449762005-05-11T15:15:00.000-07:002005-05-11T15:16:09.433-07:00Buddy4u and BuddyGopher partnership<p align="center"><a href="http://www.buddy4u.com/"><img src="http://www.buddy4u.com/images/buddy4u.gif" alt="Buddy4u logo" border="0" /></a></p>
<p>We're happy to announce that <a href="http://www.buddy4u.com/">Buddy4u</a>, one of the most popular AIM profile enhancement websites on the internet, is now showing BuddyGopher personal away message history for all of their new users.</p>
<p>If you take a look at <a href="http://www.buddy4u.com/view/?u=nickgraywfu">my Buddy4u profile</a>, you'll see a link at the bottom of the page that says
</p><blockquote><span style="color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">[</span><a href="http://bg.buddy4u.com/?aim=nickgraywfu&b4u=nickgraywfu">View nickgraywfu's BuddyGopher Page</a><span style="color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">]</span></blockquote>
<p>BuddyGopher personal away message history is turned on by default for all new Buddy4u user accounts, and users can easily enable or disable it at any time. BuddyGopher personal away message history is also available to be turned on or off for Buddy4u's 535,000+ existing members.</p>
<p>Buddy4u and BuddyGopher are third-party web-based services that enhance the sharing power of AOL Instant Messenger. We're really excited about this new partnership with Owen and the entire Buddy4u community.</p>Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084465442514843932noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11789843.post-1115701271327668442005-05-09T21:46:00.000-07:002005-05-09T22:28:29.953-07:00AIM now has 250 max buddies!<p><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102);font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:5em;" ><strike>200</strike> </span><span style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:5em;" >*</span><span style="color: rgb(51, 255, 51);font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:5em;" >*</span><span style="color: rgb(51, 204, 0);font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:5em;" >*</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 153, 0);font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:5em;" >250</span><span style="color: rgb(51, 204, 0);font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:5em;" >*</span><span style="color: rgb(51, 255, 51);font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:5em;" >*</span><span style="color: rgb(153, 255, 153);font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:5em;" >*</span></div></p>
<p>Big news today for AIM Buddy List enthusiasts on <a href="http://journals.aol.com/juberti/runningman/entries/136">juberti's AOL Journal</a>:</p>
<blockquote>I've said it before - there's going to be a lot of great stuff coming out of AOL this summer. Today's improvement is a new buddylist limit of 250 buddies per list (up from 200).</blockquote>
<p>Cool! I know I've neared the 200 limit on my personal Buddy List, especially after AOL started that whole Recent Buddies group. <span style="font-style:italic;">(By the way, did you know that AOL has a registered trademark on the phrase Buddy List?)</span></p>
<p>For BuddyGopher, this means that capacity behind the biggest custom-built Buddy List in the entire world just increased by 25%. Our server can now support 1,250,000 unique AIM buddy names. Thanks AOL! We're all looking forward to AIM 6/Triton.</p>
<p align="center"><img src="http://nickgray.net/images/50_more_buddies.gif" alt="50 more buddies! I made this graphic in Photoshop. I gotta get outta the suburbs!"></p>
<p><em>We're still looking for BerkeleyDB and Perl programmers. If you've got experience with memcached, <a href="mailto:buddygopher@gmail.com">let's go on a date</a>.</em></p>Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084465442514843932noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11789843.post-1115531956930808282005-05-07T22:59:00.000-07:002005-05-07T23:02:19.666-07:00<a href='http://photos1.blogger.com/img/131/1020/1024/Photo24-743693.jpg'><img border='0' style='border:2px solid #009900; margin:2px' src='http://photos1.blogger.com/img/131/1020/320/Photo24-743693.jpg'></a><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Happy Summer!</span> <a href="http://buddygopher.com/about.html">We</a> even wear green undershirts.Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084465442514843932noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11789843.post-1115351110740316512005-05-05T20:39:00.000-07:002005-05-05T20:45:10.760-07:00New Privacy Policy<p>BuddyGopher now has a public <a href="http://www.buddygopher.com/privacy.html">privacy policy</a>.</p>
<blockquote>We will never contact the buddies on your Buddy List, and we will never release your list of friends to the public... (but) you should assume that any motivated, computer-savvy individual could "hack" this data. <br><br>
When you submit your AIM screen name to sign up for BuddyGopher, we start collecting your Away Messages. When you submit your friends names to add to your BuddyGopher BuddyList, we start collecting their away messages, too. Unless you have your Privacy settings turned on in AOL or AOL Instant Messenger, we will collect away messages for screen names in our database as often as possible. We reserve the right to collect these away messages and save them to our database for infinity time period.<br><br>
To learn how to turn your AIM privacy settings on, and to prohibit BuddyGopher from collecting your away messages, <a href="http://www.buddygopher.com/privacy.html#enable">click here</a>.
</blockquote>Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084465442514843932noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11789843.post-1114793968465330452005-04-29T09:46:00.000-07:002005-05-07T23:01:14.896-07:00Cross Our Fingers.<p><strike><a href="http://www.pbs.org/itvs/openoutcry/trading2_3.html"><img src="http://nickgray.net/images/totally_promise.gif" align="right" border="0" hspace="10" /></a>This is just a placeholder post! We totally promise to update this development blog to tell you about the neat things we are working on.</strike></p>
<p><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0); font-weight: bold;">Update 05/05/05</span> <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-weight: bold;"></span></span></span><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Remember all that cool stuff I told you we were working on? Well, instead of building neat new feature sets and funny blinking text buttons, we've spent the last week improving what we do best: <span style="font-weight:bold;">Collecting Away Messages</span>.</span></p>
<p>BuddyGopher is now doing manual Away Message checks for all buddies in the system at a rate of once every hour. Even though BuddyGopher is built on the real-time presence awareness of live instant messaging, the occasional away message has been known to slip through our cracks. Usually this is due to users who change their Away Message without clicking the "I'm Back" button in AIM. It should never take more than five seconds for a new away message to appear in our database, but in the event that our records are innacurate, BuddyGopher will now catch the error within sixty minutes.</p>
<p>So we will continue to focus our BuddyGopher development efforts on building scalable and reliable server software that crawls and archives public user data on the AOL Instant Messenger network. <span style="font-weight:bold;">Less fluff, more buff.</span></p>
<p align="center"><span style="font-style:italic;">If you have BerkeleyDB and/or memcached experience, we'd love to get some outside advice on server architecture! Please <a href="mailto:buddygopher@gmail.com">contact us today</a>.</span></p>Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084465442514843932noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11789843.post-1114180202907920642005-04-22T07:15:00.000-07:002005-04-29T21:19:43.153-07:00We're back.<img src="http://nickgray.net/images/tulip.gif" align="right" hspace="10" alt="a tulip">BuddyGopher is now on-line and fully functional. You will have to sign up again and input each buddy on your BuddyGopher Buddy List. <br><span style="font-weight:bold;">Please <a href="aim:goim?screenname=NickGrayWFU&message=I+see+something+strange+on+BuddyGopher!">send me an IM</a> if you experience anything strange.</span>Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084465442514843932noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11789843.post-1114059605949639822005-04-20T21:59:00.000-07:002005-04-20T22:00:05.950-07:00Recovery Gossip, Part 5I am not sure what Marek worked on today, so I will leave this post as a placeholder for him to comment.Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084465442514843932noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11789843.post-1113879608654797972005-04-18T19:32:00.000-07:002005-04-18T20:29:19.703-07:00Recovery Gossip, Part 4<p>For the first time in four days, BuddyGopher collected away messages. Seven away messages per second is a new record for us. That's over 25,000 away messages per hour. <span style="font-style:italic;">Most of the buddies were already on-line and away when our OSCAR array initialized, so there was a huge backheap to collect - <span style="font-weight:bold;">plus</span> all of the buddies who may have gone away during the next fifty nine minutes.</span> Away Message collection rates later cooled down to our average of 12,000 unique messages per hour. So we are happy that the biggest custom-built AIM BuddyList still runs strong with around 72,000 buddies.</p>
<p>Strange things continue to plague a few circuits in our faulty disk drive, so we won't know until tomorrow whether or not our loving users will be required to re-enter all of their buddy names into their BuddyGopher Buddy List. Maddest props to anybody reading our development blog and patiently waiting for BuddyGopher to come back up. Shout-outs go to <span style="font-weight:bold;"><a href="http://www.eth0.us/">John Wigle</a></span>, who has been holding our hand with the EV1Servers support staff, <span style="font-weight:bold;">Marek Publicewicz</span>, the real brains behind BuddyGopher, and <span style="font-weight:bold;">anonymous Japan-bound person</span> for his continued partnership patience. Our tentative back on-line date is Friday?</p>
<p align="center"><a href="http://www.offthemarkcartoons.com/search-results/key/harddrive/"><img src="http://nickgray.net/images/hard_drive_magnate.gif" alt="A little funny?" border="0"></a></p>Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084465442514843932noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11789843.post-1113761773908947362005-04-17T10:46:00.000-07:002005-04-17T11:30:17.093-07:00Recovery Gossip, Part 3<p>
<img src="http://nickgray.net/images/tinyscrappy.gif" alt="I thought we could use a cute picture after all those rainclouds and death." align="right" hspace="4" vspace="6">Things with BuddyGopher are looking a lot better today. While waiting to see if our away message database can be recovered, Marek has been working in overdrive to piece together assorted code fragments to nearly rebuild the entire system. I think he even pulled an all-nighter in Warsaw on Friday night waiting to recompile some libraries?</p>
<p>Side note: In order to see <a href="http://lse.sourceforge.net/epoll/#pipetestres">performance gains from running epoll</a>, we had to be running the 2.6 Linux kernel. <span style="font-style:italic;">poll and epoll are ways of having a large number of file descriptors (sockets, in our case) and being able to know which of them are ready for reading and/or writing.</span> With our gargantuan live Buddy List, scalable performance gains like this are clutch.</p>Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084465442514843932noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11789843.post-1113663315484359732005-04-16T07:52:00.000-07:002005-04-16T10:31:28.293-07:00Recovery Gossip, Part 2<a href="http://www.eth0.us/">John Wigle</a> is using his dedicated server expertise to help BuddyGopher troubleshoot with our web hosting provider. John notes below that <span style="font-weight:bold;">some things just don't add up</span>.
<blockquote><font size="2">
Date: Apr 15, 2005 11:50 PM<br>
Subject: Hard drive problem<br>
The problem started last night when an incorrect move command was issue
causing the server to crash, the user knows he did it and that is not the
issue. A restore was ordered for the server since it was going to take more
time to recover it then just restore it. We requested that the old drive be
placed into the server as is commonly done so that the drives information
could be recovered. Up until this point the server had never had any trouble
with the disk drive in the server and no warning messages were ever
generated. When the server was brought back up the tech reported that the
drive's circuit board had fried and the drive was not recognized by the
system. What does not make sense is that the tech said he could physically
see the burnt chip. I know that static electricity can fry a circuit board
but it should not leave a physical mark as described in a ticket. The only
other thing that comes to mind is that somehow it was exposed to some sort
of high voltage. This is what does not make sense, the drive that failed
should never have left the box and only a single cable switched. Would you
be able to look into this issue and perhaps see if anything else can be
done? I just find it hard to imagine how this happened and want to make sure
that the drive was not misplaced or switched.
<br><br>
Unfortunately like too many servers this user did not have any backups and
there was no copy of the important data. I do realize this is completely the
users fault, we just want to make sure that everything has been done.</font>
</blockquote>Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084465442514843932noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11789843.post-1113606034027688512005-04-15T16:00:00.000-07:002005-04-16T10:32:51.833-07:00Recovery Gossip<p>Well, the opinion right now is that BuddyGopher is <strong>totally borked</strong> for at least the next one week. Come back then, or continue reading this blog now for hot recovery gossip.</p>
<p>The server that we all work on died today. What follows is the open trouble ticket with EV1Servers.net, our dedicated hosting provider.
<blockquote><font size="2">
4/15/2005 9:29:38 AM<br>
We are now working on your ticket. And will update you as soon as possible.
<br><br>
4/15/2005 10:56:20 AM<br>
Your original master drive is no good. Not able to be slave. The restore has be completed and your server is online.
<br><br>
4/15/2005 5:04:05 PM<br>
DataCenter<br>
investigating issue
<br><br>
4/15/2005 5:38:52 PM
Unfortunately the drive is physically damaged, showing a burned chip on the drive board. The drive will not spin and can not be recognized by the server. We have forwarded your ticket to management for any other data recovery options.
</font></blockquote></p>Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084465442514843932noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11789843.post-1113567236370946172005-04-15T05:10:00.000-07:002005-04-15T05:52:27.046-07:00One character mistake.<p><img src="http://nickgray.net/images/reaper.gif" alt="A grim situation." align="right">How could a missed 'spacebar' key take down a web server? I'm sure there are lots of ways, but here is one that we found:
<blockquote><span style="font-weight:bold;">mv db /* ./</span></blockquote>
instead of:
<blockquote><span style="font-weight:bold;">mv db/* ./</span></blockquote>
When issued as root, things get nasty.</p>
<p>EV1 is in the process of restoring the BuddyGopher server after this catastrophic accident. <span style="font-style:italic;">Our production server is a sweet little HP P4 2.0Ghz running Redhat Enterprise on two 80GB HDs and 1.5GB of RAM.</span> BuddyGopher should be back on-line later this weekend.</p>Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084465442514843932noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11789843.post-1113431932778897612005-04-13T14:53:00.000-07:002005-04-13T16:48:57.510-07:00We're working on it.<p><img src="http://nickgray.net/images/raincloud.gif" hspace=10 vspace=5 border=0 align="right">As a result of ongoing scalability tests, a few away messages might not have been collected from friends on your BuddyGopher BuddyList last night.</p>
<p><span style="font-style:italic;">If you happen to be a BerkeleyDB expert or an aspiring hack, <a href="mailto:buddygopher@gmail.com">drop us an e-mail</a>! <a href="http://www.kingeri.com/">Marek</a> could use a Concurrent Data Store friend.</span></p>
<p>In other news...
<ul><li><span style="font-weight:bold;">History Reduction</span><br> We have limited the Away Message history page to only display the last seven away messages. <a href="http://www.ogghelp.com/dsmith/">Dustin Smith</a> suggested that we extend our history timeline to infinity. We can do that soon.</li>
<li><span style="font-weight:bold;">New Favorites Feature</span><br> Just another good excuse to play around with XMLHttpRequest techniques? Nope. This was a user suggestion to curb problems with the limited availability of Away Message history. You can save unlimited Favorite messages, and over time we hope it'll turn into something like an Away Message yearbook. We definitely do not have any plans to delete the messages that you add to your Favorites list.</li>
<li><span style="font-weight:bold;">MyDict bot</span><br> Our dictionary bot is not very stable. We didn't expect it to be so popular and are considering opening it up to get developer feedback.</li></ul>
Do you have an idea for how to make BuddyGopher better? <a href="http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=11789843&postID=111309824209914677">Post it here</a>.</p>Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084465442514843932noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11789843.post-1113193361984023492005-04-10T21:19:00.000-07:002005-04-10T21:39:52.453-07:00MyDict is an AIM Dictionary Bot<p><a href="aim:goim?screenname=MyDict"><span style="font-weight:bold;font-size:2em;">MyDict</span></a> is an AIM bot that we built as a test-of-theory. You can query MyDict for English dictionary results from your Danger Sidekick (<span style="font-style:italic;">or any other AIM-enabled mobile device</span>). <span style="font-weight:bold;">MyDict</span> works on the desktop, too, but <a href="http://www.ibiblio.org/webster/">our dictionary results</a> aren't as current as other on-line dictionary sources.</p>
<p>As you may have noticed from using <span style="font-weight:bold;">BuddyGopher</span>, we take pride in returning fast, text-only results. One of the reasons that MyDict is so good at what it does is that we locally cache all of the dictionary definitions in an SQL database. This local database eliminates the need to query a central dictionary server.</p>
<p>I was considering offering a Wikipedia bot, but figured that the content was not as conducive to SMS-length messages. <span style="font-style:italic;">Maybe we could add a hyperlink at the end of MyDict results to a Wikipedia search?</span> For a great implementation of a website integrating Wikipedia content, check out <a href="http://www.answers.com/topic/do-not-resuscitate">what Answers.com does</a>.</p>Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084465442514843932noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11789843.post-1113098242099146772005-04-09T18:55:00.000-07:002005-04-09T18:57:22.100-07:00Feature RequestsGot an idea of how we can make BuddyGopher better? This is the place for BuddyGopher feature requests and general suggestions.Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084465442514843932noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11789843.post-1112897593469630962005-04-07T11:07:00.000-07:002005-04-17T12:09:12.870-07:00Presence Indicators<p>Your IM client is silently broadcasting a handfull of presence indicators to all of the buddies on your BuddyList. These indicators tell us to what degree you are available for chatting. Different states of presence include,</p>
<ul>
<li> offline,
</li><li> online,
</li><li> idle,
</li><li> away,
</li><li> away + idle
</li><li> Ready to Engage <em>(for example, on Skype as "Skype Me")</em>
</li></ul>
<p>In <a href="http://nicholastodd.com/buddygopher/">the BuddyGopher Development Wiki</a>, you'll see us refer to these presence broadcasts as buddy_in notifications.</p>
<p>User software only needs to broadcast its presence state once, when it has changed. When you put up an Away Message on the AOL Instant Messenger network, your software broadcasts a presence notification to the AOL servers that says, "<span style="font-weight: bold;">Hey! I'm away.</span>" and "<span style="font-weight: bold;">Here is my Away Message: <span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">x</span>x<span style="color: rgb(255, 204, 0);">x</span><span style="color: rgb(153, 51, 153);">x</span></span>" These messages go to the AIM servers, and then the AIM servers tell everybody who has you on their BuddyList that you are now in an Away state.</p>
<p>Some clients are notoriously terrible about re-broadcasting their presence information over and over and over again. It's akin to calling your boyfriend and saying, "<span style="font-weight:bold;">Hey! I'm bored!</span>" every commercial break. A few versions of Trillian had problems like this. I have seen Trillian clients continuously broadcast their state once every minute. For one or two hundred buddies on your personal BuddyList, this is not a problem. For a system like BuddyGopher, where we have the largest BuddyList in the world (<span style="font-style:italic;">69,190 buddies at the time of this post</span>), accidentally <a href="http://www.answers.com/loquacious&r=67">loquacious</a> IM applications cause us to consume a lot of extra processing power.</p>
<p>Most people use the standard AIM client, which is <span style="font-weight:bold;">the right thing to do</span>.</p>Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18084465442514843932noreply@blogger.com0