State Department to Twitter: Keep Iranian tweets coming

Senior officials say the State Department is working with Twitter and other social networking sites to ensure Iranians are able to continue to communicate to each other and the outside world.

…they do want to make sure the technology is able to play its sorely-needed role in the crisis, which is why the State Department is advising social networking sites to make sure their networks stay up and running for Iranians to use them and helping them stay ahead of anyone who would try to shut them down.

For example, senior officials say the State Department asked Twitter to refrain for going down for periodic scheduled maintenance at this critical time to ensure the site continues to operate. Bureau’s and offices across the State Department, they say, are paying very close attention to Twitter and other sites to get information on the situation in Iran.

[From CNN blog]

Lately, programming has been turning into a tiny chore and I hope it doesn’t enlarge itself. I overcome it partially by adding interesting things to do into the project so it felt a little more fun and probably can gain myself a little more satisfaction. I define “interesting things” to be something I never done before and have a high chance of getting it right. However, these “interesting things” aren’t good for me because I ended up having to maintain these interesting things.

My work generally involves – development, maintaining. I think I am supposed to squeeze testing and planning in somewhere in the steps but I don’t give a crap about those management level definitions.

Development is always the more fun part. You make something in 10 hours and watch it work. However you may end up watching it work for 10 days leaving your eleventh day in front of the computer debugging for the next 5 hours. This process typically recurs and the base case is the termination of product.

I don’t have a good solution for it but I need a constant feed of “interesting things”. So during maintenance, I added in those “interesting things” which is really just a curse. These “interesting things” come back and haunt me; and I end up having to maintain these “interesting things”. And during the maintenance of these “interesting things”, I added…

Cadillac World Thorium Fuel Concept

Here’s another one from the world of unlimited conceptual design: the Cadillac World Thorium Fuel concept. Otherwise known as the Cadillac WTF. Created by Loren Kulesus, everything about the WTF has been created to last 100 years without maintenance. That’s the reason for the element number ninety, thorium: to act as a nuclear fuel powering batteries that would power the car.

Elsewhere, every major system is redundant in case of a failure. And the wheels don’t have individual tires – in fact, what’s located at each corner is one combined unit made up of six individual wheels. That gives you 24 wheels in total, and each wheel has its own induction motor. Said Kulesus, “The vehicle would require the tires to be adjusted every five years, but no material would need to be added or subtracted.” (Source: Autoblog)

Auto correction perhaps? Interesting concept.