Tumblr is Down, Hipsters Wander Outside
Popular blogging service/social network, Tumblr went dark yesterday with a cryptic message:
We'll be back shortly. We're working quickly to recover from an issue in one of our database clusters. We're incredibly sorry for the inconvenience.
This is nothing out of the ordinary for Tumblr as it faces the challenge of scaling to accommodate it's growing popularity, and much like Twitter in its first couple years, the user base has generally come to accept frequent brief outages.
Deconstructing the Classic RPG Video Game
As a long time fan of the Final Fantasy series, starting with FFIV for Super Nintendo, once or twice a year I pick up one of Squares titles and play through to the end. It's no mystery why I find these games fun, they're part strategy, and part storytelling in a unique and engaging way that is different from may other mediums. Unlike a movie, some of these games take 40-80 hours to complete, and unlike a book, the entire experience is engaging with audio, sometimes video, text, and interactivity.
Ditching MAMP For VMWare & Debian
As a web developer on the Mac, I've long had a love for the wonderful PHP/MySql development tool for the Mac, MAMP. It's a web environment in a box, it takes two seconds to get up and running, and for many projects, it's all you need.
