inside Habbie's mind

• jobs are not protected against running concurrently (design issue)
• intervals are fixed (design issue)
• people tend to schedule the same job at the same time on whole clusters of machines (typical usage issue)

The second and third issue are closely related in that both cause undesirable load spikes because many things happen at the same time, either because of intervals phasing up or because of similar jobs running on a bunch of machines at the same time, perhaps hammering the network.

A specific pet peeve is Mailman Reminder Day. Firstly, I just don’t see the point; if my address is on a mailing list and that list is practically dead, I just don’t care. Secondly, it means every first of the month I have tens of reminders that I just delete. Some of these lists are busy — for those, the reminder is a minor nuisance. But many lists are extremely quiet (think software release announcements) and for some of these lists, the reminders are over 50% of the total mail volume. It’s so wasteful. Also, I can’t help but think that all those reminders being sent out at the same time (well, divided over 24 hours because of time zone differences) cannot be good for the mail ecosystem as a whole.

For issues two and three, Colm MacCárthaigh wrote a few great posts detailing why cron is bad, and showcasing one potential solution to the issues at hand. I suggest reading these posts fully, they are very insightful:

• Period Pain
• Period Pain part 2
• Period Pain 3

A simplified version of my workflow would look like this:

def post(entry):
  title = entry.title
  print "posting [%s]" % title
  api.PostUpdate(title) # api is a twitter Api object

feed = feedparser.parse(config["feed"])
for e in reversed(feed.entries):
  if not e.id in seen:
    post(e)

It’s the print statement. All the APIs I’m using have zero trouble with unicode, but print wants to encode for your terminal and it’ll usually assume that that is ASCII. My ‘debugging’ output actually broke the program. My workaround is to say title.encode("ascii","replace")

Brend on #python pointed out to me that the issue is not, exactly, print. The issue is interpolating title into a non-unicode string. Depending on environment, using print on the unicode object might in fact work. For those environments, saying print u"posting [%s]" % title could help. In my case however, I ran into the issue from cron with no locale set at all, so dumbing the string down to ascii is still the right thing to do.

Kiwi

Echofon

If I only had one account to manage, I could seriously consider switching to Echofon.

Nambu

If Echofon or Tweetie seem limited or minimal, Nambu is a great choice.

Note that adding an account to Nambu means you suddenly follow two extra accounts (@nambu and the developer). The checkbox to disable this behaviour doesn’t seem to work. Spammy if you ask me.

TweetDeck

Yoono

Conclusion

Update July 12th: I’ve switched to Nambu and I’m not switching back. Keyboard navigation is excellent (although a bit buggy at times). I do miss Tweetie’s Command-U to look at a specific user, but otherwise Nambu seems superior in many ways. I’ve updated the Nambu review above to account for bugfixes they made since.