This is a really interesting discussion on Twitter, its use of Ruby for its message queue system, and their move to Scala for their new backend. The original piece makes a lot of assumptions IMO, and by looking at the comments seems to be wrong in a lot of them. And that is why the post is interesting. A few Twitter developers stop in to make some comments. Make sure you read them all.

Just a little rant here… It seems pretty foolish that Ubuntu does not come with MP3 playback support out of the box on a fresh install. Regardless of politics or philosophies of open source and free/free software, this seems pretty lame.

How many users have MP3s? How many potential converters to Linux will be turned off when they can’t just play their music? How many will actually want to go and search on how to install the restricted packages, just to get some music? Yes, its simple to do. Yes, you can use other formats. But seriously? Besides, not everyone wants to spend time to get something so basic to work, or perhaps does no even have the knowledge to do so regardless of how simple.

My feelings are based on the annoyance of having to do this on my new Ubuntu install, and every time I need to do this it just brings the annoyance to the surface again and again. Enough already…

I should mention that I HATE April 1st. My RSS Feed list includes a lot of news sites so I can, /gasp, get NEWS! I dont want to have to guess whether what I am reading is real or not. Some sites are worse than others (I am looking at your Slashdot). Maybe my sense of humor is lacking, but I just want to read about news events.

eEye has a great little tool (and its free) that will scan your network for computers vulnerable and infected with Conficker (variant C). Only issue with the scanner, is it does not seem to work on Vista (either as the host or to check for vulnerability).