swas blog

We are roughly one third of the way through changing what our links on twitter direct our users towards, and if all goes well we should have completed these changes within the next ten days. I would not encourage anyone to become too comfortable with the new pages, as they are only a temporary platform to work from. If swasalert.com is progressing, as it should, changes should be a normal part of everyday business. We have so many changes coming that I do not have time to list them all, but I should mention one that just occurred for iPhone users.

iPhone users are now redirected through Apple’s network whenever they click on a link from a warning, and while they still get the full details on the warning, they are cut off from access to the live radar that all our other users have readily available. This does not occur when iPhone users click on a link from an observation on any of our Twitter accounts. Until we get this bug fixed iPhone users will have to back up to the Twitter account they came from, and click on a link from an observation to view the radar.

I personally am an iPhone user, and I want to assure all the rest of them that we are working on this and will get it resolved eventually. I can guarantee you that we will fix this as this current set up is driving me over the edge. I believe the word I should employ on this matter is “simpatico”, to all other iPhone users.

For anyone experiencing difficulty over and above what is mentioned above with their iPhone, please remember to use Safari instead of the onboard browsers in your twitter client program. If you will click on your Safari browser in your app’s control panel immediately after you have clicked on one of our links, you should not have any trouble getting proper warnings, or viewing observations and radar.

I have been asked which programs we recommend and while I am quite fond of TwitterFon, I also utilize Twitterriffic and have had little difficulty other than very chubby fingers having to make repeated attempts at clicking on a link. I have test driven virtually every iPhone Twitter app available and all of them seem to work just fine, therefore I should remind everyone my recommendations are based largely upon personal preferences.

That and very large buttons.

–gisher

We have started limited testing of the new warning pages and if these tests work as planned you will see a full rollout begin early next week. Once the warning pages are fully wired on all accounts, we will return back to the observation pages and complete the conversion on the remainder of accounts that are currently not yet upgraded. If you should need help with these pages there is a link on the upper left side “Help with this page” and that should cover most of your questions. If you require further assistance, please use the Tech Support link on any of the pages on swasalert.com

By now most people are aware that Twitter was hit today with a massive denial of service attack. This attack has also affected Swaslert.com and may continue affecting all third parties for days. The thinking here is that if this tracks a while, we could use some time off anyway, so we might just make lemonade out of this attack. The thinking is also running along the lines that Twitter was woefully unprepared for this attack. Personally I am betting this will cause Twitter to prepare themselves for future attacks, which would be entirely prudent.

We here at Swasalert.com are in the very early stages of development but I can assure you that we are building Swasalerts.com with DOS attacks in mind. We have not yet deployed even a third of the techniques we plan to use to preempt such attacks, and I am not about to discuss them in detail either, but rest assured, we have long ago burned the midnight oil on this one. We do intend to be far more protected from similar attacks than conventional websites are and if all goes well, we will eventually have a backup capability that can weather even Mother Twitter taking another hit like today’s in the future.

I will not prattle on much further about this matter other than to say it is past time that all countries and ISP’s start reacting to these attacks like they are high crimes. I wrote extensively about this subject years ago on blogs that are now locked down for security reasons, and not much has changed since then in the way of attitudes, or in methods used to deal with these attacks.

We either need to reign these thugs in, or prepare to whip out the oil lamps and fire the manual presses up again. Now that it only costs about $70 to order a DOS attack online, if we do not nip this in the bud now, we will all shortly be asking my Amish neighbors here in Pennsylvania for tips on how to live in an environment that lacks electricity.

-gisher

Update: Just got word Twitter will be spending well over the next 24 hours switching third parties such as Swasalerts.com back on.  We appreciate your patience and understanding.

Update, Part 2: For those reliant upon API with Twitter the troubles continue.  Here, directly from the horse’s mouth is the latest update, and explanation on why our feeds are still moving like molten lava.

One of our followers asked a very good question over at SWAS_Blog today. She wanted to know why we didn’t put forecasts in our tweets.  Truth of the matter is, we just retransmit observations and warnings that the National Weather Service puts out in the public domain. While there are some short-term forecasts included within those feeds, they are not globally available, and they are “short-term forecasts”.

The fact is, even if forecasts were available for each and every location, chances are we would not put them into the feeds. Why on earth do you want a full forecast sent to your cell phone while you’re driving down Interstate 590? What I would want in that situation was some sort of heads up that the weather is turning really ugly where I am, or in the direction I’m heading. The same would be true if I was working on my computer at the home, or at the office.

The forecast you get from your local television station every night has a tendency to deviate, sometimes drastically from their projections of what your weather will be like tomorrow. If you have been paying attention, our weather has been changing; tornadoes touching down around Christmas time, and tornado watches in extreme northern New England have not been the norm over the last 150 years.

It doesn’t really matter which side of the global warming argument you choose to take, no matter what is causing these changes, they are happening whether we want them to or not, and this means more volatility in our weather. A complete weather forecast for the next 24 hours sent by anyone to your cell phone is at best viewed as a given percentage of a possibility, not a certainty. In this volatile and ever-changing climate we now live in, the bizarre has become the norm, and rapid changes are common, and that percentage keeps shrinking .

Observations are your first notice, call them a trip wire if you will, that things are changing outside your window. Watches and warnings let you know that things have changed, and not for the better. Short-term forecasts are a head’s up that in a few hours conditions are going to change on you. These are the foundations of what we put into our feeds, not what the next three days are going to look like.

The last hundred and 150 years have been one of the calmest weather periods in the history of this planet. Those days are long gone now, and they took with them the stable climate we lived in, as well as one heck of an easy job for a meteorologist. You need to pay attention to weather observations and weather warnings more than you ever did before. You need to use multiple sources to monitor these changing conditions. SWAS is one of those sources. Use all of them wisely and stay safe.

-gisher