Everything, Everything

Wow, a second yellow card after only 9 minutes. This is literally a game changing advantage for Arsenal. #COYG

A while ago Twitter allowed tweets that were longer than the original 140 characters. Some bits of a tweet no longer counted towards the character count and they doubled it to 280 characters. To prevent breaking legacy applications they require an additional parameter when interacting with the API. You can find more details here.

It took me a while to update my own site to use the new API response, with the full_text, but I finally did that. The main thing was modifying the database to cope with the longer response. I then noticed I wasn't performing a Unicode regular expression, which broke a recent hashtag, which I've now fixed.

Having supported Arsenal since the George Graham era, the idea of a new manager doesn't scare me. Wenger, like Herbert Chapman, should be praised and respected for transforming the club and winning major trophies; but a change was overdue. #MerciArsène

Also known as the "40GB should be enough space for the system volume" problem. For the last several months I've been keeping an eye on the disk space on one of my servers. I've used many tricks to temporarily save space, from moving most of the pagefile to more severe changes such as moving the SoftwareDistribution (with a junction point). More recently I decided to use compcln.exe to make the service pack permanent to help free up a bit more space. But with updates from Microsoft getting bigger (and the winsxs folder getting bloated) over the years, I had to do something more permanent to avoid the need for this regular maintenance.

It would have been simple within Disk Management if the other volume wasn't inside an extended partition. It would have been simpler if I had another disk (or volume in a better place) that I could temporarily migrate the data onto. In the end I zipped many gigs of data into much smaller files (text compresses really well) and moved them to another host over Remote Desktop. That allowed me to delete the volume and then the extended partition so I could finally expand the system drive to a much more reasonable size for the next two years (unless Microsoft release over 160GB of patches in the next two years, which seems very unlikely even for them). I've even put the SoftwareDistribution folder back to normal.

But I'm still going to procrastinate over my fileserver. There's less than 1TB of free space on the array and I'll have to think about buying even bigger disks soon. But it won't happen for a while. The next task will be much more interesting and rewarding as I plan on finally upgrading my graphics card. It should be cooler, quieter, use less power, and run significantly faster.