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September 28, 2005
Site Searches
Robert Scoble (aka, the Scobleizer) has a recent blog entry that laments the current state of the art of web search technology. His gripe is mainly that the Toshiba site is not highly ranked (read highly relevant) in a search for "Toshiba Gigabeat". Dare Obasanjo follows up on this rant with the standard insightful and salient commentary on what "relevance" even means in the context of web search.
My very meager contribution here to both Scoble and the world is the well known hack to tell the search engine what site you are interested in. With Google you do this by adding "site:sitenamehere.com" to the search; below is the URL for the search in question with this minor modification ("site:toshiba.com"):
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Gigabeat+site%3Atoshiba.com&btnG=Google+Search
Interestingly, www.gigabeat.toshiba.com, the site he was looking for was first. The other major search engines must be capable of the same thing despite my complete disinterest in using a different engine.
While I am sure there are advances that can be made in search technology, the current state of the art is insanely better than the pre-Google days. I remember way back when (like 1997, remember Alta Vista?) telling my Dad that the web was such a melting pot of disorganized information that performing fine-grained research was like walking through the city dump with a metal detector. Fast forward to today and now I look up everything on Google (probably 10-15/searches per day), and I am consistently satisfied.
Today, the fine-grained tools are in place for advanced users (Click the advanced search link on major search pages) and the defaults, as Dare pointed out, are reasonable for the majority. Search technology has reached a very useful plateau and must now start working on making inferences on our searches in order to make the results more "relevant". This however requires the search engine to have a memory of your searches which brings in the problem of privacy and sheds a modicum of light on how complex this problem is. Until things get better though I am going to bask in the glory days we are living in: the days were nearly all the information I ever want is only 0.07 seconds away!
Posted by harris at 08:38 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 22, 2005
Why a Flash RSS Reader Won't Work
FlashInsider is hosting a contest to see who can "whip up the coolest Flash-based RSS reader". I have done some Flash development as a hobby and a few months ago I actually spent some time investigating how a Flash-based RSS reader would work. I got pretty far with it, but eventually hit a brick wall with how the mx.controls.TextArea component renders HTML.
To be candid this component does a very poor job with handling HTML. I noticed this with how it renders the HTML that was included in a couple RSS feeds: Engadget and ironically in Christophe Coenraets' weblog. These two feeds are important for two reasons. 1) Handling the Engadget feed is part of the contest and 2) Christophe is an employee of Macromedia and apparently wrote the aggregator that manifests the problem.
You can see the problem on CC's weblog by clicking this link, scrolling to the bottom of the page and clicking "Try It" under the Flex Blog Reader application. From CC's weblog click the entry entitled, "A Draggable, 'Minimizable/Maximizable', Configurable Panel Class". Note that after selecting that entry every other entry that you select has bullets; these bullets aren't in the original feed, but the TextArea component goes berserk after rendering this snippet of HTML.
My experience with rendering the item/description elements in the Engadget RSS feed was even worse! Images were flying every were, and the text was very poorly formatted. It will be interesting to see if someone comes up with a good solution to this problem (which, in summary, is being able to handle RSS feeds in the wild where you are never sure what you are going to get, even with a "structured" format). If they do it will certainly be with a heavily customized TextArea component or something completely new.
One last interesting thing to note. Flash runs in a browser that is built primary to render HTML; so for the TextArea component to really be able to handle HTML robustly, it would need to essentially act as a browser inside of a Flash movie that runs in a browser. Another option is to simply not masquerade as a component that can handle HTML.
p.s. I hope someone proves me wrong here and delievers something very cool!
Posted by harris at 12:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 11, 2005
Four Years Later
Today is September 11, 2005. Cheryl and I just finished watching "The Flight That Fought Back" on the Discovery channel. Seeing the reconstructed rendition of what happened on United Flight 93 was quite sad. However, it was also encouraging seeing heroes emerge. People who knew that there lives on earth would soon be over and that the best they could hope for was saving the lives of others.
Nearly everyone of the previous generation remembers where they were when JFK was shot. For my generation we all have indelible imprints of where we were on September 11, 2001 when we heard the news. For me I heard it from the radio station on my alarm clock at approximately 9 AM. I was laying on the floor at my trailer in Auburn, AL, waking up so I could head to Human Computer Interaction. After watching the news for several minutes I left to go to class; however, after hearing that the first tower collapsed on the radio, I never made it. Instead I spent the day stunned in front of the TV with friends.
Four years later it is still sad to reflect on those events, particularly when watching programs that discuss the real people that were involved, the fathers, husbands, wives, daughters, etc. And, equally as sad, is the realization that likely many more will die in this conflict... that despite all the advances of humanity in terms of technology and civilization, peace still seems as elusive as ever.
Posted by harris at 11:05 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
September 08, 2005
The First and Great Question
Graham has a recent entry on "Intelligent Design". One thing that Graham does not address in his discussion of Intelligent Design/Evolution is the very beginning: Where did matter come from? and... How did that very first single cell organism come into existence to kick off the evolutionary process? I believe these questions need to be answered prior to attempting the distillation process of how complex organisms came into existence.
This is a tougher question to answer with science. Why? Because science deals with phenomena that can be observed or that can be reproduced. This is a problem. No human was alive to observe matter coming from nothing; nor did anyone see the birth of a simple organism. Furthermore, by applying the scientific method, these phenomena cannot be reproduced. Sure scientists have made unfathomable strides in understanding and manipulating the physical world; but they have never created anything "ex nihilo" or out of nothing. When you walk into a laboratory it is never an empty room... it is fill with exquisitely precise instruments and technology. When a scientist does something interesting in an empty room that will be news!
I too am a logical person, convicted by facts and hard science. However, in answering some of the most difficult questions in life, real science simply breaks down and we are left with simply our reason. Did matter come from nothing? and did life come from that matter? or did some Being with superior intellect and power create the world and all that is in it? That is the most basic question of life, and left with that question, I believe in a Creator.
Now we can talk about the complexity of the universe! uh... just not right now. :-)
Posted by harris at 11:57 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Google Hires Al Gore?
When I saw this article, "Google hires 'father of the Internet'...", I wondered... Wow! I can't believe they hired Al Gore!!? :-) Riiiight. No they didn't hire Al. They did however, hire one of the real pioneers of the internet, Vinton Cerf, who was instrumental in developing the TCP/IP protocol suite that we now all take for granted. This is actually the holy grail of any technology... to become completely transparent. I wonder when the last time a teenager sent a message over AIM and thought, "Man!, the characters I just types were encoded into TCP packets before being transmitted... ". Gotta love it. Also gotta love Mr Cerf's new title at Google... "Chief Internet Evangelist". Sweet.
Posted by harris at 11:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack