Archive for March, 2008
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008
Introduction to Information Retrieval
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~hinrich/information-retrieval-book.html
this book is fantastic if you want to understand the basics of search.
I would with a lot of search experts, and by working though this book I am able to have basic conversations with them.
Intend to do a summary of this book at some stage.
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008
Patriot Act Haunts Google Service
Is the Patriot act causing a similar problem to the old law of US companies not being able to sell certificates higher than 40bits. One in which non-US companies have an advantage - like Thawte which was producing > 40bit keys for international sale when the US could not? Will web 3.0 consist of apps […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008
Google crawls links in gmail emails
http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/03/24/1959201.shtml
an interesting comment on slashdot - indicating that will crawl urls seen in gmail emails.
“Nothing, absolutely nothing, stops Google from harvesting everything they can get their hands on- and they have the storage systems and human expertise to do it.
Case and point: I emailed a link to a wiki I had just set up to […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Friday, March 21st, 2008
being a good employee
At the moment there seem to be two opposing mentalities in how to work
Mechamism 1: Prioritize and escalate
When someone gives you a task to do either answer with:
either say -”no, that is not in my priority list” or “to you manager - what is the priority on this”
When you encounter a problem,
For example:
Your manager […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Friday, March 21st, 2008
flipping - why you cant have sticky sessions with akamai
You could run your UGC website active-active akamai (ie. servers in both colos are serving traffic load) - Lets say the colos are: west coast and east coast. The problem is that if you site has user generated content(UGC) - some users (1%) will find themselves being thown from one set of servers to the […]
1 Comment » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Friday, March 21st, 2008
Mahalo.com a really bad idea
http://mahalo.com/ are these founders and investors on drugs? Its a hand crafted search engine targeted at head queries - but as anyone who works in search or has read “the long tail” knows - head queries do not cover a large percentage of total queries (around 2% of queries). Ok, so perhaps you can […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Friday, March 21st, 2008
Getting kcachegrind compiling, ubuntu’s packaging system rocks
After spending days trying to get kcachegrind to compile on freebsd and RHEL, I managed to get it compiling on ubuntu within an hour or so.
I love the fact that it knows that the “dot” executable is part of the graphviz package. So it doesn’t say command not found. It says: if you want to […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Friday, March 21st, 2008
Some random comments
I got into some interesting conversations with people at work.
Metric for “cross pollination across your products”
Google struggles to get average users to cross pollinate from the main product (search) - to the other products (mail). Yahoo! also has a plethora of separate sites - what is each companies transfer rate from one product to the […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Friday, March 21st, 2008
Every UGC website - a stratergy for spam protection
Web 2.0 and basically the act of allowing users to publish content created two problems:
Scaling your website is harder -you couldn’t just take a feed from a news provider and generate some static html files and put them on a harddrive and serve them on request. The pages are much more dynamic.
A massive spam protection […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Friday, March 21st, 2008
Amazing graphics
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Friday, March 21st, 2008
Growth in popularity of visualisation tools
IBM Many eyes project allows users to upload and share datasets and then to use the tools to graph and visualize the results - others are free to use the datasets and draw other conclusions. Interesting idea of Debate on factual data - rather then opinion.
Google visualisation api
OSG Boomerang tool hit the “play” button in […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Friday, March 21st, 2008
A standard roadmap for scaling websites
Two articles on scaling myspace and ebay
http://www.addsimplicity.com.nyud.net:8080/downloads/eBaySDForum2006-11-29.pdf
http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/12/talk-on-ebay-architecture.html “The parallels with Amazon are remarkable. Like Amazon, eBay started with a two-tiered architecture. Like Amazon, they split the website into a cluster in the late 1990’s, followed soon after by partitioning the databases.”
This “inside my space” article give a simple road map of the steps the […]
1 Comment » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Tuesday, March 18th, 2008
database table naming conventions - singular or plural
For database servers that support defining entity synonyms, make everyone happy by giving tables singular names
1 Comment » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Monday, March 17th, 2008
Googlewacking and nemesis.com
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Monday, March 17th, 2008
apple are chasm crossers - iphone SDK the tipping point for mobile
Apple - QuickTime - Apple March 6 Event
This presentation has to be one of the slickest most amazing things I have ever seen.
apple did not invent the phone developer network - companies like brew, nokia, symbian messed around with this for years
It just shows you how apple is good at taking something that the common […]
No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie
Thursday, March 6th, 2008
Cool explanantion of how the wii remote works
Wii remote has an infrafred camera in it - so it can track a led light source
