It looks like Powerset was sold to Microsoft for $100 million. Such acquisitions remind me of all of the crazy buyouts by Yahoo. When Google spent its money on cool loss-leaders, such as Youtube, Yahoo scrambled to find basic technologies to make the company work. This is an admission that Live search is so bad that it views the poor offering by Powerset to be good technology. The worst part of this deal is that Live search is not that bad, but it shows very poor judgment to reach for straws like this.
A recent set of searches confirmed what I already believed, that the technology is not worth much. I searched for myself. I was not on the list. In fact, there is a strange inverse long-tail effect. All I saw was Inspector Gadget and sometimes Playboy video director David Kellogg. Not that I have anything against the film maker, but the average American probably *meant* the director, and that’s all you get. Goodbye long tail, hello average meaning. Then there’s usability.
Clicking on one of the down arrows gives me an infinite swirling Web 2.0 wait signal. It never stopped. Clicking on another down arrow gives me a strange window that can almost be scrolled, but only slowly. It shows you where in a theoretical page layout without pictures where the text might be found if the source page had no pictures. I know they mean to show thumbnails, but they’re not. They are semantically similar. That’s very clever.
The site is slow. Perhaps it’s the Ruby on Rails. The usual search took 4 seconds. You could do 16 Google queries by then.
I tried the query, “manamana muppet video with subtitles in swedish”. Yahoo, Live and Google all showed me the correct video as the first result. Yes, the subtitles were in Swedish. Powerset showed no results. The least this company could do is download and index filler just in case. A helpful link asked, “Did you mean monomania muppet video with subtitles in swedish?” Clicking on this link also gave zero results. There’s just no winning with these people. I thought, maybe a small company like Powserset just does not have the resources. I tried Searchme, and it also gave me the correct result. Ask had the correct result. I think what we have here is the worst web search engine anyone can currently use.
I knew it was only a matter of time before a pedantic database supporter would chime in that mapreduce is not the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Mapreduce is very cool, and the last people likely to understand this are database programmers.
What is mapreduce?
Mapreduce stems from functional programing, such as Scheme. At the University of Illinois, I thought the CS program did students a disservice by teaching them Scheme. Apparently not. The simplest map reduce function I can think of is counting words.
every good boy does good
Let’s create a map function that simply places a one (1) next to each word and sorts it.
(boy, 1)
(does, 1)
(every, 1)
(good, 1)
(good, 1)
Next let’s create a reduce function that adds the number for non-unique keys.
(boy, 1)
(does, 1)
(every, 1)
(good, 2)
That’s mapreduce. If you had 1 trillion words to count, mapreduce becomes more useful. The data can start on many nodes, then return counted and sorted to many nodes. Even better, numbers are not necessary here. URLs can be added for both keys and values, such as (”www.amazon.com”,”ebay.com”). Using this model, reverse links can be counted, monte carlo simulations can run, and the result is page rank. There are many uses. This does not include every coding problem, but it opens many doors for formerly difficult problems.
Why would database people not understand this?
Database folks appear to be in a rut. They are overly concerned with optimization. They create the index, continue to add to the index, and retrieve data very quickly using the index. What mapreduce does appears wasteful. It creates the index once, cannot add to the index, and throws away all of the work each time it is run. I think someone in the Hadoop world should solve this problem of throwing away the index, but that’s only an optimization. Optimizations do not count where a paradigm shift occurred. Now from the article.
The database community has learned the following three lessons from the 40 years that have unfolded since IBM first released IMS in 1968.
* Schemas are good.
* Separation of the schema from the application is good.
* High-level access languages are good.
Are schemas good? This implies that data should be strongly typed. Now we are getting into the strongly-typed argument that seems never to be won between Java and C vs. Perl and PHP. My guess by extension is that Perl and PHP are bad and Hadoop is bad as well.
Schemas and applications could be separated, but that makes sense only in a database world. In mapreduce, the programmer is given control over his data. It’s called freedom. This also sounds too much like MVC arguments. Yes, databases and MVC save money in some cases, but in other cases, they just hold back creativity and development.
High-level languages are good. I agree. In a way, mapreduce programs are written in a high level language in all cases. The loop that you think you write in Java or C is actually torn apart and run on many nodes. I only appears that the loop runs on one machine, yet it runs on many machines in tiny pieces.
Some of you out there should try a little mapreduce programing and see how it screws with your mind. It’s wonderful to feel different about a loop. I feel just as good doing this as when I first learned SQL.
1. Can you comment your code? No!
People ask me all the time if I can comment my code. I just won’t do it. Commenting my code simply invites lesser programmers to come along and steal my job. Remember this, commenting your code will only get you fired.
2. Can you use this/that design pattern? No!
Design patterns merely sell books and create bloated code. The answer is no. Too many devs rely on a singleton that really should have been a global. Why does no one praise global variables anymore? They are all scared by the design pattern mafia.
3. Can you stop using a global variable called temp4 and be more descriptive? No!
I’m old school. If you can’t remember all of your variables and what they do, you should not be writing code. Pure and simple, you should just sit down and remember this stuff.
4. Can you use this/that language for this project? No!
Assembly is good enough for Steve Gibson. It’s good enough for me. People who do not code in assembly regularly simply lose touch of reality quickly. Then people ask why I even need an assembler. Why not machine code? Machine code is never ever portable!
5. Can you get me some coffee? No!
People think because you are not a high-paid, suit wearing consultant, you have to do everything for them. I stop at coffee. I will get you water if I am getting a cup, but not coffee. It’s too demeaning.
6. Can you take a shower? No!
I’ve been here for 22 hours. I don’t have time to take a friggin shower.
7. Can you write down how the config node works for the rest of us? No!
See 1 above.
8. Can you fix your buffer overflow or memory leak? No!
I can find many better things to do than fix a memory leak that probably came from some else’s library.
9. Can you write this as a reusable library? No.
Why would anyone ever want to use my code?
10. Can you write your code on more than one line? No!
There is a reason for semicolons to exist. They separate code. If you can’t read my code, you should get emacs or some IDE to format it for you.
Strangely, one programmer once worked with me who said no to maybe 8 of these requests. I was flabbergasted. Here was a real-life Bartelby that refused to do everything that comes natural to most coders. I have seen multiple functions written on one line. That’s fine, but very hard to debug. I’m still not sure what to due with my temp3 and temp4 variables. Maybe they mean something. For the record I never asked another coder to get me coffee.
After Twitter’s falling apart during Mac World Expo, I though about Ted Stevens.
Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got… an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially. They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes.
From the why-not department, I server a Facebook app from Firefox. This opens up more fluid interaction between the browser and your friends on Facebook. In this case I produced a search engine for your local bookmarks. There is no reason why you can’t just start chatting through your profile page. Here’s how I did it.
You can grab the SJS code here.
I placed this code at htdocs/fb/postmarks/index.sjs in my POW server.
Maybe more interesting than the code is how I did it. I set up a similar search engine written in PHP, starting from Facebook’s mock AJAX application. I dumped Facebook’s query string to a file. I then replayed those parameters using curl to see the response. The parameter “mockfbmltext” appeared related to AJAX text. The rest of the application was just HTML. That makes things easy. On the Facebook side, they have the guts to proxy all of my content and re-write it. All javascript is scanned. The div tags are rewritten. Proxies and dynamic rewriting is slow, but it works.
Here’s the query string part of my code.
<?sjs
pow_highlight();
var textin = ““;
if(pow_server.GET[’mockfbmltext‘]) {
textin = pow_server.GET[’mockfbmltext‘];
} else if(pow_server.GET[’mockfbmltext‘] != undefined) {
document.write(”<font color=’red‘>Please enter a search</font>“);
pow_exit();
I signed up for a Facebook API key, then filled in the blanks. These are the values I used.
Application Name: Portmarks
App Server: http://davidkellogg.com/fb/portmarks/
Canvas Page URL: portmarks
Use FBML
Website
… added on Facebook?: Yes
Who can add…: Users, All Pages
Post add URL: http://davidkellogg.com/fb/portmarks/
Post-remove URL: http://davidkellogg.com/portmarks/
Default FBML: hello
Side Nav URL: http://apps.facebook.com/portmarks
If I have a bookmarks folder called “private”, those are hidden from Facebook users. If I have a “public” folder, those are the only ones shown. Once you change the code to point to your own server (CHANGE YOURSERVER.com to your IP), it should work.
My goal was to display public and private bookmarks in my Facebook profile. It was a nice proof of concept. It would be great to see even more interaction between the browser and Facebook.
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:16 am by David Kellogg
I think Silicon Valley needs a folk song. Somehow, the crazy life here needs to be summed up by a disconnected pony-tail-sporting non-blue-shirt-wearing folk singer. In lieu of that, we have “Here Comes Another Bubble” by the Richter Scales. Thanks, TechCrunch.
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:03 am by David Kellogg
People say the Semantic Web produces nothing. I counter that it produces many useful panel discussions to entertain many MIT graduates.
Panel discussions in the web world are omni-important in producing great technology. Terry Chay has a rundown of our Web Version History. For those too lazy to click, here they are.
Notes:
Web 4.0. Potato Farming
The semantic web will relay all human knowledge between computers, leaving you and me and all of California with nothing to do but eat at McDonald’s. The resulting need for ginormous fries will lead the best and brightest into Potato Farming.
Web 5.0. The Singularity. After The Singularity the Machine is Us.
Web 6.0. ????. The whole of humanity, having been downloaded to the computer, gets caught in a honeypot.
Web 7.0. Profit!
Panel discussions predate all leaps in electronic technology. Here are a few examples.
1945 Trinity detonation — Panel discussion
1947 Bardeen and Brattain transistor — Panel discussion
1962 Nick Holonyak LED — Panel discussion
2007 Facebook Apps — Panel discussion
As you can see, all great technology comes from like-minded individuals discussing current topics to move science forward. Innovation does not come from a small set of smart and creative individuals, but rather, from talking endlessly about the fine points of maxcardinality vs. mincardinality and encouraging others to do the same.
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:06 am by David Kellogg
Terry Chay seems like he’s holding back with his criticism of OpenSocial. What can I add about a Google project that is neither open nor social?
First, the list of exclusions. Yahoo was not invited because Google thought of it. Tagged is missing because Plaxo was invited. Facebook was excluded because Myspace was invited. Ebay was excluded because Google wants to destroy Paypal.
We need a moratorium on non-open self-proclaimed open projects. If you see “Open” in CaMeLCaps, it’s not open, it’s just Web 2.0. The terms of service do not appear “open.”
Google’s version of open is that you are open, and they benefit. Google wanted access to Myspace’s users to complement tiny Orkut, and Myspace complied. Google’s terms of service reads like a closed document. It starts out
“you may use the API as part of a commercial or non-commercial enterprise.”
But then it gets out of hand.
“Google may, from time to time and at its sole and absolute discretion …”
That’s not open, and and in what way does it include Plaxo and the others?
In the end, OpenSocial is just Google’s releasing their broken, easily-hackable Orkut code to the non-embargoed companies.
With these terms of service, can I, can you, add to their API? I really doubt it.
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:10 pm by David Kellogg
Terry Chay has a running joke if he does not remember an Asian girl’s name, he just admits he’s a banana, and that to him, all Asians look alike. I think if you are a Ruby developer you can tell these sites apart but really, why do all Ruby sites look alike?
The Rails sites here appear to be templates for many other ugly sites. I will start with the worst, then I will get to the RoRing Rules.
Big Patents has Big Text. Not surprisingly, they use CamelCaps. The site brags about some wonderful patent graph. Why don’t they show it instead of huge text?
This breaks every rule of good style. It is the anti-site. So ugly, it is almost charming. It follows the first RoR Rule, Big.
1. Big text
2. Colors that hurt
3. Grids rule!
4. White space overdone
Jobster. Find your dream job. It has many large words. Jobster uses colors that hurt. This image does not do it justice. Click on the link and visit the eye pain.
LoanBack is a boring grid.
Perfect grid. Mechanical grid. I would love to look at eye tracking data for this. I have to read really hard and concentrate to see what the site is about. If I reached this through Stumble Upon, I would skip it, since I give most web sites 3 seconds before I try to leave.
This is another colors-that-hurt site, Economy in Crisis. Red white and blue never looked so bad. I like the stats on the left, though.
Now for something completely different. Some sites take time to boil their message down to a few meaningful words and graphics. They make the point right away. They are not, of course, written in Rails.
LinkedIn promotes professional and college connections.
In some ways I dislike the page, but it gets the job done with a non-grid triangle. The eye is drawn to singing up.
Facebook is about your social connections. Notice the blue, blue, blue, blue, green signup. It also gets the job done. It is also a non-RoR site.
If you look at enough Ruby on Rails sites, they begin to look alike. There is no reason for the large text or gaudy colors, yet they proliferate. I begin to wonder if the framework that is Rails removes all hope for a creatively refreshing and different looking site.
