postlogic's privates

The tech press is in a buzz about the new search company, Cuil (pronounced "cool"). Most people don't like it much, but are using it as an excuse to rhapsodize about Google and why they took such a commanding lead in the search market, PageRank and huge data centers and all those other good things Google has.

Not to run down PageRank or other Google inventions -- Google does an excellent job at search these days (sometimes spam-SEO sites get ahead of them, but so far they've always caught up) -- but that's not how I remember it. Google's victory over other search engines was a lot simpler and more basic than that. What did they bring?

Logical AND.

Most of you have probably forgotten it since we take Google so for granted now, but back in the bad old days when search engines were just getting started, they all did it the wrong way. If you searched for red fish, pretty much all the early search engines would give you all the pages that had either red or fish anywhere in them. The more words you added, the less likely you were to find anything that was remotely related to what you wanted.

Google was the first search engine that realized the simple fact (obvious to all of us who were out there actually doing searches) that what people want when they search for multiple words is only the pages that have all the words. It was the search engine where it actually made sense to search for more than one word, the first where you could realistically narrow down your search to something fairly specific.

Even today, most site searches don't do this right. Try searching for several keywords on your local college's web site, or on a retail site that doesn't license Google (or Yahoo or other major search engine) technology.

Logical and. The killer boolean for search engines.

(I should mention Dave, when he heard this, shook his head. "No. Google took over because it was the first engine that just gave you simple text that you could read, without spinning blinking images and tons of other crap cluttering up the page." He has a point -- that was certainly another big improvement Google brought, which hardly anybody else seems to have realized even now. Commercial sites get more and more cluttered, and nobody notices that Google, the industry leader, eschews all that crap and sticks with simplicity. I don't agree that's why they won, but it would be an excellent reason to stick with Google even if their search results weren't the best.)

So what about Cuil? I finally got around to trying it this morning, starting with a little "vanity google" for my name. The results were fairly reasonable, though oddly slanted toward TAC, a local astronomy group in which I was fairly active around ten years ago (three hits out of the first ten are TAC!)

Dave then started typing colors into Cuil to see what he would get, and found some disturbing results. He has Firefox' cookie preference set to "Ask me before setting a cookie" -- and it looks like Cuil loads pages in the background, setting cookies galore for sites you haven't ever seen or even asked to see. For every search term he thought of, Cuil popped up a cookie request dialog while he was still typing.

Searching for blu wanted to set a cookie for bluefish.something.
Searching for gre wanted to set a cookie for www.gre.ac.uk.
Searching for yel wanted to set a cookie for www.myyellow.com.
Searching for pra wanted to set a cookie for www.pvamu.edu.

Pretty creepy, especially when combined with Cuil's propensity (noted by every review I've seen so far, and it's true here too) for including porn and spam sites. We only noticed this because he happened to have the "Ask me" pref set. Most people wouldn't even know. Use Cuil and you may end up with a lot of cookies set from sites you've never even seen, sites you wouldn't want to be associated with. Better hope no investigators come crawling through your browser profile any time soon.

A few notes about OSCON:

It was a good conference -- lots of good speakers, interesting topics and interesting people. Best talks: anything by Paul Fenwick, anything by Damien Conway.

The Arduino tutorial was fun too. It's a little embedded processor with a breadboard and sockets to control arbitrary electronic devices, all programmed over a USB plug using a Java app. I'm not a hardware person at all (what do those resistor color codes mean again?) but even I, even after coming in late, managed to catch up and build the basic circuits they demonstrated, including programming them with my laptop. Very cool! I'm looking forward to playing more with the Arduino when I get a spare few moments.

The conference's wi-fi network was slow and sometimes flaky (what else is new?) but they had a nice touch I haven't seen at any other conference: Wired connections, lots of them, on tables and sofas scattered around the lounge area (and more in rooms like the speakers' lounge). The wired net was very fast and very reliable. I'm always surprised I don't see more wired connections at hotels and conferences, and it sure came in handy at OSCON.

The AV staff was great, very professional and helpful. I was speaking first thing Monday morning (ulp!) so I wanted to check the room Sunday night and make sure my laptop could talk to the projector and so forth. Everything worked fine.

Portland is a nice place to hold a convention -- the light rail is great, the convention center is very accessible, and street parking isn't bad either if you have a car there.

Dave went with me, so it made more sense for us to drive. The drive was interesting because the central valley was so thick with smoke from all the fires (including the terrible Paradise fire that burned for so long, plus a new one that had just started up near Yosemite) that we couldn't see Mt Shasta when driving right by it. It didn't get any better until just outside of Sacramento. It must have been tough for Sacramento valley residents, living in that for weeks! I hope they've gotten cleared out now.

I finally saw that Redding Sundial bridge I've been hearing so much about. We got there just before sunset, so we didn't get to check the sundial, but we did get an impressive deep red smoky sun vanishing into the gloom. Photos here.

End of my little blog-break, and time to get back to scrambling to get caught up on writing and prep for the GetSET Javascript class for high school girls

Visible Applications: Openbox 3.4.7.2, Thunar, Sonata, rxvt-unicode, irssi, & GNU IceCat.

GTK Theme: Clarity
Wallpaper: Hardy-Simple Colors
OB Theme: Clearlooks
Icons: Tango

Last night I released Nitrogen 1.4, check the page for release notes.  In particular, thanks to Helge Larsen for being very helpful with debugging a pretty bad X error bug that randomly affected other people too, esp. those running Xinerama.

While browsing through my favorite news sites today I discovered that the the nightly builds of Firefox now include native support for Theora and Vorbis (which includes support for the HTML5 media elements).

It is really great to see that they are taking the initiative add this along with their other changes slated for version 3.1. If anything else it will at least help show users that there are formats available for them to use which are not proprietary.

This weekend I’ll be attending BarCamp Raleigh for the second year in a row. Together with a couple of fellow rPathians, I’m planning to pitch in the following talks:

• Building GNU/Linux appliances and deploying them in the clouds
• How to participate and contribute with open source projects like GNOME, KDE, XFCE, Openbox, etc

If you’re one of the lucky ones who managed to register in time for the event, tomorrow there will be a get together (think drinks, snacks and all the trilug geeks you can fit in a bar) at Tyler’s Tap Room (map). Check out this post for more info.

I look forward to attending this event and meeting some of you folks.

As some of you may know, I’ve been doing a great deal of testing for rBuilder Online, rPath’s online community service for all your GNU/Linux appliances needs. As a QA Enginner I have a chance to play with the most innovative technologies we create (and dare I say some of the coolest things in the system/package management world?) before it hits the general public.

It is because of this work and my recent super involvement with our products that I decided to create a videocast on how to create a virtual GNU/Linux appliance using rBuilder Online. My objective is to show just how easy it is to package your software and distribute it to as many different environments and architectures without having to do a lot of heavy lifting. This videocast is the first step toward this goal, recorded this morning with no script or preparation what so ever. Please be gentle.

* Direct link here.

Some useful links for you to follow along:

• Virtual Appliances
• rBuilder Online
• rPath Wiki
• Conary Package Management System
• rMake

Recently I have been working with another contributor for the XFCE desktop environment to build an appliance with code pulled directly from their versioning source control repository. This allow us to work with the applications as they currently exist in development and work on any issues that are sometimes hard to catch without actually using the software.

Please feel free to ask me anything related to the process of using rBuilder Online and sign up for a free account!

Talk to your kids about Linux