Month: May 2003

search engine nirvana, by and by

Idle Words

The Waypath Project is worth a visit because they are trying to do two very challenging and cool things. The first is, provide a per-post weblog search, rather than the kind of per-page search you can get on Blogdex or Google. The second is to search things based on similarities in content, rather than just doing keyword matches.

I’m glad to see this: I know Steve (from Waypath) from a prior gig and he’s just half of a dangerously smart team. He’s taken great pains to point out how the Waypath stuff is better (in many ways, scalability not being the least of them) than any of these other new information retrieval techniques. While it may look like query by example, it adds a significant amount of magic to refine the example and thereby deliver better results.

the death of distance?

O’Reilly Network: Where ever I lay my URL [May 20, 2003]
You see, I just realised that no one – at least no one who pays me a wage – has any real idea where I am. I’ve never met my editor here at O’Reilly, Simon St Laurent, but given that I’m English he could possibly guess to within a few hundred miles, and my boss at The Guardian could perhaps narrow it down to within 10, but at the end of the day, my address is my URL, my email and my Instant Messenger accounts.
[ . . . . ]
This whole idea fascinates me – perhaps, for the first time, after years of prophecy, we can now truly declare the death of distance.

To paraphrase Twain, the death of distance is still exaggerated. At the end of this article, James Fallows offers a bet on whether the virtual workplace will win out over the physical.

Any takers?

Obviously, for Ben Hammersley and others similarly situated, this will work: writers have always been mobile. But consider a hive of knowledge workers like Microsoft or Apple: you *will* work in Redmond or Cupertino, and that’s that.

I have something better than will power

meta-douglasp

iPod and Will power: I visited the Apple store today. I held a new iPod in my hand. I walked away without buying one. I am going to stop talking about it now or I may go back.

A shortage of coin trumps will power anytime. If I could afford one, I’d have one. The U Bookstore can’t keep them in stock, so I’ve not seen one.

I’d be happy with the small one. I have a couple of reasons for wanting one. One, the job stress right now reminds me of nothing so painful as adolescence and music got me through that intact, or reasonably so. Two, it would give me either motivation or an excuse to continue with my analog to digital conversion project — converting all my LPs to CDs, MP3s or both. Perhaps just an extension of the first argument, I don’t know.

missed opportunity

I missed out on a job I had interviewed for last week: I got the phone message today. Disappointing but not entirely unexpected. I got the sense I wasn’t connecting with the interviewers (there were three of them).

So back to the drawing board, or better, the want ads. My current gig is going to drive me nuts. I’m tempermentally and vocationally unsuited to be an administrative person in a workplace I understand nothing about.

“They’re not there. We ate them.”

The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Major fish populations largely gone, study finds

Fully 90 percent of each of the world’s large ocean species, including cod, halibut, tuna, swordfish and marlin, have disappeared in recent decades, according to the Canadian analysis — the first to use historical data dating to the beginnings of large-scale fishing in the 1950s.
[ . . . ]
A group of top tuna scientists, he said, would be scrutinizing the study and would issue a formal rebuttal later.

So they’ll rebut the study, not matter what it came out the same day they’re claiming it’s wrong.

well said

News Is Crappy
Behind The Scenes
This site is made with only the finest tools. We use Macintosh computers because they let us work on news not computers. We use PHP because frankly it kicks butt. We use BBedit because it’s better than you. MovableType packs the backend of the site and it rocks the casbah.

it only takes one to spoil it for the rest

And that one would be me, evidently. I learned today that my purchase of a Macintosh (or perhaps more accurately, the way I did it) forced the creation of a new computer purchasing policy to make sure purchases are more tightly controlled.

The fact of the matter is, I was able to take a handwritten purchase order into the University Bookstore and buy a 2 * 1.25 GHz PowerMac with 17 inch flatscreen monitor and some software on the strength of that document. I drove there and back myself, and it occured to me that I should have charged for mileage. I set it up myself (the difficulty of that mustn’t be overrated) and that was that.

So while I agree that my methods were less than forthright and open, I’m not pleased to have an even more constrained workplace be my legacy. But it’s well-known I would never have gotten one otherwise, even though the University supports the platform and the Bookstore sells them. The fiefdom in which I work is declared to be off-limits to anything but the Leading Brand. I gave it a try and found it didn’t work for me: my observation after a particularly bad spate of crashes and general uselessness was that using Windows in a multidisciplinary way was like driving nails with your bare hands — bloody, painful, and unproductive.

Oh, well, religious wars are unwinnable: better to go along as best as you can without compromising too much.

The conflict for me is that as a probationary employee I feel compelled to prove myself as a valuable asset but it’s not easy to do that with uncooperative tools. Do others in my position have the same problems?I don’t know, but I doubt their expectations of themselves are as high. Not to be arrogant, but all I heard when I arrived was how unsophisticated everything was and how I was welcome to bring my tech experience to bear on that. But as I’ve learned, it’s hard to buck the system, even in small ways, without hurting someone’s feelings.