As some of you know we’ve been in the process of moving our infrastructure for the last couple months to a new data center. Tonight we moved the last of our production servers! As a result, there may have been a couple of hours of down time for some sites (including this one) tonight – apologies for any inconvenience.
Everything looks good right now though, and I’m quite happy that the hard stuff about the move is now behind us. Onward!
Have you tried searching Wikipedia lately? Don’t bother, because you probably won’t find what you’re looking for! I am continually amazed at how terrible the Wikipedia search results are. Here’s an example of what I mean. Go to Wikipedia, type “al gor” in the search box, and click the search button. You should see something like this. That’s right, the top results are Al-Merrikh, Cy-Gor, Firouzabad, and Kagame Inter-Club Cup.
Absolutely terrible! If you type the same thing in the search box at Google, not only do you get accurate results, but Google prompts you with “Did you mean: al gore”. Why yes, I did! So why is searching Wikipedia so bad?
Part of the problem is that Wikipedia actually has two search modes: “Go” and “Search”. If you type “Al Gore” (spelled correctly) in the box and click Go, you’re taken right to the entry about Al Gore. If you instead click Search, you’re taken to a list of articles that contain or reference “Al Gore”. You can read more about searching Wikipedia here. So they’ve sort of complicated things by including two buttons instead of just one. The Go button is useful when you know the name of the article you want, but useless otherwise.
The other part of the problem is that the search algorithm just plain sucks. I know they don’t have a lot of resources, but you’d think that one of the most popular websites on the web could have a decent search feature. Matching “al gor” with “al gore” is a problem that has been solved for years, yet Wikipedia doesn’t even come close to accomplishing it!
Wikipedia itself mentions external search engines as a way to find what you’re looking for, but they aren’t really much better. For instance, if you type “al gor” at the special Google search for Wikipedia page, you do get the correct Al Gore entry as the first result, but the rest are not relevant at all.
So here’s where we’re at. Google knows that if you type “al gor” you probably mean “Al Gore”. Wikipedia knows about all of the entries that reference “Al Gore”. What we need is a way to combine the two! Is that really so much to ask?
If you know of a better way to search Wikipedia, please let me know!
Today is election day here in Edmonton. Today is also Blog Action Day. Better together? Let’s find out! It should be pretty clear that election day means we’re voting for our city mayor, councillors, and school board trustees, but what is Blog Action Day all about? From the website:
On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind – the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. Our aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future.
This is my entry for Blog Action Day, and as you may have guessed by now, I am going to talk about the election in relation to the environment. I just heard on the news that the turnout for this election is expected to be an abysmal 20%. Are people really not interested, or is it just too difficult to vote? Maybe a bit of both, but the process can certainly be made simpler. Not to mention more environmentally friendly or green.
There are two major problems with the way we vote now:
It doesn’t have to be this way! We could make elections more environmentally friendly and efficient by getting rid of the archaic system we use now and adopting Internet voting. There are of course examples of successes with Internet voting and concern over potential problems that may arise. I won’t get into any of that here, but you can read the very complete Wikipedia entry if you’re interested. I simply look at it this way:
Good enough for me. I think it’s time we moved one of our society’s most important institutions into the 21st century. I think it’s time we started voting over the Internet!
Here are my weekly notes:
Music
My favorite song at the moment is The Pretender by Foo Fighters. Such a wicked track! Some other songs I’ve been enjoying: Hot by Avril Lavigne, How Far We’ve Come by Matchbox Twenty, Foundations by Kate Nash, and Say Goodbye To Love by Kenna. Oh and Gimme More by Britney Spears, which I commented about this week:
Enjoying Britney’s track “Gimme More”…Britney is like Michael Jackson…enjoy the music, ignore the person.
MSDN is touring the country again, this time to talk about strategies for today’s web application development. They’ll be in Edmonton at SilverCity in WestEd (actually I guess it’s Scotiabank Theatre now) on October 25th:
If you are a Canadian Web developer, this free event is for you. We will look at common challenges such as security, accessibility & usability, AJAX, Javascript debugging, using patterns to improve your development process and working with external services. In a nutshell, this is a two-part tips, tricks and tools presentation.
It will be focused primarily on Microsoft technologies (like ASP.NET), however if you develop on other platforms, you can get a lot of value from the event in terms of techniques and free tools for debugging your client side code to load testing your websites. This event is sponsored by MSDN Canada.
I like that they mention right on the details page that tools like Fiddler and the Developer Toolbar will be demonstrated. The page also mentions HTML and Javascript by name! It’s not your typical MS-marketing-speak event, that’s for sure.
I was on the community conference call where Microsoft solicited feedback on their web-related developer events, and the key point was to go beyond Visual Studio and ASP.NET proper. It definitely looks like they listened!
Read: MSDN
Tomorrow evening is the 2nd Annual RestorAction Charity Gala, presented by the Youth Restorative Action Project (YRAP) and the Elizabeth Fry Society of Edmonton (EFRY). In addition to comedy, live music, and dancing, the event features a silent auction. One of the big ticket items in the auction is an Edmonton Oilers jersey.
This isn’t just any Oilers jersey though – it is signed by the entire team! If that doesn’t make you drool hockey fans, nothing will.
Here’s the best part: you can make a bid even if you aren’t attending the gala tomorrow! To do so:
Everyone attending the gala will have the final opportunity to bid, between 6:30 PM and 9:30 PM tomorrow. There are still a few tickets available ($70) if you’d like to attend.
Happy bidding!
UPDATE: The jersey ended up going for $675! Thanks everyone!
Read: RestorAction
Electronic Arts today announced that they have acquired Edmonton’s very own BioWare Corp. in a deal that could be worth $860 million USD. More accurately, EA is buying VG Holding, the parent company of both BioWare and Pandemic Studios. From GameSpot:
VG Holding Corp. was formed in late 2005 when esteemed Canadian role-playing game studio BioWare formed the aforementioned “superdeveloper” with Californian shop Pandemic Studios. The union was funded by Elevation Partners, a venture capital firm with rock star Bono on its board, and brokered by then-Elevation board member John Riccitiello, who became BioWare/Pandemic’s CEO.
A number of articles today have mentioned the fact that John Riccitiello left Elevation in February to become the CEO of Electronic Arts. So essentially, he has purchased BioWare and Pandemic twice. He must really like their games!
This is a great move for Electronic Arts. I’m sure fans of both BioWare’s and Pandemic’s games will have some reservations about the deal though. Will EA cause the studios to lose their mojo? I guess we’ll find out. Both companies will become part of the EA Games division, but Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka will continue to run BioWare, and Andrew Goldman, Josh Resnick, and Greg Borrud will stay in charge of Pandemic, according to GameSpot. At least for the time being.
The official BioWare press release is here (PDF).
Read: GameSpot
Amazon announced on Monday the launch of an SLA, or Service Level Agreement, for the S3 web service. The lack of an SLA has always been cited as a “shortcoming” of S3, but I don’t know exactly how many customers have requested it. Enough for them to offer it I guess:
Basically, we commit to 99.9% uptime, measured on a monthly basis. If an S3 call fails (by returning a ServiceUnavailable or InternalError result) this counts against the uptime. If the resulting uptime is less than 99%, you can apply for a service credit of 25% of your total S3 charges for the month. If the uptime is 99% but less than 99.9%, you can apply for a service credit of 10% of your S3 charges.
The SLA is effective as of October 1st, 2007. Jeff makes it sound like they had planned to have an SLA for a long time, but I’m not so sure that’s the case. Doesn’t matter now, they have one!
I think SmugMug’s Don MacAskill makes a good point:
Everything fails sometimes.
The SLA payment is rarely comparable to the pain and suffering your customers had to deal with.
Very true. From my perspective, the SLA isn’t a big deal. I hope it helps Amazon land some more customers though!
Read: Amazon
Today microblogging service Jaiku announced that they have been purchased by Google. I came across the news via a barrage of Twitter updates this morning, and it wasn’t long before everyone started wondering why Google chose Jaiku over Twitter. It seems that most people feel Jaiku is the superior platform technology-wise, but the community at Twitter is better. I’d more or less agree with that statement. For instance, I chose Jaiku to display “my status” on the right side of my website instead of Twitter because the reliability and performance of Jaiku was just so much better. It still is.
Marc Orchant has a great post on the topic. Scoble thinks that Google made the move for Jaiku because of Facebook. He suggests that Google is gearing up to launch some major competition for Facebook on November 5th. That may be true, but I like what Ross Mayfield had to say better (though he too mentions Facebook):
But perhaps the greatest direction they can go with this is lifestreaming.
With Google’s savvy around structuring the unstructured, picture lifestreaming evolving into something that infers permalinks for social activity. One day your Google homepage may be a stream of your friends and what they are doing, sharing, and adopting.
Yes! Enough of this manually updating my lifestream already, let’s make it update automagically. Even better, give everyone a lifestream by default. That idea gets me excited.
A follow-up post from Scoble highlights that Google has built themselves a “very strong position in the RSS ecosystem” as they now own Google Reader, FeedBurner, and Jaiku (which imports/aggregates RSS feeds). Very good point indeed.
Now the question is – who will snap up Twitter?
Read: Ross Mayfield
I was reading Mashable today, and came across this post on a new website called JihadOnYou. Apparently the site was built over a single weekend – no word on how long it took them to come up with the name. Here’s the description from Mashable:
No matter what it is that has made your day a little bit more miserable, simply go to this site, rant about it, and “declare holy war” on it. Whether it be your annoying co-worker, an ex-girlfriend, the loaner car from the dealership, whatever it is, this is your place to rant. Other users then can rate your Jihad to decide if it’s worthy ala-Digg style.
Most of the comments at Mashable discuss the name, which could be described as offensive. To that I say bollocks!
If a word is “politically incorrect” or otherwise offensive, should you avoid it at all costs? My opinion is no. The word “jihad” will continue to carry the connotations it currently does only if we restrict its use. I don’t expect JihadOnYou to change the meaning of the word by itself, but every little bit helps. And yes, I realize that jihad is a word with a lot of history.
As for the site itself – it’s kinda neat! The about page says “we’re here to entertain, not educate” and to that end I think they have succeeded. It’s pretty hard to visit the site and not laugh!
Read: Mashable
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