Category: Technology

Search gets … smarter?

Wolfram Research, makers of Mathematica, a leading computational software program, have developed a new search engine, Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram Alpha has been hailed by some as a “Google Killer,” and as a possible “Propaganda Machine” by others. Although, incidentally, if you type “iraq war” into Wolfram Alpha as the propaganda article mentions, you get the following :

And that seems to be the major difference between Wolfram Alpha and a typical search engine. Wolfram Alpha is more of a calculation machine rather than a search engine. Type in something that can’t really be calculated, say you’re looking for a ferrari, and you get the following:

Wolfram Alpha just doesn’t know what to do with that. Of course, that should cut down on the porn spam quite a bit…

There are some funny bits, though. For instance, ask for a calculation such as “What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow,” and you may actually get an answer:

Or, perhaps, “What is the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything?“

Overall, Wolfram Alpha seems to be a pretty decent source for statistical and mathematical information. For instance, type in “Google” and you get a plethora of information about Google, the company:

Choose to view the information on Google as a word, and you get this:

Though, I find it surprising that it doesn’t suggest the origin of the word itself, “googol.” However, if you search for “googol” it does have an accurate answer:

Ultimately, I don’t think it’s anything close to a “Google Killer,” but it definitely has potential, both in the academic community, and with students overall. Google won’t just roll over, though, and has announced the launch of a new Google Labs project, Google Squared. Google Squared is an attempt to organize the data on the web into a format the seems to be more usable for researchers. Time will tell, though, as Squared hasn’t been launched yet.

I encourage you to take the Wolfram Alpha engine for a spin, see what you can find. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the incredible amount of useful information it has. And, assuming it survives, it will only get better as time goes on.

 

Slaves to Technology?

Over the past few years I have slowly moved from carrying cash to using my debit card for purchases. It’s pretty convenient for me, and reduces, somewhat, any loss I suffer from a lost wallet or something similar. I’m sure I’m not the only one doing this. However, this means I rely on technology a bit more. And when that technology fails, life becomes difficult. This bit me again this week.

I received a new debit card a few months ago and found that after just a few months, the magnetic strip on the back of the card started to rub off. I guess they’re using something different to fabricate these newer cards as my previous card lasted several years, and was still good, when it expired and I needed a new one. So, I went about ordering a new one and life went on.

Now, a mere month or so later, the strip has yet again rubbed off. Again, I’ve ordered one and I’m expecting it any day now. In the meantime, I had to run to the market the other day. I run around, gather the stuff I need, and proceed to checkout. I normally use the self-checkout, if only to avoid the usually long lines elsewhere. I go through the ritual of scanning everything, placing them into bags, etc. When I ran my card through, it failed, pretty much as I expected. I tried running it through a few times, and even tried the “bag” trick which also failed.

So what do you do in this situation? I thought there was a pretty simple solution to this, so I asked the girl at the counter to run it through by hand. This, apparently, was a big mistake. What resulted was a 20 minute ordeal as they ran to get a manual card machine, screwed it up three times and had to keep running to get new carbon sheets. Once they finally figured out how to use the manual machine, they had to enter the data into the computer. Of course, they screwed this up innumerable times. All said and done, they were finally able to get the transaction to go through.

Seriously? Come on… I do this on the Internet all the time! Enter the card number, name, expiration, and CVV. Done! I even mentioned this and was told that it was “far more complicated than that.” …. Ummm…. ok … ?

So in the end, they have a physical copy of the card (albeit a fairly crappy one… they had to hold on to my card to read the numbers because it didn’t copy well), and they have the computer transaction receipt as well. The computer receipt has the exact same information on it that a normal transaction has… So what was the problem again?

And it’s not just this particular store, I’ve had problems elsewhere. Burger King has no alternate plan if their credit card processing fails. At most, I was offered the option of running to get cash to pay with or wait for their computer to reboot… In hindsight, I should have gone to get cash.. Apparently they’re running the slowest computers on earth.

Lowes? The girl at the counter got frantic when the card wouldn’t read. She called for help, and the help got frantic too. Luckily it scanned after the umpteenth time, otherwise I may have been witness to a nervous breakdown.

Dunkin Donuts! Well, apparently they’re fairly competent there. My card failed to scan so the girl at the counter asked for it back, typed in the numbers, and ran it through manually. Took an extra few seconds. Done.

So let this be a lesson. Technology is great when it works, but you may be in trouble when it fails… At the very least, it can be incredibly inconvenient. And to think… Only a few years ago, credit cards had to be manually handled, with the carbon paper and all. And it only took a few minutes back then… How times change…

 

Bad crawler, no cookie!

My wife is a professional SEO consultant with her own business. I work with her on occasion, helping out with the server end of things. It’s fun and challenging, and I think we work pretty well together.

So, the other day she comes to me with an odd question. Why is Google Analytics suddenly showing a high bounce rate for new keywords? Interesting problem, of course. One of the first things that popped into my mind was either a blackhat SEO or a rival of some sort. It sounds paranoid, but it does happen.

So I pulled the access logs and started pouring through them. Since the bounce rate came from a keyword search, it was easy enough to locate the offending entries. There were hundreds of log entries, all coming from the same 65.55.0.0/16 address space. A couple more seconds of digging showed that 65.55.0.0/16 was owned by Microsoft. Reverse DNS on some of the IPs revealed that these IPs were all part of the MSN web crawler. MSN apparently doesn’t provide reverse DNS for all of their IPs. No matter, there were enough to prove that this was MSN. Here’s an example from the log:

65.55.110.195 – – [24/Mar/2009:03:08:05 -0400] “GET /index.html HTTP/1.0” 200 58838 “http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=keyword” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)”

So what in the world is going on here? Why are we getting pounded by hundreds upon hundreds of requests from the MSN crawler? And why is the MSN crawler reporting itself as Internet Explorer 6.0? The referrer URL showed the source of the request to be from a live.com search, but these being crawler addresses, I’m willing to bet this was programmed in rather than a result of an actual search. It doesn’t really matter, though, because whatever it is, it’s causing a high bounce rate and really screwing up the site statistics. The high bounce rate may be affecting the Google ranking as well.

Before we blocked these requests, though, we wanted to make sure this was unwanted behavior, so we started digging for info. One of the pages we came across described the same behavior we were seeing. As it turns out, this strange activity is intended. Live.com claims they do this to detect cloaking. Of course, it was quite easy to identify these IPs as coming from Microsoft, and determine (rather quickly) that they are sourcing from a search engine. It would be very simple to broaden any cloaking to include those IPs, making this crazy technique useless.

Microsoft claims they are continuing to tune their crawler to reduce the spam and make the keywords more relevant. The point is, though, that this seems to hurt more than it helps. As a result, many webmasters are blocking the referrer spam, at risk of having MSN blacklist the site. We have followed suit, deeming both MSN and Live.com to be irrelevant search engines.

Of course, if someone out there has a better idea of how to handle this, I’m listening…

 

I can’t believe it’s over …

So, it’s finally over.. The final show was… absolutely incredible. Of course, I’m talking about Battlestar Galactica. If you haven’t seen the finale yet, then stop reading now, go watch BSG at the UN instead. I’m not here to spoil the ending, but I am going to talk about some of the themes and how they tied up some loose ends.

This review is a tad late, but I didn’t get to see the show until Sunday. Thank the gods for DVRs… I was pleasantly surprised when I noticed that the finale was a full two hours. I was afraid that it would only be an hour long and I had no idea how they would tie everything up in an hour. Even more to my amazement, they tied up most of the major loose ends by the end of the first hour. In fact, I had lost track of time and thought that was the end! Obviously, though, it was not.

I had a few questions throughout the show that they wrapped up quite nicely at the end. Both the original series and this new series had Earth as the mythical destination for the thirteenth colony. Based on this, one would assume that this Earth represents the real Earth today, as it did in the original series. So, it was a bit of a shock when they made it to “Earth” and it was a nuclear wasteland. I had a hard time accepting this and wondered how they would pull the series together after destroying the main goal.

Starbuck leading them to their final destination wasn’t much of a surprised based on the build-up to the finale, but the ultimate question about her remained. If she wasn’t a Cylon, then how could she have died, yet come back? And although there was no definitive answer to this question, I think they cleaned it up quite nicely. What made it more interesting, though, was that she questioned her own existence. She didn’t know what she was, making me think that maybe there were more than 12 models of Cylon. Interestingly enough, that would make her the thirteenth model.. Ah, magic 13.

The final big battle was very exciting. Galactica proved that she could take a serious beating and still complete her mission. Just as impressive was the ability of the crew to plot a jump that landed them directly next to the Cylon colony, keeping them in the same stable orbit around the singularity that the colony was in.

The CGI effects were spectacular. The ship to ship battle lit up the sky with laser and missile fire, explosions, and eventually squadrons of fighters going head to head. Inside, the early model Cylons sped through the corridors, blazing away at each other. They spared nothing putting these sequences together.

One part of the final sequences did bother me, though. In the end, Cyril commits suicide, seemingly for no reason. For someone so determined to live and bring forward a method of survival for his people, he gave up very rapidly. Ronald Moore, one of the producers and writers, explained this as a realization of futility. I’m not sure I buy that, but it doesn’t detract much from the overall story.

I loved the ending, though. Jumping ahead in time, landing right in Times Square with Six and Baltar was incredible. The various videos of robotics breakthroughs all over the screens was a nice touch. It definitely makes one think about the future, what may be possible, and what the consequences of those possibilities may be. I think we have an excellent chance at creating a true AI, and maybe it can all go wrong. In the end, will it be worth it to try?

 

Roll the … Building?

From the air, it looks like something blown over onto it’s side, just another casualty of mother nature. From the ground, it looks like an art sculpture, interesting and colorful. In reality, it’s a transformer. No, not the cool shape-shifting alien robots from Cybertron. This Transformer is a building concept designed by Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, and built by Prada.

The Transformer is flipped and rolled by a group of large cranes, placing the building into one of four configurations. When the hexagon face is flat on the ground, the building serves as a platform for fashion exhibits. Place the circular face on the ground and you have a raised platform for special events. The circular platform in the middle also serves as a projector when the platform is placed on the square face. The square face has raised seating, making it perfect for movie viewing. And finally, when the cross-shaped face is placed on the ground, the building is in the perfect configuration for art exhibits.

The entire building will be covered with a smooth elastic membrane, serving as walls, keeping the entire pavilion free from rain and wind. It remains to be seen how durable that membrane will be with the pavilion being rolled around.

The structure is quite impressive and different. I wonder, however, about the necessity to use large cranes to move it around. Obviously these are necessary as the pavilion likely weighs several hundred tons. The presence of the cranes, however, detracts from the attractiveness of the structure, as well as causing damage to the surrounding grounds. Of course, how else are you going to shift the pavilion from one configuration to another.

The transformer is currently located in Seoul, Korea and will be there from March until July, 2009.

 

Introducing, The Touchbook

Engadget posted a story about a new Netbook from a company called Always Innovating. A press release about the product can be found here. In short, it’s a netbook, and a tablet PC, but without the typical “fold it over on top of the keyboard” scenario. The screen literally detaches from the keyboard and becomes an autonomous unit.

Inside this little beast is an ARM OMAP3 processor with 8 Gig of storage on a micro SD chip. They don’t specify which OMAP3 processor is included, so both speed and die size is unknown. It touts an 8.9″ screen, typical of the current netbook generation. For network access it has 802.11b/g/n Wifi. Bluetooth is also included, so the possibility of tethering exists as well.
Both the tablet and keyboard have built-in batteries. Battery life is expected to be 10 to 15 hours when both the tablet and keyboard are used in-concert. The tablet is expected to last between 3 and 5 hours on battery when it is disconnected from the keyboard. Battery life in the keyboard is, of course, irrelevant.

Always Innovating demonstrated the Touchbook at DEMO 2009, a technical conference that wrapped up yesterday. The demonstration video is included below:

Overall, this looks to be a fairly decent device. I’m a bit concerned about the ARM processor, and I wonder what sort of OS support it will have. The TouchBook OS will be installed by default, though from reading the FAQs, it appears that it will run anything from Android, to Ubuntu, to Windows CE.

I’m also curious as to what the device will be using for memory. Is memory shared on the SD card? Or will there be actual RAM in the device? All questions I hope to have answers for in the near future. Looks good, though, and I’m excited at the prospect of possibly getting one. Definitely something I could put to good use!

 

Testing a new blogging tool

I joined this really cool network called Mac Developer a few days ago. The programmer from Celmaro, creators of Webbla, pointed me to the site. Anyway, Mac Developer is a beta testing site. Basically, developers put their software up there and let users test it. They can submit bug reports, suggestions, and contribute to making the software better. As a reward for testing software, users gain points that can be used to gain free licenses, discounts, and more.

Anyway, I was alerted yesterday about a new project up there called Blogo. Blogo is, well, blogging software. I’ve used a variety of blogging tools thus far and, to be honest, LiveWriter has been the best. However, as I’ve moved over to a Mac, using LiveWriter is, well, not convenient.

I’ve been looking for something decent to use on my Mac and thus far I’ve only found Ecto and ScribeFire, a Firefox plugin, to be somewhat decent. Neither of these seem to have the features that LiveWriter has, though. LiveWriter handles images quite nicely, even going as far as adding some on-the-spot enhancements such as cropping, adding borders, and more. The interface was actually pretty decent, especially for a Microsoft product.

Anyway, I’ve been checking out Blogo, and I figured writing an actual blog entry might give me some more insight into how it works. Thus far I’m pretty impressed. The interface is pretty straightforward and seems to have all the major features right out in the open. I don’t see anything for video, but I can handle pasting in an embed in html mode. It seems to handle images, so let’s show a screenshot of the editor in action.

According to the image tool, which you can see in action in the next shot, it handles both fullsize and thumbnail images. I definitely like that particular feature. It does not display the image itself in the editor, though, and I’m not sure how I feel about that yet. On the one hand, I suppose it’s ok. On the other, it would be nice to see the image, just to know which image is which. Though clicking on the image in the editor shows it in the little preview area, so that helps a lot and generally saves precious screen real estate.

Blogo has a preview feature as well. It accesses your blog and attempts to create a template that it uses to create a preview of the blog entry. It can periodically update the preview as well. Below, is an image of the preview feature in action.

Anyway, it’s looking to be a pretty decent tool so far. I’ll beat on it some more and hopefully get the points I need to get a discount. If not, I’m definitely interested and unless something really bad pops up, I think I may have found my new blogging tool. Here’s hoping!

 

eBooks and e-Ink

My lovely wife surprised me with a wonderful gift for my birthday (which was a few months ago). She has been pretty eco-friendly for a while and is getting the rest of us on the bandwagon as well. So, while being something that I had wanted for a while, this particular gift also happens to be pretty eco-friendly as well. So what did she get me? Feast your eyes on this!

It’s a Sony PRS-505 eBook reader. The PRS-505 uses LRF as its native format, though it also supports TXT, PDF, and RTF. The latest firmware update also brings the new ePub format to the table as well. It does support secure versions of LRF, PDF, and ePub, though I have not encountered them as of yet.

The screen is about the size of a standard paperback book and uses something called electronic paper for display. E-paper is a pretty cool technology that can be used to display static images with very little power. Due to how e-paper works, it is much easier on the eyes as compared to reading from an LCD.

I’ve been looking at eBook readers for a while and comparing the various differences between them. And while the Sony doesn’t have all of the best features, it does have support for the formats I was interested in. Sure, the Kindle supports other formats like PDF, but you have to send the file to Amazon to have it converted. This is not something you want to do with confidential work documents. And the Kindle has wireless support, but I didn’t think that was a compelling enough feature to lock me in to Amazon’s DRM. So, in the end, I chose the Sony.

And since I’ve had it, I’ve discovered that it has very rich Open Source support! In particular is a project called calibre. Calibre is an open source book management tool written specifically for the Sony PRS family of eBook readers, though support for other readers is starting to be integrated. What makes calibre more useful than Sony’s own eBook management software is the ability to convert a slew of different formats to formats that the PRS supports.

For instance, I can convert a .DOC file to .LRF. Or, even cooler, I can convert a .CBR over to a .LRF. CBR, if you don’t know, is a compressed comic book format. So in addition to reading books, manuals, etc, I can also catch up on comics! Calibre also has a feature that allows you to synchronize various RSS feeds with your reader. Feeds are automatically downloaded, converted to .LRF, and transferred to your reader. Old versions of the feeds can be removed automatically as well.

Calibre does not support secure, or DRM’ed, formats though, so you have to watch what you purchase. Fortunately, there are a few sites out there that provide DRM-free reading material in most of the popular formats. Baen Books is one of the more popular sites for DRM-free reading material. Baen deals in Sci-fi and Fantasy books. Another fine book site is Fictionwise which seems to deal in just about any genre. And finally, there’s MobiPocket, who also deals with all genres.

One problem I’ve noticed with purchasing eBooks, however, is that you generally pay the same, or more, for the eBook version as compared to a printed version. The “accepted” explanation seems to be that if eBooks were cheaper, it would hurt the printed business, so they price them the same. This is unfortunate. I find it hard to pay the same price for an electronic copy when it doesn’t have to go through the same printing process as a paper book. I’d like to believe that the extra money a publisher makes on an eBook goes to the author, but if they’re anything like the music industry, I’m sure the author never sees any of it.

Regardless, I thoroughly enjoy my new eBook reader. I’ve been spending my time catching up on comics and reading many of the free eBooks available at the Tor.com site. If you’re into Sci-Fi and Fantasy, I definitely recommend checking it out.

If you’re interested in eBook readers in general and what the future may hold, check out this article as ars technica. It’s a pretty good look at the start of eBooks as well as some insight into the future.

New Tech!

I spent some time out in the wastes today and I stumbled across a cave of sorts.  I know, I know..  caves are dangerous, what with all the various wastelanders and other dangers.  But sometimes you just have to take a chance, right?  Besides, the rad count was pretty normal, so I didn’t think there was anything really nasty in there.

Anyway, I made sure my trusty phase pistol was loaded, turned up the luminosity on my goggles and headed into the cave.  The front of the cave was pretty dull, just the normal skeletal remains of a variety of animals.  I walked about a half a klick before I started wondering if the trip was worth it.  I was just about to call it quits when I tripped over something buried in the dirt.  There was a high pitched whining noise and then the cave was flooded with light.  I had inadvertently triggered some sort of automatic response system.  Luckily enough, there didn’t seem to be any sort of automatic weapon system.

After I stopped shaking, I took a good look around.  I’m not sure what this place used to be, but it was pretty big.  The first thing I noticed was the massive metal doorway built into the rock.  The door itself was covered in brownish dirt that looked like it hadn’t been disturbed in forever.  On the door, towards the top, was a strange symbol I’ve never seen before.  It was a triangle with an eye in the middle.  I wonder what that means.

I didn’t see any immediate way to open the door, so I started looking around a bit more.  Over by one wall of the cave were a bunch of large metal containers.  Each one bore the same image as the door.  As with the door, though, there didn’t seem to be any immediate way to open them.  I was about to turn my attention elsewhere when I heard a loud metallic click come from one of the containers.  Upon further inspection, I noticed that one of the smaller containers had opened.

I cautiously approached the container and nudged it open a bit further with the tip of my gun.  Inside was a small, black cube the pulsed with a strange glowing light.  I’m not sure what this thing is yet, but it’s definitely interesting.  I packed it up and prepared to head home.  Before leaving, I dropped a beacon so I can find the cave again.  I can’t wait to head back.

So, here I sit, staring at my new find.  I haven’t figured out what it is, yet, but I look forward to finding out.  Anyone out there come across anything like this before?

Annual Rabbit Hole Day …  Thanks Warren