blog [dot] bradleyjoyce [dot] com

A Real Semantic Search Engine Is Coming

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 03:53:26 +0000

I had the pleasure of meeting Andy way back at Pitch Camp Dallas when he gave a short presentation on Swingly. Andy and his team have been hard at work moving towards the release of their search engine, so I was glad when he was able to respond to a few questions I had shot him a while back via email.

FWSB: Introduce yourself and tell us what is Swingly on both a layman's and more technical level.

Hi, I'm Andy Hickl, CEO of Swingly.com.

Swingly is a new kind of search engine that's aiming to change how people search for factual information. We're looking to accomplish this by combining two powerful types of "semantic" search engines: automatic question-answering and adaptive recommender systems.

First, we think that it should be a search engine’s sworn duty to find the particular piece information that you’re looking for, no matter if you’re asking a complex question like

How much money did Top Gun make outside of the U.S.?

or just putting together a simple keyword query like

Top Gun international gross

If you’re like me, you don’t care if Google’s index contains 295,000 pages which could potentially help you. Who’s got time to read all of that? You only want to know one thing: the amount of money that “Top Gun” made in countries other than the United States. (It’s $168 million, by the way.) That's where Swingly comes in. Instead of returning hundreds (if not thousands) of pages for you to read, Swingly goes out and finds the exact piece (or pieces) of information sought by a query (or a natural language question) from billions of web pages or large structured databases (such as DBPedia/Wikipedia, IMDB, MusicBrainz, etc.).

Second, unlike "pure" question-answering sites (like MIT's START (start.csail.mit.edu/) or Answers.com's BrainBoost (www.answers.com/bb)), Swingly's "smart" enough to understand when someone's not asking a question, as well. In this case, Swingly searches its index for information that might be relevant to your query -- and presents it back to you in the format reminiscent of a FAQ. For example, given a query like

Sixth Floor Dallas

Swingly responds with the following set of question-answer pairs:

#1. Q: Where is The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealy Plaza? A: 411 Elm Street Dallas, TX 75202
#2. Q: What is The Sixth Floor Museum? A: The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza chronicles the assassination and legacy of President John F. Kennedy
#3. Q: When is The Sixth Floor Museum open? A: Open every day except Thanksgiving and Christmas
#4. Q: How long should you spend at The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealy Plaza? A: Plan to spend at least 3-4 hours here if you want to really take most of it in.

Swingly generates most of the question-answer pairs it returns directly from the text of WWW documents. (Our index also includes coverage for all of the questions in the popular Q&A sites (Yahoo! Answers, Mahalo, etc.) as well as questions found in FAQs and forums, as well.)

FWSB: How is Swingly funded?

We're 100% privately funded. We're not looking for external funding right now.

FWSB: How does Swingly factor in to the future on search as you see it?

Let me start off by saying how completely and utterly blown away I've been by all of the attention that so-called "semantic" technologies have recently attracted over the past few months. It's really unbelievable, especially when I think about where the market was -- even as recently as last September when we were starting up -- and where it is now.

I think it's safe to say that the availability of large, high-quality data sources (such as DBPedia or Freebase) has really sparked everyone's imagination. If you've got access to the right data set -- and you understand what you're sitting on -- it's now possible to roll out search apps that have the power to dramatically change how people interact with information. We're seeing this in a number of different verticals: Jinni (jinni.com) is providing semantic search for movie information, Sortuv (sortuv.com) is doing it for restaurants, and guys like Evri (evri.com) are looking at different ways that biographical information can be provided. And that's only the tip of the iceberg.

But where does all this data come from? While a source like Wikipedia seems inexhaustible, it's important to recognize that it's ultimately limited in its coverage. There's tons of knowledge that's out on the Web that's just not in there.

So what's a believer in semantic technology to do? Right now, if you're not getting the crowd to create the data for you (like Yelp (yelp.com) or any of the community-based QnA sites (Mosio, Fluther, Yahoo! Answers, Mahalo, etc.)), you've got to rely on data made available by content aggregators -- or you've got to go out and create it yourself. (Believe it or not, there are people who are actually going out there and creating content by hand -- TrueKnowledge (trueknowledge.com) is one example of a company that's going out and doing it the right way.)

With Swingly, we're going in a different direction. Instead of involving humans in the task of content creation, we're using natural language processing (NLP) technology to extract factual knowledge from the text of any document found on the open Web. We're big believers in the power of NLP: if done right, it can be used to unlock a nearly-limitless supply of knowledge from text. There's no limits to the knowledge that we can include in our index -- short of what's available out there on the Internet.

We're fortunate enough to have licensed some great, wide-coverage extraction systems from our parent company, Language Computer Corporation (LCC), which allow us to extract hundreds upon hundreds of types of entities, attributes, relationships, and events from text. The coverage of these extraction systems is key: in the not-so-distant future, we're expecting to be able to automatically convert raw, unstructured texts into rich, RDF-style semantic representations that can be searched or mined by any semantically-aware app.

FWSB: What's your launch timeframe?

Alpha coming in late much and a public beta in mid-May. The alpha version will use an index of about 850 million question-answer pairs (more than all the Q&A sites put together) and will only be searchable. The beta release will consist of about 5 billion question-answer pairs and will include full questions & answer plus semantic search capabilities.

FWSB: Thanks Andy! Really look forward to the launch and digging into Swingly's capabilities.

Full Fledged Squeejee

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 20:09:35 +0000

So last Wednesday was my last day at LeadRival and while I had a good run there I can't say I will miss doing brochure websites for attorneys!

I'm really excited to be a part of the stellar team at Squeejee and have a chance to work on some really cool rails apps, like Mindbites.com.

Perhaps even cooler is I get to have this super cool Squeejee commando/ghostbuster character:

Thanks to the very talented artist for shaving off a few pounds :-)

Project Launch: Bethany Raelene Studio

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 18:06:47 +0000

If you haven’t seen Bethany’s (my sister) photography, you are missing out! She is absolutely amazing and it has been really fun to see her work progress.

Any good artist needs a place to showcase her work so I was happy to help Bethany create her website, BethanyRaeleneStudio.com.

So go check it out! If you are in the Portland, Oregon area and need a photographer give her a shout! Also, I think she might be willing to sell you a print of your favorite photo :-)

BethanyRaeleneStudio.com

Facebook Chain Message Spam

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 14:16:58 +0000

Well, I guess it was bound to happen... and it finally did. I just got my very first spam chain message on Facebook.

Here is the text

Attention all Facebook members. Facebook is recently becoming very overpopulated, There have been many members complaining that Facebook is becoming very slow.Record shows that the reason is that there are too many non-active Facebook members And on the other side too many new Facebook members. We will be sending this messages around to see if the Members are active or not,If you're active please send to 15 other users using Copy+Paste to show that you are active Those who do not send this message within 2 weeks, The user will be deleted without hesitation to create more space, If Facebook is still overpopulated we kindly ask for donations but until then send this message to all your friends and make sure you send this message to show me that your active and not deleted. Founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg

REALLY!?!? Come on people!! Facebook (and every other website where you have to login) KNOWS when you log in, how often and how long you stay. They don't need to send silly messages around AND tell you to copy, paste and send them on.

X-P

The Serial Entrepreneur's Vehicle

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 20:51:38 +0000

So what does a serial entrepreneur drive? Acura would have you believe it's their TSX.

"This is start a business, sell it, and start another 'luxury'."

Check out the commercial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV_o2ZP9GmU

Easy Vendor Lists in Shopify With Liquid

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 17:48:32 +0000

Shopify is a hosted e-commerce solution built on rails that is, for the most part, pretty simple and useable.

In fact, Shopify differentiates itself from other e-commerce solutions by maintaining a 'less is more' attitude toward many features e-commerce people are used to enjoying on other platforms.

One recurring frustration many Shopify customers are venting about about the forums is the lack of an easy way to create a list of vendors that you have products for.

There have been some solutions posted in the forums, but they all seem to require some level of javascript that the average Shopify user is probably not going to understand.

Since I was battling with this same problem on my shopify store, RustyTripod, I decided to try and find a more simple, elegant solution.

After battling with Liquid, Shopify's template language, for hours I finally arrived at a pretty simple, non-javascript solution.

<ul> {% assign: vendorname = "none" %} {% for product in collection.products %} {% if vendorname != product.vendor %} <li>{{ product.vendor }}</li> {% assign: vendorname = product.vendor %} {% endif %} {% endfor %} </ul>

That's it! I tried so many different variations on that same theme, but it turns out the simplest solution was the right one.

Note to self: remember in the future that this is usually the case for just about everything.

As far as the code goes, it's pretty straightforward. First I assign a random string to the variable 'vendorname'. Then I create a for loop that loops through all the products in the current collection.

Next, we check to see if the vendorname is not equal to the vendor of the current product we are at in the loop. If not, we go ahead and output the product vendor, set vendorname to the vendor of the current product, and start the loop again.

This time, when we hit {% if vendorname != product.vendor %} it will be comparing the current product vendor to the one we just displayed previously, and if it's the same we skip it.

This takes care of the duplication issues some of the other solutions were having to solve with javascript. If it's a new vendor, it then gets added to the list.

Hopefully this solution will help out many of you frustrated Shopify users out there!

Using rflickr to put Flickr on Rails

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 20:45:04 +0000

My sister Bethany is in the process of starting a photography business while finishing her Bachelor's Degree in Graphic Design. She came to me for help putting together a great website to showcase her work and her company.

As an avid photographer, Bethany has most of her pictures already uploaded to her flickr account. So, while I was tossing around ideas for her site, I figured it would be really cool to integrate her site with flickr so she would only have to upload photos in one place (flickr) that she was already familiar with.

The challenge then became getting her photos from flickr, to her website. Luckily Flickr has a really robust API for doing such things and even more conveniently there are three ruby implementations of the API that we can use inside a rails app (Don't you love the open source community?).

After taking a brief look at my options, I quickly settled on rflickr as it seemed to be the most comprehensive solution even though it was lacking on documentation.

So what's my goal? Well we want the site to look like this:

Each of the images needs to be pulled from the flickr account and displayed as shown above. Then the goal is to do some fun ajax slideshow stuff once we have the images available to us.

So far, with the help of rflickr, I've been able to access Bethany's flickr account and pull in just the images I want (images with that have been given a specific tag from within Flickr). The project is still ongoing, but I thought I would post some of my code in case anyone else out there is doing something similar.

First, if you are just getting started, Alex over at digital:pardoe had written an excellent tutorial of getting up an running with rflickr, so I won't repeat that here. It's a little tedious to get the ball rolling but after completing Alex's tutorial you should be good to go.

So with rflickr installed here is what I've got so far. (Feel free to check out bethanyraelenestudio.com for the live version as it progresses)

As with most rails plugins, once you have it installed it's pretty easy going. Here is what the index controller looks like:

class IndexController < ApplicationController require 'flickr' API_KEY = "yourAPIkey" SHARED_SECRET ="yourSHAREDsecret" def index flickr = Flickr.new(RAILS_ROOT + "/config/flickr.cache", API_KEY, SHARED_SECRET) #@photos = flickr.people.getPublicPhotos(flickr.people.findByUsername("bethanyraelene")) @photos = flickr.photos.search(user_id="10043857@N04", tags="featured") end end

As you can see, usage closely follows the actual flickr api so using the official documentation for reference will get you by. Flickr.new opens the connection to the flickr account using your api key, shared secret and cached authentication token. Since we are only wanting to show certain photos, I grab the "featured" tagged photos using flickr.photos.search, passing Bethany's user id and the tag I'm looking for. The line commented above that one grabs all the public photos in her account.

So now that we have the photos loaded into an array, we need to display them. Here is the index view code that renders the images:

<% @photos.each do |photo| %> <a href="<%= photo.flickr.photos.getInfo(photo.id).urls.values %>" target="_blank"><img src="<%= photo.url('s') %>" /></a> <% end %>

Simple right? As it is right now, this renders the images with a link back to the image on the flickr account. Eventually, this will change to display the full size image on the left side of the page.

Again, documentation for rflickr is pretty scarce so you will find yourself referring to the Flickr API documentation which is a pretty good substitute. Where there are gaps, trial and error will have to suffice. It took me a bit of time to figure out the correct syntax for the tag search, but in hind sight it's all pretty logical and obvious.

Some of the challenges moving forward with this project will be tighter integration of flickr data with the website and (a huge one) improving performance.

I'll post more code and usage updates as I go along. Hopefully this will help some of you get started putting Flickr on Rails!

Integrating Twitter With Your Rails App via Twitter4R

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 18:55:51 +0000

In my previous about about my bookmarklet, you may have seen some code references to twitter. I mentioned I would provide more info on that later, so here it is.

When I created this site, I was also just starting to really use twitter and wanted a way to update my twitter status whenever I made a new post to the blog or hit my bookmarklet on a site I was reading.

After a little digging, I came across a really cool rails plugin called Twitter4R, developed by Susan Potter.

Here is the process I followed to integrate my site with twitter, using Twitter4R which makes it SO easy:

Step 1: Install Twitter4R

$ sudo gem install twitter4r
Step 2: Add necessary code to your controller:
class PostsController < ApplicationController #make sure we can use Twitter4R require 'rubygems' gem('twitter4r','0.3.0') require 'twitter' require 'twitter/console' #blog post creation method, including twitter update # POST /posts # POST /posts.xml def create @post = Post.new(params[:post]) respond_to do |format| if @post.save client = Twitter::Client.new(:login => 'myTwitterLogin', :password => 'myTwitterPass') status = client.status( :post, 'New Blog Post: '+@post.title+' http://bradleyjoyce.com/posts/'+@post.post_slug+'') flash[:notice] = 'Post was successfully created.' format.html { redirect_to(@post) } format.xml { render :xml => @post, :status => :created, :location => @post } else format.html { render :action => "new" } format.xml { render :xml => @post.errors, :status => :unprocessable_entity } end end end

As you can see, Twitter4R makes it a real snap to send an update to twitter. First we create the connection to twitter with Client.new, passing the login info. Then we set the status with client.status, that's it. It is possible to set your login info permanently in the Twitter4R config file, but I chose not to mess around with that.

Obviously, I have a really, really simple application. Twitter4R is a full Ruby implementation of the twitter REST API, so there is definitely a lot more that you can do. I am hoping to expand my own integration in the future.

7 Reasons to Work at LinkedIn

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 18:09:34 +0000

I was poking around on LinkedIn today and saw a big ad for jobs at LinkedIn. So I browsed the list to see what's happening over there and read through a couple of the descriptions.

At the bottom of each job description, you will find 7 great reasons to work for LinkedIn. Here they are:

Benefit Highlights:
• Free catered lunches every day and breakfast on Fridays.
• Fully stocked cafeteria with free snacks, fruit, drinks, coffee and tea.
• Free private shuttle with WiFi between San Francisco and the office.
• Multiple free shuttle buses from CalTrain to the office.
• Brand new on-site gym and shower facilities.
• Fully loaded MacBook Pro laptops and Apple displays.
• Great colleagues to play Guitar Hero III, Rock Band, and Four Square!

Sign me up!

Check out their jobs here.

IDEA: iFundedThat.com

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 03:11:55 +0000

FACT: Startups are cool and they are doing a lot of really cool stuff

Heck, just check out the startups funded by Y Combinator and you know what I mean… a lot of cool stuff.

Startups need money, you want in on the action… enter iFundedThat.com

Part bank, part venture capitalist firm, with a big dose of everyday people who want to support the next big thing. Think Kiva.org for homegrown entrepreneurs, but getting a decent return on investment.

How does it work?

Entrepreneurs list their startup on iFundedThat.com, selecting the size of investment they’re seeking (amongst other details)
Joe Investor who loves entrepreneur A’s idea signs up for iFundedThat.com and adds money to his account. This account is guaranteed to return 4% apy or whatever the current CD rates are.
Joe Investor can then distribute the money in his account to different startups as he wants
If Joe Investors favorite startup gets bought out by Google or Microsoft, he would then get a ROI equal to the percentage he contributed of the total iFundedThat.com investment in the startup.
Joe Investor then parades around in his newly aquired iFundedThat.com t-shirt

Obviously there are a lot more details to work out… but that’s why they pay you the big bucks right?

Would it work?

Inline PDF Viewing in Firefox 3

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:30:30 +0000

One of the features that I have always loved about Safari is the ability to view PDFs within the browser. It keeps the flow of web browsing moving forward while allowing access to content that was not created specifically for the web.

As a Mac/Apple enthusiast there are many things I like about Safari and many reasons to use it, but as a web developer it is really hard to beat all the extensions/plugins that are available for Firefox.

I was extremely happy when I found a plugin for FF2 that allowed inline PDF viewing.

Of course, when Firefox 3 came along with its much touted improvements, I upgraded immediately. Much to my horror, the first time I clicked a link to a PDF the downloads window popped up, downloaded the PDF then launched Preview to view the PDF.

Say WHAT?!

Isn't this supposed to be the most happenin' browser out there right now?! And I can't view PDFs in the browser?!

Of course, I was frustrated and vented my shock on twitter. At least one of my followers agreed with me, stumped as to why this was.

A few days later I got a random direct message on twitter from firefox_answers

NO WAY! So I check out the link and, what do you know, a blog post with a title sweet to my eyes: Firefox-Mac-PDF allows in-line PDFs for Firefox

Why did my searchs not reveal this previously? Well, it turns out that the plugin is relatively new and it also is nowhere to be found on the Firefox Addons site.

The only place to download the plugin, which is compatible with Firefox 3 only, is its Google Code Page.

Simply click the link to install and you are ready to rock the PDFs in Firefox 3!

So far, I've had great success with it, but there does appear to be a few bugs/issues the developer is working through.

If you can't live without inline PDF viewing in Firefox 3, get your Firefox-Mac-Pdf extension asap!

Bookmarklets in Rails 2.0

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:30:06 +0000

As I was creating this website, my first rails app, there were three main sections that I wanted to display on the homepage. As is on the site now this included the "What I'm Reading," "What I'm Working On," and "What I'm Writing" sections.

I thought this would be a neat way of showcasing my interests and abilities. The projects and blog section was easy, as those are kind of standard things. However, I was initially stumped as to how I wanted to go about adding things to the "What I'm Reading" section.

I thought about just having a form I would go to add a link, but that seemed like it would be a bit tedious everytime I wanted to share a link to a blog or somethign else intersting I've been reading.

Then I thought, wouldn't it be cool to have my own digg/delicious/popurls?? So i decided a custom bookmarklet (or favlet or whatever you want to call it) would be the way to go.

It was actually really really simple, which is cool since I am so new to the whole thing.

Here is how my bookmarklet works:

Find a cool blog post or website that I want to share
Hit my bookmarklet that I have saved in on the favorites bar of all my browsers.
The bookmarklet takes the title and url for the page I was on and sends it to the controller in my rails app that handles it.
The controller grabs the title and url, creates a new record to store the info, then sends me back to the page I was at.

My index controller then grabs the last 10 "readings" to display on the homepage. Pretty simple. Here is how I coded it:

First, the code for the bookmarklet. This is just some simple javascript:

javascript:location.href='http://bradleyjoyce.com/faves/addFave?title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)+'&url='+window.location.href

So, 'faves' is the controller and 'addFave' is the method being called and then of course we pass the document title and url.

Here is what the faves controller looks like:

class FavesController < ApplicationController require 'rubygems' gem('twitter4r','0.3.0') require 'twitter' require 'twitter/console' def index @faves = Fave.find(:all) respond_to do |format| format.html # index.html.erb format.xml { render :xml => @faves } end end def addFave @faves = Faves.find(:all) @title = params[:title] @url = params[:url] @fave = Fave.new( "title" => @title, "url" => @url, "created_at" => Time.now ) if @fave.save client = Twitter::Client.new(:login => 'myTwitterID', :password => 'myTwitterPass') status = client.status( :post, 'I\'m reading: '+@fave.title+' '+@fave.url+'') redirect_to :back end end def show @fave = Fave.find(params[:id]) respond_to do |format| format.html # show.html.erb format.xml { render :xml => @fave } end end end

The meat of this is of course the addFave method where it creates a new fave, stores the title and url passed from the bookmarklet and the creation timestamp. You'll also notice some code involving twitter status, I'll post more on this later.

Great, so now we have the title of the webpage I was on when I hit the bookmarklet and the url to it, but how do I share that with my readers? In my index controller, inside the index method is this simple line:

@faves = Fave.find(:all, :order => "created_at DESC")

which simply stores the info for all my "faves" in an array inside the @faves variable, in descending order by the creation timestamp, so newer faves are listed first.

Then to over to the index view to render them out:

<ul> <% for reading in @readings[0..10] %> <li><%= link_to reading.title, reading.url %></li> <% end %> </ul>

That's it! The only downside to the whole thing has been the couple times I've accidently clicked the bookmarklet when I'm on sites that I don't necessarily want to share... like my bank statement. :-P I would advise keeping bookmarklets in a safe location.

I love favicons

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 21:16:23 +0000

Favicons might be the coolest art form on the web. It's like the haiku of branding.

Am I the first person to say that? I think I should trademark it or something. Anyway...

Here is what wikipedia has to say about favicons:

A favicon (short for 'favorites icon'), also known as a website icon, page icon or urlicon, is an icon associated with a particular website or webpage. A web designer can create such icons in several ways and many recent web browsers can then make use of them. Browsers that support them may display them in the browser's URL bar, next to the site's name in lists of bookmarks, and next to the page's title in a tabbed document interface. Some operating systems, like Windows, will also often use the favicon for Internet shortcuts to sites placed on the desktop or in other directories.

Here is a collection of some great favicons from around the web:

Inspire Yourself: 50 Remarkable Favicons

I use this as a prelude to announcing the creation of my very own favicon for bradleyjoyce.com! Woohoo!

Here it is, what do you think?

TheFunded Now Making Connections

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 05:26:57 +0000

If you have ever thought about going after VC money, are interested in the way venture capital works and who is involved, the you have to check out TheFunded.com

Shrouded in mystery after its creation shook up the VC world, TheFunded is probably THE best place to get the low down on venture capital.

Now, it's also the place to get connected with potential investors.

According to an email I just received from TheFunded, they are announcing "TheFunded Connect", a free members-only service designed to facilitate introductions between fundraising companies and VC firms.

From the email:

Investors traditionally respond more favorably to referrals from existing portfolio companies, but it's often difficult and time-consuming to organize high quality introductions. TheFunded Connect is designed to properly introduce a company raising capital to as many as 30 investors in less than a month. In initial testing, Sequoia Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Clearstone Venture Partners, and Altos Ventures all set up meetings within 6 hours of being introduced to a company using the new technology. The process is simple:

Fundraising companies post a Pitch on TheFunded Connect.

Members comment on the pitch to refine the message.

Members recommend appropriate investors for the business.

Members introduce the fundraising CEO to investors.

Throughout its existence TheFunded has been the target of both alot of praise and hate. However, this new service will definitely be another reason for every startup to get involved in TheFunded's community.

TheFunded.com

Have You Ever Googled Your Name?

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:02:44 +0000

Over the years I have occasionally Googled my name just to see what would come up. Usually, the results would be a bunch of stuff about genealogy and people search, or about something with my name in another country, or someone named Joyce Bradley (that's the worst, but a story for another time).

After getting into web development, I decided I need to take over the Google search results for my name, "Bradley Joyce," so I could begin to build a professional presence on the internet.

According to www.howmanyofme.com there are (in the US):

39 Bradley Joyces
18 Brad Joyces
299 Joyce Bradleys

So 356 people (theoretically, howmanyofme doesn't seem to confident with their numbers) are potentially competing with me for Google page 1 search results. Not a huge number by SEO standards, but significant nonetheless.

Seeing as how there didn't appear to be anyone previously trying to rank specifically for the search term "bradley joyce" I figured total domination of google page 1 results should be fairly easy.

So after a few months of working not so hard at it, all but 3 of google page 1 results are directly related to me in someone. Not too surprising, my LinkedIn profile is in the number 1 slot. That profile is probably the longest existing space on the web that has my name all over it. Of course, the weight of the domain helps too.

Scattered through the results are some other network profiles, a couple of forum posts (interesting) and of course, this site, bradleyjoyce.com.

My goal is completely own page 1 of google, and get bradleyjoyce.com to the number 1 slot. This might be more of an uphill battle.

Have you googled your name lately?

Why You Should Upgrade Your Wordpress Install

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 18:32:06 +0000

So you run your own, hosted wordpress blog right? You've spent some time downloading the files, getting them uploaded to your own server, customizing a theme and posting content.

Then the guys over at Automattic release a new version and you see something about some security fix, blah blah blah. How important is it that you upgrade to the next decimal place version immediately anyway?

Well, I would say probably pretty important! Hire-Engineers.com is currently, for better or worse, built on Wordpress. After the release of version 2.5 I upgraded to get the new look and enhanced functionality. Not long after, 2.5.1 was released with a note about some important security fixes.

I pretty much have ignored it for Hire-Engineers.com as well as the over 100 wordpress sites we run at work.

Needless to say, I just noticed today a rogue link sitting in my links section of the sidebar. How did that get there? Some stupid link to a wordpress theme site is there just laughing at me for not heeding the warning security issues in WP 2.5 and the need to upgrade to 2.5.1

So I deleted the link, and upgraded to 2.5.1.

If you have an old version of wordpress running... go ahead and upgrade!

Where You At?

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 13:55:03 +0000

Want everyone to know where you are at any given point in time?

Well, a startup called Sense Networks can do just that via your cell phone. The companies technology, dubbed Macrosense, takes data emitted by user's cellphone and also from GPS devices, WiFi and taxis to build a heatmap of the "hot" locations around town.

Currently, the technology only works in San Francisco.

Call me crazy, but I don't see myself being a part of this type of network any time soon. We can already be tracked easily enough, why contribute even more data to the cause?

Some 14 year old hacker out there will probably crack their network security and figure out how to personally identify everyone, just for "fun" and their goes your information.

In an era where GPS and satellite communications can start your car, stop and disable your car and pinpoint your location with a few feet, these types of applications that track your whereabouts just make me nervous.

What about you?

Read the TechCrunch write up HERE

Who Will Rule the New Internet

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 18:00:02 +0000

Time.com published an interesting article on Wednesday stating that very question.

They profiled 3 companies (Google, Apple and Facebook) and overviewed what each is doing to attain that goal. Interestingly enough, Microsoft is left out of the conversation.

Wait, is it all that interesting, or surprising? Sure, Microsoft has a minority stake in Facebook, but Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has stated numerous times that he's not interested in selling out to the software giant.

Neither is Yahoo. So far Microsoft has been unsuccessful in their takeover bid of the #2 search engine.

With product flops coming faster than you can say, "zune sucks", Microsoft appears to be a really bad Elvis impersonator on his way out of the building.

After recently attending Google I/O in San Francisco, I would have to say that Google is definitely positioning itself to rule the internet, in any shape it takes in the future, and probably the world.

In the mean time, Apple is pushing Microsoft further into lame duck status as it charges ahead with innovative and elegant products like iPhone and MacBook Air.

Facebook, unfortunately, is now competing as a "platform", almost directly with Google (through opensocial), and that will be tough to survive.

Read the Time.com article HERE

Google I/O: Impressions

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:25:03 +0000

If anyone needs evidence that Google is position themselves to take over every aspect of the web, Google I/O is the smoking gun.

They have their hands in EVERYTHING, and the bottom line, as put by Google VP of Engineering, Vic Gundotra, is more revenue for Google.

That being said, Google has a wealth of high quality tools, all offered for free, that allow web developers to do amazing things. During Vic’s keynote, we saw an impressive demonstration of Android, Google’s open source mobile phone platform.

So far, most of the breakout sessions have been sales pitches for the respective Google products being discussed. Most of the interesting sessions that I have attended have been focused around App Engine, Google’s relatively new system for rapidly building, deploying and scaling web apps.

Overall, I am enjoying the food, beanbags, and pool tables… oh an learning a little on the side :-)

What is an Enrepreneur?

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:23:44 +0000

In my June issue of Inc. Magazine, they say ?These days, it seems everyone is an entrepreneur.? By their (Inc Mag?s) definition an entrepreneur is ?a hands-on operator who relies on creativity and hard work to build a self-sustaining enterprise that employs people and earns a profit.?

The definition paints a pretty broad stroke but I think it?s accurate for the most part, though I would venture to say there a number of people out there who like the entrepreneur title and yet are still working hard to turn a profit.

Does the fact that they aren?t making money yet make them NOT entrepreneurs?

I wouldn?t go that far. Of course, profit is important and without it any entrepreneurial venture will eventually fail. Even entrepreneurs can consistently go down in a blaze of burning benjamins.

In the end, I don?t think there is one catch-all definition for an entrepreneur. There are so many different levels of entrepreneurship and so many different types of entrepreneurs. At the root, though, is a desire to create your own vision of something.

In my book, if you are putting blood, sweat and tears into making your vision, whatever it is, come to life, then you?re an entrepreneur.

Hello World

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:21:04 +0000

Testing tinymce

test

@readings = Reading.find(:all, :order => "created_at DESC")