everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Year: 2004

  • For Sale

    On Wednesday, the real estate agent’s “For Sale” sign went up on our home. I knew this would be traumatic for us all but I had no idea how much. Of course we had prepped the neighbors but seeing the sign out there, with it’s brash “Buy Me” red letters really drove a stake through the neighborhood. Izumi called me at the office to tell me the sign was going in and she sounded so sad, “It’s happening. . .all the neighbors have come out to look.”

    Tyler took it the hardest. We have been talking to him about this move, why it was necessary and why he would have a great time in San Francisco (“They have sea lions there! Right in the harbor!”). Yet this home is all he really knows. The friends he’s made on this blocks are his only friends. San Francisco is too far away for them to come play. “Do they speak English there?” he asked.

    When the sign went in, he ran outside and tried to tear the sign out of the ground so no one would buy this house and take it away from us. I know he’ll be fine. Heck, I barely remember where I was living when I was five. But hearing this ripped a hole in my heart.

  • Click Fraud

    Write up in CNet on a dark secret known amongst the interactive advertising industry. There are a number of sites out there which artificially generate banner clicks from automated bots and use that to scam Google, Overture, and other ad syndication networks which serve up advertising and pay out commissions for clickthroughs.

    This pay-for-performance gaming of the system has a counterpart in the music industry. In London, I heard cases where a record company would hire students to hit the record stores around town and buy up copies of an artist they would want to promote. The volume in sales would push that artist up on the charts and generate a hit. In the US this practice was applied to radio stations where a radio syndicate would be paid to play a hit song more regularly than other songs. This practice was called, "payola"

    Another slant on this story on tainted metrics is the Mozilla plug-in Bug-Me-Not which "liberates" sites that require registration by providing a collective pool of user accounts that can be shared among its members. I always wondered why Factiva.com had customers in Afghanistan until I realized that this country was the first (and thus default) country on our registration drop down. Users listed from this country were probably just too lazy to pick their own.

    With Bug-Me-Not shared IDs, it’s even easier to share such skewed profiles. I wonder how many Accountants from Afghanistan are part of the nytimes.com demographic?

  • On things being in more than one place

    Infoworld’s Jon Udell posts outtakes from his interview with Quentin Clark, the director of program management for Microsoft’s WinFS that will serve as core technology of the next generation of Windows code-named Longhorn. Of particular interest is his take on Outlook’s current limitations and the problems posed by trying to work through this:

    . . . The limitation of Outlook 11 is that it doesn’t allow you to put an item in more than one user lassoing. We want to allow multiple lists, or folders, where you can put the same thing in both. We’re removing that Outlook limitation.

    We encountered significant design challenges around user experience and expectations, and also problems around the DAG (directed acyclic graph). Consider security. I take an item, it lives in a bunch of folders, what is the security on that thing? Folder 2 has it too, then moves to folder 3. All the way back on folder 1, does the owner have any way to know what’s happened? Then there’s naming. If I have a doc, call it “jon’s doc,” created in a single folder, then I want to have it appear twice in that same folder, what is it called? If it’s in a second folder, and I delete it from folder 1, then at some point I rename folders and put the doc back, calculating namespaces becomes complex.

  • LexisNexis Total Search

    Lexis, the legal research division of Reed Elsevier, announced enhancements to a product called Total Search. Included in the enhancements is the ability to hook into a firm’s document management system and bring back an aggregated set of search results.

    LexisNexis Total Search also identifies, correlates, and links case citations appearing within internal work product and LexisNexis search results. These citations are noted, and access to the internal work product is provided, through a “correlation” icon appearing next to a particular case or code citation within an internal document result, LexisNexis full-text document or in a LexisNexis cite list.

    Not clear from the literature how easy it is to integrate Total Search as either an outbound feed to downstream search engines or as a platform to receive and integrate inputs from other systems such as email and newsfeeds.

  • New Category – Browsers

    Today I’m launching a new category to follow the march of progress of alternatives to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser. After following Mozilla Firefox for several months, I’ve now made Firefox 0.9.1 my default web browser on my Windows machine. I’m impressed with the speed of it’s rendering engine and the open source aspect has added a healthy suite of plug-ins and extensions. The tipping point for changing the browser default came when I ran across an extension that allowed me to right-click on any web page viewed using Firefox and view that page within IE.

    As a first post on Browsers, I link to a post on BoingBoing which outlines how quickly (31 hours!) the open source community was able to react to and patch Firefox in response to discovering a security vulnerability. This turnaround time is especially significant when put into context with all the recent hubbub over security holes for those using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer including an official warning from US-CERT.

  • Back “home”

    We made it back to rainy New Jersey late yesterday. Before unpacking, we let some of our neighbors know that we’re planning on pulling up stakes to move to San Francisco. It really starts to hit home when you tell families that you’ve been sharing your lives with that you’re going to be pulling away.

    After unpacking and eating take away Chinese, we finally hit the sack around 11 pm. Jet lag set in on the kids with first Julia, then Tyler making their way to our bedroom for some company. After several attempts of telling them to try and get some sleep, at 4 am Izumi turned over to see both Tyler & Julia, quiet as can be, side-by-side between us in bed, staring straight up at the ceiling, eyes wide open. We finally gave up at 5 am and got up to fix some breakfast.

    Julia just came by and said to me, “How’ya doin’” in a perfect New Jersey twang, I think it’s time for us to move on.

  • Head Fake

    Psych! We were quietly settling in for our flight (Continental 008) from Tokyo to Newark when the ultra-smooth voice of the captain comes over the IC. Something about an issue with the right engine that came up in the pre-flight check and needs further investigation. The captains cucumber-cool voice continues with something like, “We’ve got the ground crew looking into it right now folks. After they have a look-see, we should be good to go in a few minutes.”

    The minutes tick by – that’s fine, I’d rather have them check things out thoroughly rather than have a blow out of one of our two engines on a Boeing 777 go out over the Pacific. After about 20 minutes, the captain’s back on, this time a little more tentative. To his credit, he’s totally up front with the situation and explains that it’s some sort of “blower” part and that fortunately there’s a spare one nearby but it’ll take between (and there’s a looong pause) 5 – 10 hours to replace.

    Collective groan by the Americans on board followed by a second one by the Japanese as soon as the translation hits them. The Continental ground crew is still “confident” that they can patch things up in time to get the scheduled 4:20 PM flight on its way before the 10 PM curfew but I have my doubts and make a beeline for the gate agent.

    After much collective handwringing in the line with others I make it to the front. Amazing what people will do to get out of a country on time – one woman looking to fly to Hong Kong to catch the midnight flight to Los Angeles and then overnight it to Newark. She comments that she really wants to make it ahead of her group so she can spend time with her sister. I remark that she’s going to be so wigged out after her extended travels she will not even realize she’s with her sister.

    I innocently ask to remove the four of us off of the flight and put us on the same flight the next day. The kind lady took our order and then set off on a complicated series of moves to get us seats and then pull our bags off the flight so we could recheck them for tomorrow. In the meantime, the manager on staff scolded her for making such a promise and then slams the gate closed for any future endorsements to the next day’s flight. We were the only ones to make it on.

    We later had to re-enter the country (our passports had already been stamped) which involved immigration looking for the fiddly bits of paper they tear out of your passport so they could re-attach the fiddly bits of paper. We then claimed our bags and put them into overnight storage after retreiving a fresh set of clothes and caught the train back to my inlaws. By 10 PM we were bathed, fed, and asleep.

    I awoke this morning to see that CO 008 for Saturday was cancelled after all and can only think of the poor souls that stuck it out at the airport for six hours only to be told their flight was cancelled after all. By 10 PM it’s too late to catch a train back to the city for a reasonable amount of sleep especially considering their flight will take off first thing the next morning. I’m also told the hotels around the airport were all booked out because it’s the beginning of Summer vacation for the schoolkids and lots of families were staying near the airport last night, having flown/drove/trained in from the provinces in order to catch early morning flights on Sunday. I thank my lucky stars it wasn’t us stuck at the airport.

    UPDATE: I just called Continental to check on our seats and asked what happened to those going on yesterday’s flight. Turns out the took the plane in for maintenance and it will not be ready to fly until 6 PM this evening, two hours AFTER we fly out. I feel like I should be rubbing some genie bottle in thanks.

  • Scam Baiter

    Funny story posted on BBC about a man who got a Nigerian scammer to paint the number 9 on his chest.

    We’re jumping on to a plane that will take us all home from Tokyo. I’ll post photos later!

  • Lookout Purchased by Microsoft

    Surprise, Surprise. Lookout, the Outlook add-in that I’ve been touting for some time now, has been scooped up by the MSN division of Microsoft. They will be rolling in Lookout’s universal search technology into the next generation MSN search technology. Nothing more than vague musing right now but the statements from the Microsoft press release below points to a vision where MSN will reach into your email box and hard disk connecting internet searches with queries on your inbox and hard drive.

    This acquisition builds on the range of new and updated services MSN launched July 1 for its MSN Search service. As part of a $100 million investment in improving the customer experience, MSN delivered its most significant upgrade to MSN Search, introducing several changes designed to help give people faster, cleaner and easier access to the information they want. Specific improvements included a new MSN Search home page (at http://search.msn.com/) that features easy navigation to popular MSN services; a new, cleaner look for its search results page that separates algorithmic results from paid results and eliminates paid inclusion; direct access to popular information sources such as Encarta®, the No. 1 best-selling encyclopedia brand*; and extensive performance improvements.

    These improvements were initial steps toward achieving the MSN vision of taking search beyond today’s basic Internet search services to delivering direct answers to people’s questions from a broad range of information. As part of this vision, MSN will launch a new algorithmic search engine and a range of other search services within a year. With the acquisition of Lookout, MSN adds additional expertise and technology that will contribute to this vision.

    Time to add mentions of “algorithmic search engine” to my clipping profile for news about Microsoft Search.

    UPDATE: Anil, looking at the fine print in the revised license agreement, notices that Microsoft is now licensing an Apache product and points to Joel who has his own theories.