Search Engine Bingo

Has Microsoft managed yet to come up with a marketing campaign for anything that doesn't reek of desperation? These Bing ads have been the worst so far - and maybe it's just because the service itself is so badly done that it feels like they're trying to put lipstick on a pig. Nevermind the name, just call up the site, and try it a bit. As far as I can tell, they're just trying to out-Google Google. Same basic stuff, with a couple annoyances (images and ads at the top, so that those of us without much vertical real estate have to scroll down to see more than one actual result) And really, that's a winning strategy for them: Bing plus Internet Explorer's default page = lots of people who won't bother with Google because they're already using something comparable.

Let's try some comparisons: Google, Bing, Wolfram Ego. The Bing page is a little more slick than the Google page, sure, but it sure looks to me that they put very little thought into it beyond "Make it like Google, only better". And then there's my own experience actually trying to use it: when I used it this afternoon to search for information on a Microsoft product (Netmon) the very first link, to a Microsoft page, was broken. WTF? To be fair, I get the same result with Google... but then, shouldn't the bar be just a tad higher for a Microsoft service searching microsoft.com?

Wolfram, on the other hand, is intriguing. I may mock the egotism involved, but I'm seeing the basis for some very interesting (and potentially useful) stuff there. Go look up your hometown on it. It's not quite as engaging as, say, Wikipedia, but it does a good job of laying out the sort of basic facts that might be useful

Celebrating the coffeehouse

There's a nice little post on the history of coffeehouses over at I Need Coffee. I have my own favorite penny university, of course. It's a shame that Hanover has such a lousy coffee shop culture. The two main places in town (I'm not counting the bookstore-bound Starbucks) just don't have the right atmosphere, and neither is open past 6pm.

Too slow!

I stopped by the grocery store with a brilliant idea yesterday, but it was just too late -- the ramps are gone!  I will have to leave it to someone else to attempt ramp pesto.

(Ramps, for the regrettably uncultured, are sort of a cross between garlic and green onions.  I think they're technically wild leeks.  They have long broad leaves that are a bit fibrous but have a wonderful garlic flavor, which I intended to pair half-and-half with basil for the pesto.  I'm not sure pine nuts would have stood up to it, though.  Pistachios might work better)

Still Alive

Been busy as hell at work, then had a Weekend of Social Engagement Doom, then was sick for a week.  But I'm still alive!  

In the process of being sick, I decided to give the Codex Alera series (by Jim Butcher) a second chance.  Last time I tried I only got ten pages into the first book.  This time, I burned through the whole series in less than a week (damn you, Kindle, and your instant gratification!)  Less shark-jumpy than his Dresden Files series, and more carefully-crafted.  He keeps a lot of secrets from one book to the next, and is confident enough not to answer all the questions he raises, even five books in, there are questions unanswered from the first book.

(Oh, and as evidence that I'm still alive and well, I still hate Perl.)

Two-Minute Hate

Regexes. Damn them.

On the plus side, those two minutes are billable time. On the minus side, it's more like a twenty-minute hate, and counting.

Whole Bean

So, how would you go about brewing whole bean coffee? As in, not grinding it, attempting to extract a coffee-type beverage while leaving the beans intact. I thought about trying this with a cold-brew system, but I only have half a pound of whole beans, and less than a quarter pound of interest in this question.

Wallace and Gromit game!

For those of you who are fans of either Wallace and Gromit, or of Telltale Games (or like me are a fan of both) the new series of W&G games starts with its first episode on Monday. I've already pre-ordered, since I've been a huge fan of their adventure games. The only downside is that it sounds like they couldn't get the actor from the films to do Wallace's voice.

New Computer!

In other news, the parts for my new computer shipped today! This is my birthday present to myself, intended solely for playing games. It's not for research, or for work, just for fun. It'll be a Vista machine, sadly - but then, playing games is the one thing that OS is good for.

All told it should be a decent machine. The Intel Quad Core chips are good for what they do, though I'm skeptical that many modern games are effectively multi-threaded. The only disappointment is that the RAM I wanted was out of stock in the speed I wanted, especially because I suspect that RAM speed is going to be the major bottleneck in this system. I guess I'll resign myself to running Dwarf Fortress with fewer than 300 dwarves until the first upgrade...

The other weird thing is how natural it seems to buy a terabyte disk drive. I know intellectually that this makes sense: I pointed out in a lecture last fall that within a year or so, the industry will be manufacturing one bit of magnetic storage for every star in the sky every year, and a byte every year shortly after that. But I still remember when a 100 MB drive seemed freaking huge, and this just boggles my mind.

(Actually, the really sad thing is that of the handful of games I'm really looking forward to playing, a number of them are Interactive Fiction. I'm told that Blue Lacuna is particularly good, though.)

Giving Criticism

I learned a lot about management during my graduate studies - learning by example sometimes, but mostly learning from counter-example. [1] Being a manager frequently means giving feedback, and I've learned a number of lessons there. Over time it became obvious that there is one iron-clad rule that must be understood: If you do not give credit where credit is due, you have zero credibility in giving criticism where criticism is due.

Note that this is not the Golden Rule, this is not a piece of advice. This holds true regardless of what you think of it, and especially if you think it's not true for you. It's also not a matter of being fair: some of the most manipulative people I've ever known have cultivated a reputation for fairness.

Those who are oblivious to this rule are easy to spot: people don't listen to them. They're called nitpickers, tyrants, "never satisfied"s. These are the people whose children and employees are told privately, "You can't please him, so just please yourself." Working for someone like that can be an exercise in frustration, and it rarely ends well.

If you are a person who does not understand this rule, you are probably saying to yourself, "It shouldn't matter if I say positive things so long as what I am saying is true." In theory, that's true. And in theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. But this is not just a matter of discernment and truth, it's a matter of trust. Very few pieces of work that you will ever be presented with are entirely without merit, and if you cannot be counted on to identify what is of merit, how can you be trusted to have identified correctly what was wrong?

This is not a matter of "softening the blow." This is not a matter of trying to find something nice to say whenever saying something negative. It is a matter of cultivating a reputation for fairness: if the person you are talking to understands that you are the kind of person who will identify and comment on the positive aspects of their work or argument, then they will listen to what you are saying, even if this particular interaction is wholly negative. In fact, earning and maintaining a reputation for fairness is remarkably freeing. It is the only way to legitimately be able to say what you think.

This leads into a corollary - you must understand this rule in order to correctly apply it. If you do not understand it, and think of it merely as "softening the blow" or (worse) as "being nice" then you will inevitably wind up spouting mealy-mouthed crap. You'll wind up focusing on trivialities on the positive side, and only getting to the meat on the negative side, and anyone with half a brain will consider this at best a nicety and at worst condescending. If you are presented with something that you wish to critique, you really honestly cannot identify anything non-trivially positive in it, and have not earned a reputation for fairness, you would be far better off keeping your mouth shut: you will probably not be heeded, and are probably wrong about there being nothing non-trivially positive.

I bring this up because I see everywhere people who violate this rule constantly, and then wonder why nobody takes them seriously. Politicians stand up and rail against the new President for what they see as waste, for example - and you know what? There is a lot of waste in both the stimulus bill and other spending bills. But they have no credibility to criticize, because they fail to recognize what is being done right, and they additionally failed to point out the same offenses when they were committed by friends. Without credibility, they have nothing.

There is in general on the Internet a lack of understanding of credibility. I could point out a number of online discussions and online "discussions" where the people talking seem to all assume, "Being right justifies what I say, how I say it, and how I treat those who disagree with me." Put an otherwise normal human being onto a message board with a tiny comment window and a lot of semi-anonymous handles, and that person turns into a college freshman, or worse. I am coming to believe that this is a perhaps necessary result of valuing anonymity - one CANNOT have credibility under these conditions. Anonymity encourages the idea that every comment is an island, but most forums discourage posting long enough comments to engender enough credibility to make an argument - even if the comment boxes are large enough, and the comment screen doesn't cut off or otherwise hide long comments, you simply lose track of a "real-time" comment thread and risk having someone faster or more pithy than you make the case while you're still checking your spelling.

[1] I have a whole other rant ready to go about how PhDs are not adequately trained in management, but almost universally expected to manage. Having gone through the experience of getting a PhD is not a guarantee of knowing how to manage other people - it is if anything a hurdle to overcome when learning to manage! Too many PhDs get into the "I'll do it myself" micromanaging mode, or insist that everyone have a special portion of the project carved out for them as though they are working on theses and not together on a shared goal.

Pretty much

The best product ever.

Web 2.0 has its uses

Which would have worked better to dissuade this kind of behavior: a high-level diplomatic protest? Or putting up videos of the incident on YouTube?

Know yourself, and know your enemy

The New York Times Magazine has an excellent piece this weekend. I only decided to link to it when I got to this point:

“Most Republicans are not entrepreneurial[.] They’re corporatists. They like the security and the comfort of a well-thought-out, highly boring boardroom meeting in which they do a PowerPoint once. And it worries them to have ideas, because ideas have edges, and they’re not totally formed, and you’ve got to prove them, and they sound strange because they’re new, and if it’s new how do you know it’s any good, because, after all, it’s new and you’ve never heard it before.”

The gentleman who is speaking is referred to consistently as an "idea factory" or similar. I've known a few of those over the years; they tend to do exceedingly well in academia. Outside of academia, though, they tend to rise or fall not on their own merits, but according to the ability of others to focus and harness them. The idea that the engine keeps running even when the wheels fall off captures the phenomenon well - as well as the difficulty in reattaching wheels.