It's On Now, Bitches!

This is only the beginning. From this photo, we're much farther along than this today. We should be open for business next weekend; I'm shooting for Saturday, August 2.

Rehberg Technology, Inc.

Let's see... what did I get done today?

I woke up, worked in the shop several hours, came home, drank some beer, ate dinner, posted to a class forum, and then I formed a corporation.

Who thought it would be that easy? Just a quick web form and $100, and I have myself a business entity. Rehberg Technology, Inc. is as of right now Georgia's newest corporation, and I couldn't be more proud for them to name me as the CEO.

Which reminds me - I have to stop by the paper and give them $40 and the instructions for the press release (notice of incorporation).

It's late now and I'm spent. I formed a whole company, for chrissake! Good night.

Mr. Dvorak, You Are Wrong Again.

He thinks that Internet access should be metered, just like the power and water. You pay for what you use. His argument is rational, I'll admit, but it is not inclusive of every use.

I'm writing in a hurry because I really want to discuss this, but Beth won't let me take a computer this weekend to Florida. I'll put the link here so you can take a look, and I will discuss this at length at a later time. I'm shutting down now.

Changed My Mind About iPod Touch

I saw an ad on Gmail from Amazon, pushing the iPod Touch at a discount. 9% off the 32GB, bringing it down to $460 or so. I wanted to look at it again, so I went to the Apple store and watched the videos. Some of the features are great, but they're just not worth $460. For instance, any PDA these days can play music and videos, and most of them in that price range are equipped with Bluetooth. The iPhone with a contract has Internet access everywhere. Not so with the iPod.

No Bluetooth, WiFi only, no GPS (seriously, how hard would that be?), no replaceable battery, and it's $500. It just doesn't make sense. I'm going to wait for a multi-touch enabled Open Handset sporting Android. From the emulator that comes with the SDK, I expect to have everything that could possibly be crammed into a handheld device at my disposal. Bluetooth, WiFi, 3G, GPS, accelerometer, multi-touch, and possibly a keyboard. All on an open platform for which the API is very open. Sure, I won't have 32GB of storage, but I will be able to use any wireless carrier, use Bluetooth headphones, and write an application that does whatever I want it to, without anyone stopping me.

On Management

I was fumbling through my business card holder just now, and discovered again a card I really appreciated when I got it. Some guy was installing a new Cisco firewall in one of my offices last year and I questioned him about his work. He gave me the usual, watered-down "it's a job" kind of thing, and gave me his card should I wish to seek employment alongside him.

This guy, Jeff (not important), worked for a company called Coleman Technologies, Inc. and it was apparently owned by Jeff Coleman (not the fellow on the front of the card). On the back was a pretty straightforward approach to leading. It was a list of 30 little statements, called Jeff Coleman's Laws. They are as follows:

1. No one is smart enough to be a dictator.
2. The only real power one has is the power of persuasion.
3. The less you know about something, the simpler it seems.
4. Important decisions require at least one night's sleep.
5. Decisions made without all the facts are guesses.
6. The most important thing a manager does is people picking.
7. Lies are hard to remember.
8. There is nothing more critical to true success than openness, honesty, and integrity.
9. Those that don't solicit and listen to advice are destined to be unsuccessful.
10. What is given cannot be taken away.
11. Meddling after responsibility is delegated and accepted, provides a built-in excuse for failure.
12. Unwritten agreements are soon forgotten.
13. Time is not a good decision-maker.
14. You must look successful to be successful.
15. Cash flow is more important than profit.
16. Grow or die.
17. The only people not making mistakes are those not doing anything.
18. Don't bite off more than you can bite off.
19. The most important and most difficult trait to identify is the ability to get things done.
20. A manager with a full calendar every day isn't delegating properly.
21. A full day spent in meetings is 40% wasted.
22. A pat on the back is the ultimate in cost effectiveness.
23. A manager that takes the credit for the work of the troops should be made a member of the troops.
24. A manager unwilling to take risks is destined for mediocrity.
25. Twenty percent of the people do eighty percent of the work.
26. People that feel comfortable in their job are more productive.
27. All contracts end.
28. The prepared bird gets the worm.
29. An unfilled position is better than one filled by the wrong person.
30. The killer of the bearer of bad news quickly joins the ranks of the uninformed.

After two minutes of clicking, I discovered that this is available at the Coleman Technologies website.

I realize that the phrases in this list are not original, but this is a great collection. I am now all out of motivation. Goodnight.

The iPhone Didn't Do It for Me

I'm surprised at Apple. Usually when something really groundbreaking comes out, the price of the item I've had my eye on drops into my range. In my case, it's been the 32GB iPod Touch for several months. I was glad to hear about the iPhone 3G, and even happier that the price of that was $199.* Almost two weeks later, the 32GB iPod is still $499. Why?

Is it that the price of the new iPhone is so low that Apple can't reduce the price of the iPod? Are there so many people dropping $500 bills on the biggest Touch that they don't worry about lowering that number?

Or is it just that the iPhone 3G is not that groundbreaking? I have a few reasons that might be the case:

1. Hundreds of thousands of people already have the pokey iPhone, and it's good enough for e-mail, so why change?
2. Solutions were built to make the first iPhone work for their business, so there really is no need to update to a new device that supports MS Exchange natively. It would make the recent infrastructure change a big waste of money.
   
3. They are late adopters, and only six months into the first two-year contract on the old iPhone. They simply can't afford to upgrade to a new device.
4. It wasn't impressive enough the first time to waste money on it again.
5. We're all waiting for Android on Open Handsets.
   

In any case, I'm still not buying the Touch until the price goes down. It will only take time, or the release of a 64GB or 128GB Touch. Fine with me. As soon as it hits $300 for the 32GB, I'm in. But I'm definitely not buying an iPhone.

*Price is $199 with a 2-year contract with AT&T wireless, the very worst wireless carrier in terms of customer service. Good luck if you think the $199 tag is worth it.

Firefox 3 Download Day

Even though I have two irregular readers, I'll tell them about this. Today is Firefox 3 Download Day, but the site doesn't have a link to download version 3 right now. It's 9:30 on the East Coast of the United States, so I would imagine the day has begun for most of the world.
Check back soon today and download Firefox 3. I'll be checking throughout the day and will update this post when I see they have provided a good link. Seems like they're wasting time today if they want to set a record.

Update: Looks like the downloading starts at 10AM PDT (that's California time), so my friend in Arizona (not McCain) can download starting at 11AM his time. 12 noon for Scott, and 1300 hours for me. The download day will then run for 24 hours, so you people have plenty of time to get it to all of your computers.

Update 2: It's 6:50AM on 6/18/2008, and download day is still going. Five more hours!

One Tell-Tale Sign You Might Be Getting Older

I went to my favorite Otolaryngologist today because I was feeling down and I couldn't breathe through my nose. He ended up prescribing so many pills that I had to buy this thing.

This, plus two nasal sprays.
Not much else to report today. I am, however, already feeling better.

The Glider

I guess I'm not as big a geek as I thought. I've never heard of the game of Life they speak of, but now I will explore it. Well, later. Right now I want to talk about a great article I read last night on How to Become a Hacker. I never thought I'd come across something like that, for real hacking is just that - hacking. Whatever art or science it is, if you're really good at it and are able to build things and solve problems, you are a hacker. A passion for such things is usually apparent in the person, too.

On to my subject, and a link. The first result from Google for 'amortization schedule' for years has always returned this one at FSU. I took a look at the fellow who wrote it and found this symbol on his page. It turned out to be a link and in that link were the words "hacker emblem." I had to look.

Apparently there is a following of people who use this emblem to mark themselves in this way, but according to the emblem guide it doesn't mark them as hackers; it only shows that they support the hacker culture. Fine with me. I'd rather not boast that I am a hacker, because if I'm the only one calling Ben Rehberg a hacker I obviously haven't proven to anyone else that I have the skills.

That said, I do support passionate homemade engineering, as I like to call it, so I will display the emblem on this site too. Come to think of it, I could put it on all the sites I own.

Not Dead Yet

The Web Crawler project is not dead. I'm fumbling computer hardware and software right now and making my best attempt at keeping up with school. Oh, and I have a job.

I have started hosting the project on Google's servers so that other programmers may join me in this. I haven't allowed access by anyone yet as I may not want help. The code, however, is available there (I think). Try looking at the rehbergwebindexer project if you wish. I don't think there is even any code in the source file yet; just commenting.

Consolidation

I'm sitting here this evening with a MacBook that has slowed to a crawl. It further delays my inevitable completion of a school project (fine with me), but I really just want to finish what I'm doing (not the school project) and go to bed.

It's not the MacBook. It's the parasite I installed on it.

For the past month, I've been juggling the Vista desktop I use at home for development, the Vista notebook I use for school, the Windows XP tablet that I have for my day job, and this wonderful MacBook that doesn't have many applications I actually use to produce things. It's cool to blog with it, chat, and play with the camera, but it's really just eye-candy. I can't do schoolwork with it (they require Office 2K7 documents), I can't find an FTP program for it, and I really can't figure out how to edit raw text - a very important feature I need to edit HTML and do programming.

To combat my two-computer dining room table, I installed Windows (the aforementioned parasite) on the MacBook using VMWare's VMFusion. It's a wonderful piece of software and it is very similar to Parallels, only cheaper ($40 vs. $80). I installed the trial of VMFusion, and an old copy of Windows XP. It has effectively slowed my MacBook to where it takes a full eight seconds to open a new tab in Firefox. It's working really hard right now on installing SP3, and I'm sure a slew of updates are in store after that is finished. It has Office 2007 and I shouldn't need much more to do everything that I need to do on this beautiful 13-inch MacBook.

The cool thing is that if I ever get really sick of the reduced speed, I can close the Virtual Machine and Windows goes away like a little troll in the closet. I feel powerful.

Okay, I know it's slow because I am only running 1GB RAM on this computer with two operating systems running. A fix (4GB) is on the way. After the updates and the memory upgrade I should have no problem. I might even install Ubuntu on another VM.

Must go now; I have to write a post to tell everyone that the Web Spider project is not dead - I'm just busy.

School of Ben

I'm attending school online, and while that doesn't seem very prestigious, it did present me with an idea this morning which I probably will not be able to digest very completely here this morning.

I can teach. And I can learn at the same time. I will post questions here for my readers to solve, and when they answer in the comments we can have a discussion, m'kay?

I started this post in the morning, and now it's late at night. I have forgotten the question I was going to ask. At least now you know my intent and you will know what your mission is when I choose to send you on one.

Schadenfreude

Like when George Bush fell off the Segway.

Break Time

I've sworn off the web crawler project for the week. I'm in North Georgia until Friday; I intend to ride my motorcycle and relax at the Bed & Breakfast I have enjoyed so far. I didn't bring any books related to the project (the bike was packed already) and I have to get some schoolwork done.

I might be hanging out listening to the rain tonight, but that's fine with me. As long as I can get home Friday, there won't be a problem. I want to ride some in the mountains while I'm here, but a friend is taking me to Athens tonight if the weather permits and it will probably rain Thursday. Friday I'll go home, likely without really hitting the curves up here. It was a nice ride up Monday; really good practice for the trip in September.

Back to "work" now.

Some Books

I got my courage up Saturday and ordered the books from O'Reilly. This press has long been highly regarded by technologists, whether they are programmers, IT professionals, or just geeks. Go ahead - ask a geek if he/she has a camel book, and chances are they'll know what you're talking about (and it will be within reach). Don't tell them what it is if they don't know.

I'm posting this to chronicle my efforts to build a web crawler and eventually a search engine. I expect to make further posts about how this project develops, and perhaps what I've found in these books that helped.

I have ordered three books. I went there for one, but there's always a deal to get three for the price of two, plus free shipping. And I can always find another book to get. So:

Perl & LWP. This one I've borrowed before, and it opened my eyes to the possibilities of automated web surfing using Perl. I built a small script one time that looked up my SMTP server's IP at spamcop, then e-mailed me if my mail server was ever blacklisted. It was fun and quite easy, but since I can't find that script right now I'll have to post it later.

Spidering Hacks. I ordered this one for obvious reasons. This book's excerpts is where I found that little bit on needing my spider registered. I expect to learn a lot and become very frustrated with what I find here.

Perl Cookbook. This was the third choice because I needed three. Also because it's $50 and I could use the discount. There apparently is a series of "cookbooks" that have really cool stuff (recipes) in them. There is also the PHP Cookbook, the C# 3.0 Cookbook, and more. I expect to find shortcuts and things I'd never thought of in this book.

Light Reading

I'm taking a class right now on software requirements engineering (does one actually engineer the requirements, or did they just want to make this class sound hard?) and I came across something I might use with the web crawler project.

In the chapter about "The Software Process" which talks about the processes necessary for an individual or team to succeed at building a quality piece of software or system, I came across the Personal Software Process, or PSP. The book simply states that every developer has a process, whether anyone can see it or not. Either way, there is a proper way to go about producing software at a personal level, and here is the gist (Pressman, 2005, p.37):

Planning. This activity isolates requirements and, based on these, develops both size and resource estimates. In addition, a defect estimate (the number of defects projected for the work) is made. All metrics are recorded on worksheets or templates. Finally, development tasks are identified and a project schedule is created.
High-level design. External specifications for each component to be constructed are developed and a component design is created. Prototypes are build when uncertainty exists. All issures are recorded and tracked.
High-level design review. Formal verification methods... are applied to uncover errors in the design. Metrics are maintained for all important tasks and work results.
Development. The component level design is refined and reviewed. Code is generated, reviewed, compiled, and tested. Metrics are maintained for all important tasks and work results.
Postmortem. Using the measures and metrics collected (a substantial amount of data that shoul be analyzed statistically), the effectiveness of the process is determined. Measures and metrics should provide guidance for modifying the process to improve its effectiveness.

I'm not sure if what I'm doing will fit into this personal model of development, but it's thought provoking. Even if I don't collect data about what my problems might be and then analyze the data about what actually went wrong, I can still hold myself to some kind of process. Even though I don't have a deadline or an antsy customer to deliver this to, I can possibly eliminate shortfalls if I just think it out before delving into code.

But then what fun would that be?


Reference (in our favorite APA format):

Pressman, R.S. (2005). Software engineering: A practitioner's approach. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Executive Decision

After toying with C# today, I've decided that it is way to process-intensive to write the application on a runtime environment like .NET or Java. What I need is a simple language that can download a page, rip through text like a bandit, write the necessary fields to the database, and move on. I can organize the data when the search engine extracts that data.

I can't commit to anything yet, but my spidey-sense is telling me that the crawler will be written in Perl with LWP. I suppose I could look at Ruby, too, but I already have my Camel book and have worked with LWP before. I haven't tied Perl to a RDBMS, but I have done it with PHP and it must be similar. Perl can also do some limited recursion from what I understand, and if it can't I may can use a database back-end to save the stacks of URLs.

I was ready to buy books at O'Reilly today (I chickened out of spending the money) and found a book on writing spiders. From the preview I surmised my crawler/spider must be registered. That means I have to go mainstream, doesn't it?

And now after some more reading, I have discovered that this crawler can be used to build an index for special purposes. I can build my own search engine for this site, for example, and get much better results than I can searching the Google index for benrehberg.com. I have searched for things I know I wrote about, but never found them with Google. Building my own search engine and maintaining my own index of the site can prove useful if I keep writing about programming.

Update: I have created a new label "Web Crawler" for all posts related to this project.

How to Write a Search Engine

It seems a bit strange using the world's best search engine to find out how to build your own. Google is my first resource in this project, though Google itself provides nothing but the idea. There is a paper at Stanford by Larry and Sergey, and that basically is the starting point. That is Google's only contribution so far aside from the many searches I will perform.

There are three main parts to the search engine: the crawler, which tirelessly captures data from the web, the database to hold everything, and the actual search engine - the queries that put the data together in a meaningful format for you.

I could write a search engine that actually crawls the web looking for my search criteria, but that is very VERY inefficient. Google (and many others) have solved this inefficiency by effectively downloading the Web (that's right - as much of it as they can) to their computers so it can search it much faster and have it available in one place. They've done a whole lot more to increase efficiency and effectiveness of searches, but downloading the web was the first thing they did. It turns out they needed a lot of computers.

I'm going to start with two. I have three desktops that no one wants to buy, and I am really tired of looking at them. I will probably need more if I get this index working soon, but there will be software considerations to make too. You can't fit the web on one computer, no matter how big. I will learn a lot.

I have always had an interest in distributed systems and cluster computing, so this will be fun. I have a lot to learn about distributed databases and algorithm analysis. But all that is later - I haven't even really finished thinking out the preliminaries yet. So one development/crawling machine, and one database machine. After I figure out how to crawl the web, I will begin work on performing searches. If this project holds my interest long enough, I might publish statistics at 49times.com, so keep looking. I will be posting here if I come up with anything worth publishing. I'm going to try to journal my progress and decisions without publishing code, but I realize that I very well could lose interest in this. If I get started, I will likely enjoy it and keep going, but no one can say. If you have some confidence that I will continue, you can subscribe to this blog and get the updates. Beware, though, that you'll get everything else I write too.

As a Student of Software Engineering,

from the stories I hear about glitches and compatibility and poor project management, this is friggin' scary.

Good Times

I realize we probably looked like a couple of homos walking down the beach, but my reunion with Scott was great. We drank, but not enough, and we didn't get tattoos either.

Just more reasons to do RAGBRAI together in 2010.

Uh-Oh.

49times.com is down since yesterday. You know it's on that powerful box, and I think it took the grid down for a few seconds yesterday when traffic was high. I can't tell yet, but I think there might have been as many as 2 simultaneous users, overloading the system.

Actually, the power blinked and I'm not home to restart it. Friday night is the soonest; I know you guys can't wait, but we all need to suffer a little bit for the cause.

And I'm Spent...

It is working. After a long battle all day yesterday (and giving up on Apache), Ruby on Rails is running. The rest of my configuration is yet to be done (no database yet), but all in good time. Take nothing for granted: this is a very powerful server. Here are the specs (and yes, it is 2008):

Fedora Core 8
450MHz Pentium II
512MB RAM
10GB HDD

Should serve very well for the amount of traffic I expect at 49times.com.

Should Have Been Mine

An article in the Washington Post today caught my eye. It's about a web-based startup called WEBook that lets authors collaborate on a novel and they all make money when it's published. Some of the books will be sold through Amazon's on-demand publishing and some sold directly at Barnes & Noble stores.

For some reason, this sounds really familiar. I don't know why, but it may be similar to an idea I had several months ago. They probably had the idea at that time, but they were smart and got a company going, with investors and everything.

Which leads me to believe that I in fact do have good ideas from time to time. No one batted an eye when I mentioned a community-written book, and now a few folks are living it up in Mountain View with their good idea. The model can last so long as there are serious players writing there. My brother could benefit from something like that.

Now, what to do with my next big product of random thought before someone makes a corporation out of it...

Never be Late Again

With Gmail's Custom Time, just make up an event in the past and say it happened. It's that easy!

You may even figure out a way to win last week's lottery using the Custom Time API! I'm going to create an app for Android so you can even keep a little slice of your own time in your pocket (coming the second half of 2008). But when that happens, I'll have had it since 2005.

You guys are way behind!

Gimme a Minute...

I used to get a locally roasted and flavored coffee called Highlander Grog downtown in Colorado Springs. It was always a special time when I was able to get it. I took a thermos of it to Literature class on Friday nights, sat up in the morning and drank it, and winter was the best season to have some Highlander Grog. Even more special were the times the coffee shop was actually brewing it, and my daily coffee turned into an aromatic treat.

And then I moved to South Georgia. You've heard enough about my regrets of this decision so I won't bore you with that. But down here, there are quite a few people who haven't even heard of the television show Highlander, or even muttered the word before. They think they know coffee when they get some bag at the grocery store that says "Gourmet" on it. They have no idea.

My parents took a road trip up the East Coast in late 2005 and discovered Intercourse Canning Company in Intercourse, Pennsylvania. Guess what flavored coffee they have!

So every once in awhile my mom orders coffee from there. This morning is the first time in over a year I have smelled that familiar aroma that takes me back in time. I stood at the coffee pot a few minutes ago with my eyes closed, and I could almost see my Literature instructor talking about Othello. I could feel campus around me. I was back to a happy time, long ago.

So to combat this, I'm sitting at my kitchen table in Adel, Georgia, with a cup of Highlander Grog under my nose, waiting for my daughter to wake up. I can enjoy my good memories from time to time, but that never means I have to stop making them.

Good Point.

Barack Obama doesn't like the VP idea. From CNN:

"'I don't understand,' he said. 'If I'm not ready, how is it that you think I should be such a great vice president?'"

I Think She Knows

This isn't me, by the way. It's John Mayer. If it won't play here, it might over there.

Bono:

"The less you know, the more you believe."

That got me going this morning. I love it!

Reflections

Just testing a cool script I found today:

Subsidies

"It's the opinion of some that crops could be grown on the moon; which raises the fear that it may not be long before we're paying somebody not to."
Franklin P. Jones

I don't know why this struck me as very funny this morning.

Friends with Vista

After nearly a year, I finally decided to figure out what I could do to make my Vista laptop a bit faster. The memory is maxed out at 2 Gigabytes and it has a dual-core AMD CPU. It had always been very very slow in completing trivial tasks, like opening a browser or the control panel. Copying and moving files took way too long, and I just never approached my problem with logic.

A few weeks ago I was talking with a friend about my experience with Vista so far, and mentioned to him that I didn't think it was a problem with Vista, but a hardware issue with my Gateway laptop. "It runs very hot," I told him. "The hard drive activity never stops. I just don't think the machine was designed well enough to support such a heavy OS." I'd never seen Vista so slow on any other computer, so why the hell is it pokey on mine? And what in the dickens is going on with my hard drive?

Then it hit me. Constant hard drive activity is an indicator of (1) a virus or crapware, or (2) an indexing service. Google Desktop search was deployed with the computer when I bought it; part of Gateway's image, along with all the other garbage like BigFix, AOL , and the Office 2007 90-day trial.

Having been a student of Vista before and during its release, I remembered something about Google and Microsoft having fits about desktop search. It seems that Vista includes its own indexing service to speed up searching, and Google was having a hissy over users not being able to choose a desktop search engine. The Windows Indexing Service is on by default, and I don't think any manufacturers have changed that in their production images. And it just so happens that Gateway included Google Desktop in every computer they released with Vista, and therein lies my problem: two indexing services, constantly running on my poor little 5400 RPM notebook hard drive.

After some thought, I decided I'm a fairly organized fellow and don't have the need very often to search for a document. Most of what I access anyway is on the network, and those locations aren't indexed by default anyway. So away went Google Desktop. Though I love Google, I have no need for that program on my mobile station.

And for that matter, I canceled the Windows Indexing service. No need to pick sides, you know?

Then for a final pick-me-up, I had Vista optimize the graphics for performance, which took away all the eye-candy and effectively made my desktop look like Windows 2000. I'm fine with that.

Oh, and one more thing: I shut off the UAC. Those pain-in-the-ass messages one gets when he tries to install a program, "Windows needs your permission to continue," are gone. I can now run a command window without specifying to run it as Administrator. I can change IP settings with fewer mouse clicks. A little bubble message when I log on warning me that User Account Control is turned off is the only annoyance I have now, and I'm sure that with a simple registry edit I can get rid of that too. Maybe I'll post it later.

I must say this little bottom-end laptop is pretty damn speedy these days. NetBeans opens in under 60 seconds. Outlook opens in under 5, and boot times are at their lowest since I got it. This doesn't change anything about the inevitable change to a Mac when I can afford one, but it certainly makes me more comfortable in delaying it.

HD Coasters

It's in all the latest news, so I might as well chime in on it, too. HD-DVD is dying, and fast. Since Warner Bros. announced that it is dropping it from its DVD release formats in January, Netflix said they're not going to place any more orders for movies in HD-DVD. Then today I read that Wal-Mart is phasing it out. Seems like there's a clear dominant format finally.

Geez, before I can even finish writing this, Toshiba calls it quits. Forget I said anything, then. I guess it's really over. At least I didn't get the Xbox 360 with the HD-DVD player. Now there's 300,000 pissed-off people if you ask me. Hell, it took me until 2001 to buy a DVD player. Sometime next year I'll have a Blu-ray device, but not now.

Why Doesn't This Make Sense?

Microsoft Takes a Swing

Microsoft Bids $44.6 Billion for Yahoo - Washington Post

This actually came as a surprise today. Microsoft buying Yahoo!? Preposterous!

That could change a lot about the web, but something smells. Microsoft is a huge company, and little-old Google seems to have them grabbing at straws to figure out how to catch up. I can look at any place on the web that Google produced and tell you exactly why their advertising makes so much sense. Why their e-mail works so well, and no user has to pay for it. Why they have so much available for free.

It's simply because they have but one reason: "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." That's it. There are no software revenue projections, nothing to give the shareholders a hard-on, nothing about providing a service at a premium. Just to organize the world's information. This has been their goal since Sergey tried to download the Internet (or was it Larry? ...not important). Sure, they sell stuff. Useful stuff (except the lava lamp) even, like the Google search appliance and SketchUp Pro. But that is not their main business driver by any means. They're spending millions every year to scan books from libraries and make them searchable. They have a vast collection of scholarly journals and papers from around the world, and one may also search inside any of these.

This is just a taste of what Google is doing. They are successful because of something I don't have a name for, but it is something along the lines of know what you're doing and do no evil.

Most of you know that this blog is driven by the Blogger engine. I pay nothing for it, and it works much better than some of the other tools I've tried. Google probably bought it, but it has improved much over the years and it has never cost me anything. The funny thing is that there aren't ads all over it. Sure, there are ads on this site, but I put them there; they aren't some mandated advertisement justified for making my blogging free, it's just free.

No one has mentioned so far that Gmail doesn't inject ads into every message sent. It's just regular e-mail. The advertisements shown on the side of the Gmail window are only text-based, and they're usually relevant to what my e-mail is about. That way the advertising works. And if it works, people pay for it. So Google is king.

Microsoft and Yahoo! (and AOL, for that matter) are not because their interfaces are so heavy and the ads are very annoying. Their infrastructures are likely not as efficient as Google's (who else uses a hundred thousand servers?) and their business models are not in tune with what people want.

Okay, I changed my mind. Yahoo! and AOL are in the entertainment business. Microsoft is in the software business (I put that together all by myself!). Google, however, is in the search business. Does anyone remember when a Yahoo! search looked eerily familiar, as if the results of that search were the same as a Google search for the same string? It's because they were. Yahoo! used to use the Google engine for its search until just a few years ago.

The business of the web is changing, but there's no way I can predict anything. I only get feelings, and I'm usually wrong because business is definitely not one of my strong interests. If the major search engines are reduced to two, though, it could get pretty damn nasty by 2010. I'll likely not keep up with this subject, but it may be interesting nonetheless.

Netflix Errors

You'd never guess what I found today in my DVD player, so I'll tell you: Night at the Museum. This comes as a surprise only because I sent an envelope back to Netflix last week that should have had this disc in it. I suppose if I haven't heard anything from them in three weeks, they can just keep whatever movie I sent them and we'll call it even.

I am posting this here because someone might Google that question and will perhaps find an answer here. I wonder what will happen with the DVD, but this experiment was not intentional. Here are some questions folks may type into the search engine:

• "What happens if I send the wrong movie back to Netflix?"
• "Will I get in trouble if I keep a movie from Netflix and return something else?"
• "What if I got a movie from Netflix, kept the original, and sent a copy back to them*?"
• "Will the FBI knock on my door if that happened?"
• "Should I hide my stash?"

Seriously, though, I'll try to report what happens if anything does happen.


* I doubt I did that.

Windows Home Server

I've written earlier about a Dell PowerEdge SC440 Server I have that I couldn't find anything to do with.

I would like to announce that my quest for a task is over. May I introduce Windows Home Server:

You can add one of these to your home network with ease, and it takes care of file duplication and backups automatically. In my opinion this is the best product for consumers that Microsoft has come up with in a very long time.

The architecture is based on Windows Server 2003 (the startup splashscreen tells us that), which is a proven operating system as it is in use very widely throughout the enterprise market. If you use multiple Windows systems and/or have an Xbox 360 that you want to access videos and pictures from, this is your answer. HP has them for about $599, but you'll need a second hard drive for the duplication capability. The two-hard disk model is $749, and that's two 500GB hard drives, plus room for two more. If that somehow is not enough, it accepts external drives as well.

If a disk fails, you'll get a message. Simply replace the drive and start the server again. It automatically rebuilds the disk and balances the storage.

You don't need a monitor or keyboard after it's set up. Just put it in a closet and plug it in to the network. Install the client software on each computer in the house, and go. Backups run at night, and everything (if you so choose) placed on the file server is duplicated (if so capable).

You can even access your Home Server from afar. With a little bit of configuration, you can access your files on the server and even upload new ones from anywhere you might find yourself. I have already found this useful.

Rehberg Technology can also provide, configure, and install the Home Server.

Quote

"A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on."
-John F. Kennedy

Andrew Olmsted

I learned yesterday from Scott about our mutual friend and former Army Company Commander, Andrew Olmsted, was killed in Iraq on January 3, 2008. It came as a bit of a shock, and then I found myself simply staring at the computer screen with a gaping mouth.

I read his final post and realized that he did quite a bit of thinking before he went to Iraq. This is probably much more than would have gone through my mind on the way over there. He always was a thinker, whether he had a doctorate or not (he didn’t, by the way, but no one could tell). Andy recited every crewmember on every Apollo mission one time in the middle of the desert. He was very well read and seemed to know something about anything that entered into conversation. I always admired that about him.

Andy was left-handed.

He had a pretty dry sense of humor, as he himself admitted. I remember one time, though, Andy, Scott, and I were in a van in the field and Scott (then Andy's driver) said something he probably shouldn't have (probably about the Red Sox). I suggested to CPT Olmsted that Scott do pushups with his feet on a very high table. He took my suggestion, and Scott probably remembers this too.

He was very biased toward Coca-Cola.

I served as Andy's driver for about the last year of his command of Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 1/68 Armor Battalion, 4th Infantry Division at Fort Carson. I hated most of my time in the Army, but what time I enjoyed was that I spent in the company of the more intellectual members. Andy was one, if not the most intellectual I ever encountered during that time.
He signed my leave so I could go get married, in spite of my failing the last PT test.

He had great integrity. In the middle of the National Training Center, when no one else was around, the two of us sat in full MOPP-4 for about an hour because it was part of the simulation. Take into account it was the warmer part of the year, in the Mojave desert, wearing up to three layers of clothing that covers the entire body including the face, and no one else was looking. We were even inside a vehicle and there we were, covered head-to-toe and sweating like we've never sweated before. He did it because it was the right thing to do; because it was necessary for training as a soldier. I did it because he told me to.



The last time I saw him, he was just out of Active Duty and working as a car salesman. This happened to be at the same place I worked right out of the Army, too (though I bet he lasted much longer than I did). We met for coffee that night, and I remember him explicitly mentioning that he’d started blogging. He seemed like it was a big thing, and I never imagined he’d enjoy it that much.

Thoughts come to me today as I read the stories about him and the comments from family members, friends, fellow soldiers, and readers worldwide, but I can't really describe them. I teared-up reading the last of his Final Post, when he spoke of Amanda. I remember him describing her as "drop-dead gorgeous."

Andy’s death weighs heavily on me, mostly because he is the first person I knew personally who has been killed in Iraq, but some of it is because he was out there trying to help. The more I read, the better I feel about what he was doing when he died, and what he thought of it. And if he was comfortable with it, so am I.

So long, Andy.

More about Andy can be read on this post at Obsidian Wings.