I don’t use Jaiku or Dodgeball, although there is sure to be a wailing and gnashing of teeth over the closing of Dodgeball. I had been using Google Noteboook, semi-extensively and although it is not being shutdown, development on Notebook is ceasing, which for my purposes anyway, amounts to the same thing.

This just reinforces one of my current productivity goals: to get all of my stuff in one place. Where is that one place? Really nicely solving this problem is 1) hard and 2) lucrative.

Hm…

Ri is the Ruby solution to this problem but the results are not always what you are expecting.

A Simple Enhancement for ri

The combination of “seems impossible” and “strong network effects” is about as close as you can get to the magic formula for incredible, sustainable success, as with eBay, Wikipedia, and Google.

Trenchant analysis from Joel Spolsky.

Sample fact: The time American’s spend watching television commercials every weekend is approximately equal to the entire time spent in creating Wikipedia to date.

Rule of thumb: “Doing anything is better than doing nothing.” “It’s better to do something than to do nothing.”

Via Jason Sutter who lives in New Zealand but shows up in my feed of blogs local to my zip code.

Update – 28 April 2008 Here (via Gruber) is a link to the text of the talk. Also, the quoted rule of thumb is corrected.

For those who don’t know, MarsEdit is a Macintosh program to write blog posts.

There are a couple of small features in the way the Mars Edit works that could have been deal breakers for me, so I was going back to the MarsEdit forums to figure out if there were a work around for them. I couldn’t remember the url of the site, so I Google MarsEdit.

The problem is the results. The first result returned by Google is to a page on the Ranchero Software site mentioning that Ranchero Software sold MarsEdit to Red Sweater Software more than 7 months ago. The second Google result points to the Red Sweater Software page that describes MarsEdit.

Curiously, the PageRank for the Red Sweater page is 7 while the Ranchero page PageRank is 0, and the PageRank for the Ranchero Software home page is 7, while the Red Sweater home page is 6.

What this means is that there are so many more links out there on the web that point to MarsEdit at the Ranchero site than at the Red Sweater site, and the rating of those sites is so much higher, that a deficiency in page rank of 0 to 7 is overcome.

Even more confusingly, the absolute number of links isn’t that different. As of this moment 282 links point to the Red Sweater page and only about 592 links point to the Ranchero Software site.

I wouldn’t have thought it possible. This is a PageRank result that really confounds all my expectations.

Most frequently when I am searching, if I enter multiple terms I am implicitly requesting results for items that match all of the terms. This is the way that results from Google and Yahoo work. If you search for Repair Manual the results are pages that contain both the term repair and the term manual.¹

I’ve bolded and in the last sentence because that is the operative term. The results returned by Google and Yahoo are the logical conjunction (and) of the separate results for the individual terms. If I search for Repair and Manual, Google helpfully informs me, “The ‘AND’ operator is unnecessary — we include all search terms by default.”

The other commonly encountered method of combining results is disjunction. This search returns all pages that contain either repair or manual. There are obviously many more results in this case. For repair and manual Google returns not quite 2.5 M results, while for repair or manual Google returns more than 40 M results.

The problem that I encountered, was that many web sites silently ignore the de facto standard set by search engines and attempt disjuctive, or, searches. Instead of returning pages that contain repair and manual they return pages that contain repair or manual. I’m not exactly sure why so many e-commerce sites seem to do this, but it may have to do with available tools. I know that disjuctive search is the default for the Apache Lucerne search engine library, although Ferret, the Ruby search engine gem which was inspired by Lucerne, switches the default to conjunctive search.

Can you see where this is going?

I was attempting to repair a dishwasher that had stopped cleaning the dishes on the top rack. Some small piece of plastic – perhaps the inner liner of a yogurt container – had gotten loose in the dishwasher, been sucked into the pump and macerated. Small pieces of plastic had been blown through the entire circulatory system. I had cleaned much of it out, but it still wasn’t working and I wanted a closer look, but I wasn’t sure how to take some parts off without breaking them. All I needed was a Repair Manual for my washer.

A little Googling around led me to an appliance repair site. I located my make and model of dishwasher and searched for repair manual. When there was only one result returned, I wasn’t surprised. I only expected one.

Without any closer examination I added it to my cart along with the other part that I knew I needed.

Unfortunately, when the part arrived, it was accompanied not by a detailed Repair Manual but by the ludicrous User Manual that I already had.

I was a little annoyed with myself for not being more careful and a little annoyed at the merchant for giving me a misleading answer to my question, but the cost was minimal (perhaps I would have been more careful if it had been higher).

As I noted above, this experience has recurred several times since, minus the steps of adding an incorrect item to my shopping cart and buying it. I think merchants are making a mistake in ignoring the search engine standard and courting a possible liability.

Customers are dissatisfied by these unexpected results and if they make a purchase based on them, they are going to want their money back.

1. Both search engines do some other processing, so the returned pages might contain “manuals” instead of “manual” or even “fix-it” instead of “repair.”

If you do try to poke around on the Internet looking for prints, you might just come across this reproduction of the Great Wave (local cache). This is a fine lovely print, you can zoom in to see the detail, read a brief description and note the bequest by the Havemeyer family. (Zoom in on Mt. Fuji and the boats to appreciate the phenomenal detail.)

Art lesson over, the thing that jarred me about this web page was clicking on the “Next” button. That goes to this page (cached) containing a pair of Royal Earrings from 1st century Andhra Pradesh, India.

Could anything be more miscellaneous? Different styles, different techniques, different media; two works of art separated by two thousand years and four thousand miles. They have nothing in common beyond being art produced by human beings. To be fair to the Met, I jumped into a spot in their collection stream where it transitioned from Japanese to South-Asian, so I accentuated the effect. It was as if I were present in the gallery and I turned the corner from the East Asian Hall into the South Asian Hall. On the web, I didn’t have any visual clue that I was nearing a transition. The collection streams are organized chronologically by region, further heightening the transition.

What I did

I had been using standard Wordpress themes, most recently Bosco 2.0 + Widgets. This was a fine theme, clearly organized and readable, but it was a black box that I never looked into. I needed to get a better understanding of my tools to handle some future projects that I am considering.

One of the tools that I was looking into was Instiki. While reading up on Instiki, I came across this post from Kevin Lawver on how he was using S5 with Instiki.

I loved the look of Kevin’s site (I also enjoyed reading some of his presentations on CSS) so I am giving him the sincerest form of flattery by imitating the general look of his site a Wordpress theme.

I pulled my Wordpress install over to my home machine and went to work. I created a new template, eventually called EarthSea, by copying the Bosco theme to a new directory. I used MAMP to run a local version of Wordpress, CSSEdit to modify the CSS and TextMate to modify the php templates.

It was a really nice combination of tools. CSSEdit allowed me to modify the site CSS styles as I watched. I’d change the font and immediately see the change on my page. I could change the padding on a div by turning the mouse wheel and watching it grow or shrink.

I’m still not a fan of php. Speaking as someone who has used Perl professionally for 10 years, php looks like line noise to me, but it sure is easy poking around directly in the page source.

Also, as someone who has used Emacs for about 20 years, the adjustment to Textmate is slow. I love the look and feel of Textmate, but Emacs key bindings are stuck in my fingers.

I like the way the result looks. The design is much cleaner than any of my previous sites and I think it will be easier to manage and extend.

What next

There are some pages that are missing, mostly because they are placeholders for future work I am planning. I would also like a better version of the archive page and an automatically generated blogroll. I am currently using Google Reader, but I think I want more control than I can get from a simple automated tool.

I also want Atom 1.0 feeds, instead of the current 0.3 versions. The bottom of the sidebar is a little chaotic looking with both RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 feeds of both entries and comments. When I get Atom 1.0, I’ll clean that up and probably just move to autodiscovery.

In general, the future direction of this blog is going to be less focused on the technical themes that most interest me — calendars, synchronization, planning for small groups, ruby on rails, application servers — and more on the personal, family and political topics. I’ll still use this as a capture point for technical details that are of broader interest, but the big topics are moving from here and to my technical blog, Cornercases.

From the TextMate documentation:

4.5.2 Find Clipboard

Two useful key equivalents are ⌘E and ⌘G. The first copies the selection to the shared find clipboard. This works in the majority of applications and allows you to find the next occurrence of that string by then pressing ⌘G.

The find clipboard works across applications so whether in Safari, TextEdit, Mail, TextMate, Terminal, Console, or similar, one can copy the selected text to the find clipboard, switch application and use ⌘G to find that string.