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Short Takes: July 1, 2009


By SD Times Editorial Board
July 1, 2009 — 
Binging on a similar search engine
Microsoft's Live Search never got me the results that I was looking for; Bing is a substantial improvement. The results mirror what I get from Google, but Bing does not seem to spider pages as quickly.

There are a lot of head-to-head comparisons that have been done, and Bing has held its own. It is very competitive for a first release, but it may not be enough to wrestle substantial market share away from Google. Being just as good as Google is not good enough. I'm not going to change my search habits just because something new is equivalent to what I'm already using.    — David Worthington

The 'M' stands for 'Missing'
M-Audio, M-Audio, wherefore art thou, M-Audio?

In the "personal crisis for Jeff, but no one else cares" department, a music and audio device known as M-Audio has gone missing. It is a small silver device that plugs into my laptop and serves as an adapter, letting me connect my electric guitar, bass or keyboard to the laptop for recording music.

However, after a move into a new apartment and several renovations at the house I grew up in, M-Audio went the way of the milk carton. And I'm not happy! I get annoyed when I lose a pen, and this is a bit more expensive than a pen.

So I am forming a search party out of any folks willing to come to New York. The blue team will take the upstairs bedrooms, the green team will search the basement, and the red team will just eat milk and cookies; that will be the team I'm on.

M-Audio, please come back to me! (whimper whimper)    — Jeff Feinman

Google's blazing its own trail
Recently, I had to clean up a blog post. Not because the writer used bad language, but because he committed the ultimate faux pas:  pasting directly from Microsoft Word into the blog engine.

The bizarre HTML tags output from Word resulted in goofy output as well as a polluted RSS stream. Many people have written about the strange HTML output from Microsoft Word. But that’s what happens when a company decides that it knows better than everyone else and insists on doing things its own way.

Google, like Microsoft, likes to do things its own way. As you can read on SDTimes.com, Google has recently bet heavily on HTML 5, which will be at the forefront of the forthcoming Google Web Toolkit 2.0 and the new Google Web Elements. That’s not all that's coming from the Googlers, who seem to be fighting every battle at once. The company continues to move forward with Android, its operating system for netbooks and smartphones, for example. This puts it into conflict with many, many companies, including Apple, Microsoft and RIM (makers of the BlackBerry).

The big new thing, however, is the new Wave platform and its set of APIs. What is Wave? It’s hard to describe. Google says:

Google Wave is a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the web. A "wave" is equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Google Wave is also a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services and to build extensions that work inside waves.

Good luck with that.

Google’s creativity is commendable. My big worry is that the company never seems to finish anything. Gmail is still considered to be in beta, for heaven’s sake! Let’s hope that Google doesn’t morph into Microsoft: having lots of interesting ideas, which are implemented in a way that drive people crazy.    — Alan Zeichick

Cleaning up some agile practices
I recently visited a friend who is a professional agile consultant. Specifically, he specializes in teaching pair programming techniques. One thing I never thought of until he mentioned it was the potential for terrible personal hygiene to make pair programming a nightmare.

Specifically, he mentioned one of his former developers who insisted upon flossing at his desk. This resulted in many elbow jabs and bits of food being flung onto the monitor. Naturally, a dental hygiene fixation is preferable to a lack thereof, but it's certainly some food for thought.

Traditional developer wisdom has always focused on productivity as a function of coffee and motivation, not a function of interpersonal dynamics. But it is absolutely a critical area in which some developers need to be taught if they're going to continue sitting side-by-side at a monitor. Perhaps pair-programming training should include a round of hygiene training as well.    — Alex Handy


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Comments

07/01/2009 10:26:39 AM EST

On Google's unfinished products... I hope they never finish. The net is always changing. Static might work for some, but the web is more dynamic than that. Even the outdated eMail system we all use is not really finished in the sense that we keep adding things to help deal with the changes in security alone. As far as I'm concerned, we can leave the static to history and classic novels.

United StatesRonnie


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