A couple of months ago Brad came to me to discuss problems with the search on our site. Since our site features a ton of text it’s imperative that users can easily find documents in a quick manner. Up until recently we had been using MySQL’s FULLTEXT feature, which I’ve covered extensively in articles and at conferences. FULLTEXT simply wasn’t scaling in the manner in which we needed it to. As a result, I set out looking for something that would.

I think it’s rather telling that MySQL themselves do not use this feature to index their own site, instead using Mnogo Search. While looking for a solution for us I decided against open source solutions for two reasons.

1. We would still, essentially, be rolling our own search solution, which would still have to be maintained and supported internally. With two full time developers (including myself) this simply wasn’t an option. We needed a “Plug and play” solution.
2. Support is non-existent for ht://Dig, but is available for Mnogo Search, however this still left us configuring, installing and supporting hardware.

This left us with two options: a hosted solution (ie. atoms.com) or an appliance (ie. the Google Search Appliance). In the end we went with the GSA GB-1001 for a few reasons.

1. Even with the hefty price tag of $30,000 (USD) it was still cheaper than a hosted solution.
2. It’s supported for two years and, after the two years is up, we still get to keep the hardware.
3. Since we host it internally we can quickly change the XSLT stylesheets, etc. without having to call up an ASP to make changes.

So the GSA arrived and there was much rejoicing. Until we booted up the machine and noticed that it had arrived with a dead hard drive. Google says that it’s perfectly okay if a single drive fails and that they normally don’t replace a GSA with only a single dead hard drive. Okay, that’s fine, but the thing arrived with a dead hard drive. For that much money I would think it should arrive in pristine working condition.

To top off my frustrations the box locked up twice within a 24 hour period. Obviously, I wasn’t putting this thing into production anytime soon. Come to find out this locking business is a known issue with a working patch. I flat out asked my Google rep why it wasn’t shipped with the patch and they said it was because it only affected some of the GSA’s. Great. In the end we shipped our GSA backed after they shipped out a replacement.

The second one arrived with four working hard drives, but also suffered from the locking issue, which Google quickly patched by logging in via SSH. SSH? Yes, the Google Search Appliance runs RedHat Linux.

So what exactly does the GSA run on? Well I’ll list the specs out for you.

1. Quad 2.66GHz Intel Xeon
2. 12GB of RAM
3. Five 250GB Western Digital EIDE drives (Two 250GB RAID1 mirrors on a 3ware ATA RAID card and one hot spare)

In other words it’s a really beefy linux box (in a really dorky looking yellow case). Of course the box is all locked up so you can’t look on the inside and I wasn’t looking to void our support and warranty by opening the box.

So how does it perform? Well, after much tweaking of the XML interface, it’s pretty amazing. According to Google the GB-1001 will index 500,000 documents and is capable of performing 300 queries per second.

After the initial problems with the GSA I have two major complaints with it. The first is that the support is inadequate. For $15,000 per year I expect support to be better than email-only Monday through Friday during business hours. The second is that it didn’t ship with a SOAP interface. The main Google site has one, why doesn’t the GSA? Sure I can get the response back in XML, but a SOAP interface would have been much appreciated.

Other than those two issues and a few minor quirks I give the GB-1001 a high score. If you’re simply doing a site-wide search I don’t think you’ll find a more brain dead simple solution.

There has been much talk in the news recently about stealing WiFi from your neighbors. I have a middle of the road point of view on this that I think most of my fellow geeks will agree with. There is much confusion as to what is okay and what is not okay. To help clear up some of this confusion I’ve created a simple grid that you can now reference whenever you come across a WiFi hotspot.

I look at it this way; if you knowingly leave your access point open to the world then it’s perfectly okay for me to use it, however, I should respect your kindness and not use it for malicious activities of any kind. The exception to this is what I call the “Idiot WiFi Hotspot”, which is like picking on the retard during recess. If someone is too stupid to at least change the admin password then they have no idea what’s going on with their WiFi and, while taking advantage of this idiot might be tempting, it’s just not very cool. The only exception to the IWFH rule is is if your connection is down and you want to check your email or read the news.

If you had to sniff packets or crack a WEP key to gain access to a hotspot then you’ve just broken the law and are a total douche bag. I liken this to someone breaking into your cable box and siphoning free HBO.

We’re not talking quantum physics here people. If you knock on someone’s door and they either don’t answer or the sign says “Closed” then you don’t just come on in. Use common sense and the handy reference table above and you most likely won’t be arrested for stealing WiFi.

Well, Microsoft finally released it’s beta of the highly anticipated Internet Explorer v7. And the tech community rejoiced let out a collective groan. As exhibit A I’d like to introduce this this screenshot of the new browser UI. As exhibit B I’d like to introduce this screenshot of the RSS feature. Now, there are a few good things in this release.

1. Tabs. Finally.
2. RSS. Finally.
3. Search. Finally.
4. Phishing detection, which I think Microsoft should surely be commended for. Though I think the word “phishing” should be replaced with something less tech-centric that my mom would understand.
5. They’ve added the ability to manage browser add-ons, which evidently wasn’t supported in previous versions.

My problem with this list is I find myself saying “So what?”. Firefox, Opera and Safari have had all of these features, except for phishing detection, for years (NOTE: Firefox has an anti-phishing plugin, but does not ship an anti-phishing feature by default). I find myself wondering if this is too little too late. Either way, Microsoft should ahem be commended for making these changes. They’re late to the party, but at least they came. As can be expected from someone who pretty much hates Microsoft products I do have a few complaints.

1. Why the hell did the move the menu bar below the tabs? They’ve actually gone against their own UI recommendations. They should clearly put this back at the top of the window.
2. No stop or refresh buttons? I don’t need a 500 pixel-wide location bar, but I do need a stop and a refresh button.
3. What the hell is up with the phantom tab to the right of the tab? It opens new tabs, I get that, but it should be turned into a “New Tab” button next to the “X” for closing tabs.
4. I can’t aggregate feeds? I assume this will be fixed before it launches.
5. IE 7 still isn’t acid compliant and still doesn’t fix many of the CSS rendering bugs in IE 6. As someone who makes a living banging his head against various IE bugs I seriously hope they fix this before it’s finally released.

As a web developer I’m pretty pissed that the rendering bugs haven’t been fixed and the browser still isn’t compliant with even CSS1. Meanwhile, CSS3 is being proposed and CSS2 is getting wider support in Safari and Mozilla/Firefox. I would have liked nothing more than IE7 to come out and be fully CSS3 compliant. You would be reading a very different post if it had.

Overall, I give this beta a C. Why? Because Microsoft has done the bare minimum. They haven’t done anything ground breaking here and they didn’t even bother to fix the existing rendering problems. Unlike others, however, I’ll wait to pass my final judgement until the final release has hit the streets, which I think will be around when Windows Vista is released.

Maybe I’m late to the party, but I’ve finally figured out a way to build Smart Playlists in iTunes that include only my favorites from a pool of bands. Since iTunes restricts to you all or any of the search terms you can’t say something like “All of the songs that are rated three stars or more and where performed by any of the following bands: The Thrills, The Killers or Franz Ferdinand.” Well, I’ve figured out how to make this work.

1. Create a new Smarty Playlist and have it match any of the Artist names you want (ie. The Thrills, The Killers and Modest Mouse). Name your new playlist and save it (ie. “Thrilling Killer Mice”).
2. Create another new Smarty Playlist and choose all of the criteria should be met. Set Playlist is insert name of first playlist and then click the plus to add another criteria. Set this second criteria to a range of stars that suits your fancy. Save this new playlist.

It was killing me for quite some time that I couldn’t group bands by their specific sounds and also have the playlist reflect my ratings. This way the first playlist stores all of the songs by all of the like sounding bands and the second playlist reflects songs from that pool of artists that I like.

Of course, the first playlist is for reference only. When you add another album by a band in one of your various pools the first playlist will update and, when you rate songs on the new album, your second playlist will update. It’s kind of like inheritance in iTunes playlists.

I’m sure everyone has pretty much heard about the 10 year old Pakistani girl who passed the Microsoft Certified Application Developer. I’m sure this was no small feat for a 10 year old girl living in a third world country and I’m not going to comment on this. The funny part of the article is that, upon meeting Bill Gates, she read him a poem “celebrating his life.” The guys on Slashdot couldn’t resist speculating what the poem’s contents where. Here are some of their guesses.

There once was a man from Nantucket
Who told all the world to suck it
Selling insecure code
He sure was a chode
And his ethics could not fill a bucket

There once was a programmer named Gates
Who never could get any dates
So he bought MS-DOS
Became his own boss
And now he just masturbates

I stole stuff from Jobs.
And now I own Microsoft.
Holy crap I’m rich.

That’s some funny stuff for sure. By the way, the last one is haiku, so it’s not necessarily supposed to rhyme.

While many might scoff at someone passing a Microsoft developer exam, I have to point out that this girl was 9 when she passed the exam. The most complex thing I had figured out at 9 years of age was my Nintendo. Meanwhile, this girl is programming in C#, which is a strict typed language. Meaning it requires her to know the difference between an int, float, etc. Impressive.