my code trip » General

Google’s Search Algorithm Continues to Amaze me! Search Results are Still VERY RELEVANT :)

Shiva — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 04:59:33 +0000

Today, I was trying to locate a very brilliant post by another software developer, who name and website address I did not remember. What I did remember – and typed into google’s search box – were 2 phrases. The 1st phrase was the caption on the thumbnail photo of the post that had a little boy shoving his middle fingers towards the sky saying “FUCK YOU GUYS“. The 2nd phrase (rather 2nd word) was the name of web hosting company Rackspace that was the main focus of the developer’s blog post.

So I went to google.com and typed the 1st and 2nd phrase together “fuck you guys rackspace“. Guess what, the 1st search result link was the blog post I was looking for!

Here, try it out for yourself!

I'm feeling Lucky!

How delightful! I would find out soon enough that the developer was/is Allison Gianotto. My “geek” alter-ego took over, so out of intense software developer curiosity, I visually examined the post, to try and figure out how google could possibly have associated the “fuck you guys” and “rackspace” and properly decided that this was the post I was looking for, given that the HTML body of the post did not have the 1st F* phrase anywhere at all!

It turns out that the title of the featured thumbnail image has the 1st F*phase in it’s name. So that is a clue. Obviously it is not that simple, but that would be a start if I were writing a similar search engine (which I obvisously am not smart enough to do, otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here blogging about it.)

But I digress. Google’s search results are still as relevant as ever, and I can only imagine how hard their engineers and PHDs are working behind the scenes to make search results as accurate and relevant as possible! While Mark Fuckerberg is busy harvesting your social data – including your home address, email address, neighborhood, friends, preferences, even how you like your eggs cooked and how you like to bust your nuts on your woman’s face – and making millions of dollars off of you, google is actually adding value to your everyday life for FREE with it’s very accurate and relevant search results.

Think about it.

How To Protect Your Pdf Files On The Web In IIS/Asp.Net Using Forms Authentication and HTTP Handlers

Shiva — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 19:21:52 +0000

Chad Scharf presents a detailed step by step walkthrough on protecting your PDF files using Forms Authentication and HTTP Handlers.

Amazon.com Releases the AWS .Net SDK Kit

Shiva — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:11:31 +0000

Earlier this month, Amazon.com announced the release of the AWS (Amazon Web Services) SDK Kit for .Net. This is exciting news for .Net developers, who can now build rich applications on top of the APIs that encapsulate a lot of the lower-level plumbing associated with programming for the AWS cloud, including authentication, request retries, and error handling.

According to the AWS SDK for .Net website:

The AWS SDK for .NET supports the AWS infrastructure products, including:

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)

Amazon SimpleDB

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)

Amazon CloudFront

Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)

Amazon Elastic MapReduce

Amazon CloudWatch

Elastic Load Balancing

Auto Scaling

For more information, visit the following resources.
Amazon Web Services SDK for .Net Home Page
AWS SDK for .Net “Getting Started” Guide
AWS SDK for .Net Developer Discussion Forums

In Which I Partially Disagree With The Microsoft Base Class Library Developers

Shiva — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 18:21:20 +0000

Too Many Choices Are Overwhelming Software Developers

Shiva — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 19:22:13 +0000

J.P. Hamilton talks about how too many choices in our software industry is overwhelming developers, and thinks that a training plan could help alleviate the situation.

Why We Need A Windows Powershell Certification

Shiva — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 19:39:01 +0000

How to Build Scalable Databases: Pros and Cons of Various Sharding Schemes

Shiva — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 20:49:38 +0000

The Service Cannot Be Started Either Because It Is Disabled Or Because It Has No Enabled Devices Associated With It

Shiva — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 19:45:49 +0000

Outsourcing Not All Its Made Out to Be

Shiva — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 19:21:06 +0000

7 Things That Discourage Software Developers From Working Late / Overtime

Shiva — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 02:27:48 +0000

Tim Stall analyses 7 things that could discourage software developers from working late or doing overtime on their job. Meanwhile, Avonelle thinks this is pretty normal and we should not treat software developers like special creatures.

Exploding The Myth Of The Single Exit Point For Methods

Shiva — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 02:53:07 +0000

Colin Scott explores explodes the myth of the “single exit point” school of thought which requires all logical paths through a method to end in a single place from which there is a return of control and method result(s) to the caller.

Woz Of Wisdom.

Shiva — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 04:45:48 +0000

“The rewards are in your head. The reward is invisible. It’s what you like to do.” said Mr. Wozniak.

Further Reading

The Camel Has 2 Humps. February 22, 2006. Academic Paper by Saeed Dehnadi and Richard Bornat – School of Computing, Middlesex University, UK.
Why Good Programmers Are Lazy and Dumb August 24, 2005.

Why Microsoft Should Introduce Compiler Extensibility But May Not

Shiva — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 17:57:40 +0000

Tore Vestues discusses the possible benefits of introducing compiler extensibility that would allow developers to get into the .Net code compliation process and modify code before generating the .Net assembly. He also cautions us not to get too excited because it seems that Anders Hejlsberg (C# creator) mentioned in a PDC 2008 session that compiler extensibility will never ever be available in C#.

Casting Syntax Vs AS Operator – Which Approach Is Better And Why ?

Shiva — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 23:25:54 +0000

The two most popular approaches to casting – converting data types and objects – in C# are

Using the cast syntax i.e. (TypeToBeCastTo) (type/object) and
Using the AS operator i.e. (type/object) AS TypeToBeCastTo

It is speculated that most developers use the first approach, but have you ever wondered which approach is the better one, is more performance efficient, and why ?

According to Jon Skeet (on MSDN), the fundamental difference in the two approaches is as follows.

The AS operator returns a null when the variable you are trying to convert is not of the requested type or in it’s inheritance chain. The cast syntax, on the other hand, throws an exception.
AS operator can only be used on reference type variables, whereas the cast syntax can be applied to reference and value types.
The AS operator also will not be able to perform conversions on user-defined types, whereas the casting syntax will be able to accomplish this.

Performance: According to Jon, the AS operator syntax is known to be slightly faster than the casting syntax in v1.0 and v1.1.

Moreover, to me, it makes sense to use the AS operator where possible also because it does not throw an exception, which are in general very expensive in terms of performance. Lastly, I think the AS syntax also looks “more elegant”.

Further Reading

Jon Skeet’s C# Frequently Asked Questions
Ian Griffiths’ essay on C#’s approach to Casting. (1500+ words including code).

Emailing Under Influence ? Mail Googles Is Your Savior !

Shiva — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 23:22:35 +0000

Ok, I know at least 7 people (myself included) who should be using this new feature that google’s gmail has introduced. It is called ‘Mail Googles‘ and it prevents the email account user from accidentally shooting off an email in the spur of the moment, or in an inebriated state (read while under the influence of alcohol, drugs, or hallucinogens).

Mail Googles can be enabled in your gmail account in the Settings -> Labs section. In the settings for Mail googles, you can specify the Days and the time range during which you want gmail to enable the Mail googles feature.

Once enabled, if you are writing an email during the date-time range you specified in the settings, if you attempt to send the email, you will be prompted with a popup that will ask you to answer simple math questions. The popup will also include a timed delay. The idea is to make you stop for a few seconds and think. During this time, hopefully you will snap out of whatever it is that prompted you to type off the email, and make an informed decision whether to go ahead and send it anyway, or to cancel the send in favor of damage control.

Neat feature no doubt. But are you (like me) wondering what happens to those users who are mathematically challenged ?