randomness

Posted on August 10, 2006 by mfagan

work seems to be keeping me rather busy

Yesterday I got around to fixing a several-month-old bug with my University of Waterloo search engine. Turns out the problem was Yahoo having changed their query parser. The query I was sending used to be

search terms (site:example.com OR site:example2.com OR ... site:exampleN.com)

however example.com wasn’t showing up on the results… the fix was adding a space before the ending parentheses.

search terms (site:example.com OR site:example2.com OR ... site:exampleN.com )

I wish Yahoo would publicly document all of their advanced search syntax, including the maximum query length.

I’ve been meaning to do another OpenSearch Update post. I’ve recently started adding some of these to del.icio.us. Noticing lots of non-English blog posts on OpenSearch lately, which is very cool. Today someone asked about including thumbnails. I’ve replied suggesting Media RSS but asking for consensus (although my email still needs to be moderated).

Lots of neat stuff in the mapping space lately. Thanks to Mikel Maron, Virtual Earth now has georss feeds.

So for years I’ve been largely ignoring the social networking websites. Or to be more accurate, reading up on them a lot, but not actually using them. Among other things, I don’t want to waste my time, nor provide a lot of my personal data to some walled garden. Regarding the latter, PeopleAggregator has been out for a while, and I hadn’t gotten around to congradulating Marc and Phillip. Anyhow, Facebook came to my school (this year I believe) and I’ve found that I’m actually using it. Not much, but more than I’ve ever used another similar site. Unlike the first generation of these websites, it actually has a point to it. I’m still resisting uploading photos to it (if I annotate those photos, am I ever going to be able to export that? highly unlikely) and I don’t like using it for messaging, because it won’t be searchable and integrated with my email or instant messaging services. Amusingly enough, I do think Facebook will actually succeed in making money. Hmn.. I guess I don’t have any major point to make here..

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Women in my newsreader

Posted on July 21, 2006 by mfagan

always read

sometimes read

compare this to around 200 feeds in bloglines (which by the way, has gotten their act together). hmn, maybe I should resubscribe to Marry Hodder, I don’t quite remember why I unsubscribed.

note: doesn’t include my friends from school and work, nor group blogs that include women

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Globe4D

Posted on July 14, 2006 by mfagan

Globe4D – this is fantastic. For a while I’ve envisioned something quite similar, although mine involved projection from the centre of the sphere, rather than from outside it. Clearly their method makes more sense 🙂

Every school in the world should have one. Via Phillip

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She’s back!

Posted on June 16, 2006 by mfagan

The web is a funny place. I’ve never even met Danny Ayers in person, but I feel quite relieved that his cat Sparql has been found.

and if you know what sparql is, then my readership has certainly shifted to the techier – or maybe I crossed that road a long time ago…

4 Comments

OpenSearch Update

Posted on June 11, 2006 by mfagan

I’ve been fairly busy at Microsoft, working, and hanging out with other interns and so I’m way behind on blogging about OpenSearch.

Internet Explorer 7 beta 2 and Firefox Bon Echo are out, both with some degree of OpenSearch support. Both support autodiscovery of Description files. IE7 (not sure about Firefox) supports search results in OpenSearch Response (RSS/Atom) as well as HTML. IE7 (and I suspect Firefox) do not support extended search parameters (those beyond searchTerms, startPage, etc.), but that’s to be expected at this stage.

Firefox support is a little odd, in that they also support some odd pseudoOpenSearch format. So please, developers, use real OpenSearch, it’ll work equally well in all readers, not just Firefox.

Firefox’s beta also has support for “search suggestions” when using Google or Yahoo. DeWitt has shown how (see draft document) these suggestions can be implemented in a way that is completely compatible with OpenSearch, without changing the existing format (JSON) at all. And it also opens the door to allowing suggestions themselves in OpenSearch; the Query element is ideal for this purpose.

From a webmaster perspective, the OpenSearch referrer extension (draft) is really great, allowing search sites to see where their searches are coming from. I’ve wanted this for a while, and it’s great to see it happening.

Perhaps more interesting than any of this is moving forward on adding structured data into OpenSearch, and DeWitt’s draft OpenSearch and Microformats is a great step in that direction. Personally I like data to be in XML more directly (rather than embedding it within atom:content, for example), but hopefully that approach can work in tandem, still using microformats. I’ll be looking into it, as I unofficially advise my university on how to create an API for their people search. Others have been looking at this too.

These are just some of the major happenings in OpenSearch. There are a variety of new software libraries, such as in Java and Ruby. An increasing number of organizations are basing their APIs and other things on OpenSearch. A9.com’s listing of OpenSearch providers is now well over 300. It’s hard to believe how far OpenSearch has come and how far it looks like it may go.

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Tantek’s Thoughts – Building Things

Posted on May 31, 2006 by mfagan

Tantek’s Thoughts – Building Things – I have no idea what Tantek has been working on, but congratulations on the imminent launch and being so dedicated to something. I can’t wait to see it.

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Aharef: Websites as graphs

Posted on May 26, 2006 by mfagan

Aharef: Websites as graphs – neat visualization. Via Tufte

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UW Priorities

Posted on May 24, 2006 by mfagan

UW Priorities – my schools’ Daily Bulletin from yesterday notes the priorities for the upcoming year:

  • graduate expansion
  • space
  • income diversification
  • international recruiting
  • expanding professional program capacity
  • strengthening industrial partnerships

Now, I complain a lot about the school’s priorities but I won’t go into that whole rant here. But if I were the president my list would look rather different. It might include crazy things like “improve the quality of education,” “improve student life,” “decrease tuition”, and “improve student-university relations.” Feel free to post your own suggestions (yes, I’m talking to the 0-2 people who read this that attend UW).

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Hidden Passages in your home

Posted on May 22, 2006 by mfagan

Another gem heard on CBC radio: Creative Home Enginnering.

having a hard time thinking up tags for this post…

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Useful sites for Torontonians

Posted on May 16, 2006 by mfagan

Listening to CBC Radio (Toronto) at work (ironically in Redmond, not Toronto) and an interview mentioned two neat sites.

TTC Rider has lots (and lots) of useful information about the subway system, such as which car to get on so that you get off right at the escalator ;-).

The second is the not-quite-launched WashroomQuest.com, which aims to list all public and sorta-public washrooms. For people who walk, rollerblade, or bike anywhere – you know, instead of driving from one indoor location to another – this is badly needed in every city.

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