Jul/080
Apple’s new iPhone causing lines to form by chance?
I was speaking with a friend this weekend about the new iPhone and he was surprised that Apple with all its technical abilities could not setup a better system for all their fans to get a hold of the new iPhone than to have everyone stand in line for five hours to purchase one. Well, that was not by chance. Steve Jobs wanted the launch to be so inefficient. There are lots of benefits to having people wait five hours to buy one.
First and most important of all is PR. Every newspaper I read had an article about the iPhone craze. All the people walking by the line will certainly notice the launch. The bragging that happens after a fan has stood in line for five hours to obtain one is going to be more than five months of non-stop blabbing (probably through his new iPhone).
Secondly when someone exerts so much effort to getting his hands on the device, he will love it more than life itself for a certain duration of time. That love for the new iPhone will translate to an irrational love for Apple and resulting in Apple sell more products to these iPhone owners.
The launch was very well orchestrated. Well done, Steve!
Jul/080
Useless content on the web
The web is full of information that nobody cares about. So many sites just throw content up as quickly as they can trying to gain the precious keyword indexing advantage on big search engines. As a result, this is also the reason why search engines are a necessity in order to get any valuable information online these days. But what all these sites are forgetting is that getting visitors to their pages is not the final goal. It is important to keep them consuming more pages and revisiting the sites over and over again. In order for that to happen, sites need to provide real value. What can they do for the visitors to help them solve a problem? If they focused on that aspect of their sites more, they would be having more success.
Jun/081
How to find a SEO expert?
I was chatting with a colleague the other day when he found someone who claimed to be an SEO expert in LinkedIn. He was complaining about how that guy did not know jack about SEO and there are so many SEO quacks out there just ripping off their clients. Certainly, I have no arguments there as I totally agree that the SEO industry is just full of posers. However, the interesting thing is my colleague did find this so call poser through the web out of the millions of other SEO experts. So in a way, this poser already proved himself to be an expert.
So the next time you want to find a SEO expert, just Google “seo expert” and the one that comes up first is probably your guy.
Jun/080
Visualization Of Data
I’m sure Tufte would be all for this. Sometimes, we have so much data that it is just overwhelming. Generally, we do statistical analysis on data to get the underlying story behind it. But what about visualizing it. ManyEyes is a data visualization tool built by Martin Wattenberg at IBM that does just that. (Full disclaimer, I do know the creator.) It allows anyone to upload a dataset and use any number of their visualization tools to view the data. It is amazing how looking at data from a different angle can result in new discoveries.
Jun/080
Very Interesting Explanation Of Design Pattern
http://37signals.com/papers/introtopatterns/
It really simplifies the methodology of designing web applications.
May/080
Google Earth / Map Implementation Problem
One thing that was not documented fully at Google for integrating Google Earth into Google Map is that the function, getEarthInstance, is only available in the newest version of the Map API. I could not find exactly which version so the best way is to use v=2.x like in “http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&v=2.x&key=yourkey” instead of specifying an exact version. Have fun with this new feature.
May/080
Google Earth on Google Maps
Google just added a new Earth plugin feature to Google Maps. Now we can have all the functionalities of Earth as one of the selections buttons on Maps just like Satellite view. This is a very exciting new development.
May/080
Mysql on 32bit processor vs 64bit processor
Here is the continuation of the experiment done previously on Mysql on Windows vs Linux. After doing more analysis and observation, it appeared that the difference in speed for the benchmark tests were not related to Windows and Linux but were related to the processor. The previous test just happened to have AMD 64s on the Linux machines and Intel Xeon 32bits on Windows. We hypothesized that the increased throughput of the 64bit processors resulted in about half the time required to return the same query run on a 32bit machine.
So we decided to test the same query again on a Windows machine with an AMD 64 X2. This time the result for the query took 7.35 second, almost the same as the other AMD 64s running Linux.
One more test to run the query on a Windows Intel 64bit chip machine would better solidify our hypothesis.
May/080
Mysql server has gone away
I have a spider crawling the web written in PHP running constantly to insert and update data in a Mysql database. Today, it kept stopping on a records with the error message, “Mysql server has gone away”. It certainly did not time out as just starting the process again would result in this message immediately. The script did not close out the connection to the DB as it had worked just fine for over a year.
Finally, I found that the problem was max_allowed_packet setting in my.cnf was too small. It was set to 2MB and when Mysql receives a query larger than that, it assumes that something must have gone wrong and closes the connection. I increased that parameter to 4MB and everything is working fine now.