June 2009 Posts

So I see Microsoft’s is attempting to rebrand the old Windows Live Search as bing.com. The commercials on TV are advertising it as a different type of search engine - a “decision engine.” Yeah, when I heard that, I, too, wondered exactly what a “decision engine” was. But the commercials are clever and somewhat funny to anyone who has ever spent time searching through hundreds of results for a single missing piece. But where’s the meat? My coworker Brian, a few weeks ago, provided a great example of how this claim of being a “decision engine” is kind of a joke. And it can be summed up in a single sentence: “How big is the sun?” Maybe now you’re confused about what I’m talking about. What does the sun have to do with search engines? Well, try plugging that sentence, word for word, into your favorite search engine. Our of curiosity, I ran this search on a number of top and up-and-coming engines to see what they returned. Google is obviously the 900-pound gorilla in this space, so they’re a logical place to start. When you ask Google “How big is the Sun?” Big Brother Google replies, right at the top “Mass: 1.9891 ×1030 KG 332 946 Earths,” with most of the results relevant to the question at hand. In fact, all but two of the results were directly relevant to the question asked. Yahoo didn’t return a nice little piece of math like Google did, but all but one of the search results is _directly _relevant to the question asked. The only result that wasn’t relevant was that VH1 has some videos by a band called Big Sun, but that was torwards the bottom of the SERP. The newcomer Wolfram Alpha, which bills itself as a “knowledge engine” gives you a simple result, 432,200 miles, along with a handy formula for conversion. Not a traditional search engine, but closer to a “decision engine” than Bing … And finally, the “decision engine” Bing. So how does the vaunted “decision engine” handle knowing how big the sun is?It doesn’t. The first result is a garden furniture store in Austin, Texas. The second result is an Equine Product Store in Florida. The third was pictures of the sun from the Boston Globe - okay, that one was close. The next results are a realty company in Florida and an athletic conference. Only then, six results down, do we get into the meat of the question. Look, it’s easy to hate on Microsoft. It’s no challenge anymore. I, personally, am not exactly a fan of Microsoft, but I’m hardly an enemy either. At worst, I’m indifferent. And, as an aside, I really feel sorry for the poor guy they send to the OSCON keynote every year who literally gets hammered for no good reason by what can only be described as nerd rage from the questioners. And yet every year, they come back with more money and more people. I almost posted an entry about it last year. It was really kind of sad to watch. Anyways, the point is, there are some things that Microsoft _has _done well. Office? Great productivity suite. Windows 7? From what I’ve seen, it looks pretty good. The XBOX and gaming units at Microsoft do gangbusters. But it just seems like they’re irrationally pursuing this search thing, out of spite, at this point to the detriment of the rest of their business. Considering that bing doesn’t appear, at the surface, to be any different from Windows Live Search in terms of its usefulness (that is to say, not), Microsoft is throwing tons of money in the form of development and marketing to something that just isn’t very good when they could be focusing on the core parts of their business. But, then again, I’m not Ballmer.

I’m sure many of you have been following what’s been happening in Iran, right? Or maybe you haven’t because, like often happens in international events, the American media has dropped the ball in the most epic of fashions. And I’m talking Ed Scissum (God bless him) fumbling deep in Bama territory to give Auburn the win in the ‘97 Iron Bowl dropping the ball. It’s been that bad.

… it’s more likely than you think! And here I thought drama was isolated to fandom mailing lists and MySpace! I was not at php tek this year. I keep meaning to make it to that conference, but, let’s face it, the week before Memorial Day is a really lousy time to have a conference. I usually like to take that Friday off to make it a long weekend. I may finally make tek next year, though. But, even if I went, I don’t usually get invited to the cool parties. It’s really for the best, though. I usually end up drunk in a bar listening to good music rather than trying to discuss functions and benchmarking after having imbibed a large quantity of booze or making an ass out of myself by diving into bushes. Ask me about that some other time. Apparently, at php tek, at one of these “cool-people-only” parties (okay, it was apparently an after-hours panel), a bunch of people cooked up this idea of having a uniform PHP coding standards amomg their own projects with the goal of having them adopted as some type of official standard. Now, in and of itself, this sounds like a good idea. Most other languages have at least a suggested best practices (Sun’s coding conventions for Java or Apple’s for Cocoa come to mind) even if you don’t use them. Every job I’ve worked in has had some standard, even if I had to write it. Most of them were derived from the PEAR standard, including what we do at dealnews. But hey, variety is the spice of life, right? What’s the harm in another choice? Nothing. So we’ve established that the idea of havng a[nother] PHP coding standard is not necessarily bad. The problem, as with all things, is what happened next… Somehow, they managed to get a closed mailing list on php.net. Think about that for just a second. This group, composed of some guys from some projects with no official relation to PHP other than being users of it, somehow ended up with [email protected]. WTF? I would love to know how that happened.More to the point, this will cause conceptual confusion among new, and even existing users. When I first heard about this, my first thought was, hey, this is on PHP.net, right? It must have some kind of official recognition, right? Well, as far as I can tell, it doesn’t. It’s just … some guys. Put yourself in the shoes of a new PHP user, visiting PHP.net for all your manual needs. Oh, what’s this? Standards? Well, I better use those! It was a suspiciously closed action for such an open-source project. The original mailing list was a closed list until Rasmus himself opened it, and the members don’t exactly seem keen on welcoming any input from anyone outside their little clique.Some of the things being said by the “PHP Standards Group,” quite frankly, make me very suspicious of their motives. Things like “All of us are too busy, both with real jobs and our various projects, to fight the battles that come of trying to make this a completely open process where anyone with an email address can contribute” reek of self-aggrandizing nonsense. I’m sorry, but that’s bullshit. Plain and simple. And the fact that no one else in the group has stood up to say otherwise speaks volumes. There’s a phenomenon that I have seen occur on mailing list called implicit acceptance. If you don’t stand up and say otherwise, you are implicitly agreeing with the stated course of action. So, if anyone in this group disagrees with the stated opinions, guys, now’s the time to pony up. If you’re going to have a mailing list on php.net, and call yourselves the “PHP Standards Group,” you need to welcome input from the PHP community - all of us - not just your group. Otherwise, you don’t need to be on php.net, and you don’t need to be calling yourselves the “PHP Standards Group.” It is overly focused on OO. I know a lot of people think that objects are the answer to everything. I have strong disagreements, but I will save those for a later post. But (kind of tying into my previous point) there are a _lot _of people using PHP in a strictly functional way or in a way that sanely mixes functional and object oriented programming. Any standard - if it’s going to be called a PHP Standard - needs to take all widespread uses of PHP into accout, and not just OO. Now, as I said before, I’m not a “cool person.” I don’t have CVS commit access. I don’t have thousands of followers on Twitter or a cool blog (no offense to my five regular readers - you guys rule and I’ll buy you a round sometime!). I’m just some guy who’s been writing PHP for the last nine years or so. So, while it appears this “group” probably won’t care what I have to say anwyays, here is my humble suggestion for a path forward.** **Figure out the semantics. **Notice that all this stuff we’re talking is appearances and semantics. Nobody is discussing the actual proposals (as they have been made) so far, just the actions of the people involved. What exactly is this project trying to accomplish? Are you trying to write a standard for your project(s), or are you trying to produce something useful for the community? If this is just for your project(s), move it off php.net, call it something else (“The Shared Standards Working Group” or some other such nonsense), and do whatever the hell you want. But if you’re going to call yourselves the “PHP Standards Group,” and have your project on PHP.net, you have to welcome input from the community, even if you ultimately discard it. The thing I don’t understand is why this group appears so afraid of public input? Okay, the signal-to-noise ratio can get pretty high sometimes, sure. But for every ten, hundred or five hundred bogus suggestions you get, you may get one really good one. One you might not have thought of yourself or no one in your tight little circle might have seen. And this is the true power of any open-source project. I would urge the “PHP Standards Group” to overcome their fear of public input and let us - the users - have an input in the community process. As always, this represents my own views only, and not those of my employer, the beer I’m drinking (Fat Tire Amber) or my cat.