techno.blog("Dion")

Brian M pointed me to Google Suggest.

It is actually kinda fun to put in some combinations and see what shows up. It really shows you what people are searching for at the moment :)

It is also impressive to see how fast the suggestions come back, even though it talks back to Google for that nice little packet.

It would be interesting for it to get smarter and offer suggestions based on ME, not based on the fact that lots of 13 year olds watch THE O.C. ;)

There was Microsoft Bob, and now there is Google Bob. Congrats on the move. It shows once again that Google is doing something fun! Now I need to get Bob or Cedric drunk enough to let on :)

I also just downloaded the Google Desktop which is really nice. It will be interesting to see how it fairs against Lookout (which is what I use now).

As I recently said, I love tools like del.icio.us and gmail where I can tag things with metadata.

I think with one more level of tagging I would have almost everything that I need.

For example, I would love to be able to link tags in del.icio.us. With a web of many-to-many relationships between a tag, I could build a folder setup, or more interestingly… a structure that suits me better. With this facility, I wouldn’t just have a list of tags that I can click on, but I could see the relationships.

It would then also be really nice to be able to say “if I tag it with java, also tag it as dev and programming”.

Tags are nice, but for some tasks value could be had with setting name:value pairs of metadata. This could especially help with searching via the lucene/google fields.

Great stuff!

Dion

del.icio.us shows you that Google aren’t the only guys that get it ;)

The concept could have easily come out of Google though.

The concept is so simple too. You create bookmarks, and you tag them with metadata. This is exactly what I want to be able to do with my email (and you can with GMail).

del.icio.us gives me:

• The ability to easier sort through my book marks.
• An easy way to find great content through the “Those who care about, also cared about” mechanism.

I just love it.

I read a rumor that a Google browser may be in the works.

The browser could be based on the Firebird codebase, which gives them a great place to start at.

I remember Adam Bosworth talking about changing browsers to work in a near-time mode. His vision was of an application that can work “offline”, and can sync up when you get back online. He wanted this to be “standard” for browsers, but without the power of IE behind it, how could he do it at BEA?

Now, at Google, he CAN push this ahead with a Google Browser.

Who knows, maybe we will be hitting gbrowser.com sometime soon.

When you flip through Dr. Dobbs you may run across the green Google Labs Aptitude Test.

I wonder if the like of Cedric, Adam Bosworth, Josh Block, and Neal Gafter applied in this way? :)

Some of the questions are hilarious:

• Solve this cryptic equation: WWWDOT – GOOGLE = DOTCOM
• Write a haiku describing possible methods for predicting search traffic smoothly

• 1
  11
  21
  1211
  111221
  

  What is the next line?

• What’s broken with Unix? How would you fix it?
• This space left intentionally blank. Please fill it with something that improves upon emptiness
• On an infinite, two-dimensional, rectangular lattic of 1-ohm resistors, what is the resistance between two nodes that are a knight’s move away?
• In your opinion, what is the most beautiful math equation ever derived?

A fun place to work?

I have recently been in a few conversations regarding Transparent Persistence.

Is it possible to have 100% transparent persistence?

Not within Java. There is an impedence mismatch between objects and relational. You don’t “delete” an object in Java. You let it go out of scope, or you set it to null, or something else. What would it mean to delete the object?

How would you query for objects? We need some kind of API/QL to do this

Oh man, so we DON’T have transparent persistence. Woe is me. We are doomed

It isn’t bad that we don’t have fully transparent persistence. I think it is actually a GOOD thing. As soon as you go into the way of data and persistence the rules change, and you may want to do things differently. However, for many of the things that you do, you want to basically be working with objects and have persistence taken care of for you. What we DON’T want to do, is the manual mapping between objects and JDBC/SQL. Or manually working with connections, and statements, and all that garbage :)

So. With JDO (and Hibernate and Cayenne and …) we have a good level of transparency, but we are allowed to get in there when we need too.

However, maybe we are doing OR mapping all wrong

(NOTE: Google. How about hiring Brian and funding him to do this work?)

Cedric Beust has moved from BEA to Google.

Cedric is another top notch developer that Google has grabbed, so I can’t wait to see what comes out from all of these guys soon.

Congratulations to Ced, and have a great time googlin’

Sometimes I have to laugh at the Google Ads that get served. Here on my blog I just got:

Class action?

Find out if you have a case! Free consultation!

I guess we need the Semantic Web to give these search engines some help!

Man. Everyone wants to work for Google :)

Adam Bosworth was BEA’s Chief Architect working on Project Alchemy which was going to make our browsers cool again. He talked about how the browser would work near-time… in a manner where you are offline some of the time.

Anyway, so long BEA. Now Adam is going to be at Google, with Joshua Bloch from Sun :)

I wonder if there is anything particularly cool going on there, or just the norm.

Google gets another Java guy: Adam Bosworth from BEA

BEA’s Adam Bosworth Departing For Google