Blogs

There has been a LOT of buzz about Cuil (pronounced ‘cool’) – a brand new search engine. Unlike MSN / Yahoo / AskJeeves etc, it does not share any of the underlying technology with other search engines, and maintains entirely its own database of webpages. Apparently their database is multiples larger than Googles, and in fact, several of the key employees are from Google.

The media has been blasting Cuil as fizzling out on its launch day. Technical problems plagued the results pages – often replying with ‘No results found’ (which 99% of the time is rediculous). I can certainly forgive this type of problem on launch day as they figure out how to scale properly to the load. What is less forgivable are the lack of relevance in search results. Google has become quite good at filtering out the spammers and link-hoarders from SERPS. When I searched for ‘ajax grid‘ I got mostly shareware download sites (wrong!) all forwarding to the same 2 products.

A secondary issue is how the URL’s for search results are quite small and out of the way. I usually focus my attention on the URL as opposed to the page title – mainly because it helps me filter out the junk from the gems quickly.

I’m always willing to try something new, and I’ll definitely come back to Cuil after a few months – but they definitely need to address relevance in their SERPS. The good thing about search engines is that switching costs are ziltch so there are opportunities out there for people who want to compete – like Cuil. They would, however, join a long list of utter failures when it comes to the search space.

I was also thinking, one way for them to get a foothold maybe in the search space would be to sell a Google-appliance like device that competes favourably on features for enterprise search. My experience there tells me there are opportunities if they can compete on features and price – even if their SERPS’s are still being improved.

If you follow IT news you might have heard something about a ‘DNS exploit’ squirreling its way around the Internet. It’s true, there is one and its a doozy. Something like 52% of all DNS servers on the Internet are vulnerable. There’s a fix, but it’s not easy to implement and its not a ’silver bullet’ either. For an easy-to-understand english language explanation, check out this post. The summary is as follows:

What’s new is that the bad guy doesn’t actually have to wait [for a DNS request]. DNS is actually more of a relay race than a sprint. Remember, you send a request to a server, and you might get a reply that says “www.foobar.com? Sure, here’s the IP address to use.� Or, you might get a message that says, “www.foobar.com? I don’t know, ask ns1.foobar.com, here’s its address.� That’s recursion. It’s not a bug, or a rarely used feature. DNS is always sending you to different servers to find a record — this is how the servers that run .com work.

And so, the attack. If someone’s trying to attack www.foobar.com, he doesn’t pull out the starter pistol for that particular name. After all, the server might not be willing to go out looking for www.foobar.com for hours. No, he declares races for 1.foobar.com, 2.foobar.com, 3.foobar.com, and so on.

I recently installed Skitch for doing mac screenshotting after I switched to Mac from Windows. I found it to be cumbersome and not exactly intuitive. Then I discovered a really handy screenshotting tool that comes as a Dashboard Widget. Check this out (Screenshot Plus).

MobileMe is Apple’s answer to Microsoft Exchange with some additional features that look a lot like that Microsoft is offering with their new Live Workspace service. Essentially it gives you a unified way to handle eMail, Files, Photos, Calendar, and Address Book between all your machines including your PC, Mac, iPhone (iTouch), and AppleTV. For a marketing overview, check out the video over at apple.com. Its main advantage for business users is probably the way it provides similar functionality to Blackberry with the Push-Email Push-Contacts and Push-Calendar features. This means that the very moment an email is sent to you, you are notified with an audible noise from your iPhone without having to wait for it to page the server. Pretty cool indeed, and I bet RIM is shaking in their boots.

The Good

Email. The web based eMail application seems top notch. Clearly mirrored on Microsoft Outlook, it provides a clean, fast UI with seamless integration to the other MobileMe services. The push-email to mobile devices such as iPhone and iPod Touch make this feature an excellent choice for business users. Also, the Ajax-y goodness baked right into the Sproutcore platform makes this a really competitive webmail solution – right up there with Yahoo Mail and Gmail.

Online Storage with iDisk. This is something that has really been missing all-in-one suites. Some way is needed to move large files about the web between devices that doesn’t feel so ‘tacked on’. I was really impressed with the way Microsoft is solving this problem with Live Workspace, and it looks like Apple is following suit with 20GB of storage.

Calendar. This feature is well executed. The calendaring synchronization between devices is perfect, and the UI for the calendar interface on the web is as good as Outlook’s.

The Bad

No Chat. Integrated chat is conspicuously missing from this package. While I can do texting-yes, I cannot see those conversations in the web view if I am away from my phone or don’t want to use my phone. I’ve really gotten used to this feature with Google Apps.

Browser Support. It’s odd that a solution targeting PC users does not support IE6 and only has limited support for IE7. As a rich-ui web developer I know that it’s far easier to build a web app that supports these browsers from the beginning than to go back and fix it later.

Price. Apple is asking for $99 for an individual account (per year). If you buy an iPhone or Mac you can get it for $69. To me this is steep. If I fork out the $2200 commitment for a new iPhone (with 3 year contract in Canada) why are they asking for $70 more bucks just so I can have the same level of communications Blackberry offers me all-inclusive? Also just generally what I expect these days for $99 is quite a lot when it comes to online services. Microsoft will sell me an entire office suite for $170 – I feel like I’m getting ripped off by paying $100 to Apple to make their own devices talk to one another. If I had to pick a price that would make sense for me.. I’d go closer to $49 for the Individual account, and no more than $20 if I buy a new computer or iPhone and sign up within 30 days.

Data Migration. I have so far seen very little on how they are going to help me move my data from Blackberry/Exchange/Google Apps to MobileMe. This is huge for winning converts and my biggest objection so far.

The Verdict

Apple has bitten off a lot for the first release appears to have chosen well for the baseline featureset. As always, I am wary about jumping on new Apple products right when they come out because I usually get burned (either with unanticipated price drops soon after launch, or hardware/software failures). However, my main objection to mobileme is that I am a committed Google Apps user and would have a hard time migrating all my data – as well as my email address. I will certainly keep my eye on this because I would love to get this level of integration with my devices, and like a lot of what Apple does, it looks oh-so-sweet.

I stumbled onto a copy of Making Things Happen (Second Edition) a few weeks ago here at Nitobi and I’ve finally had a chance to give it a good going-over when I was at the lake this weekend. This is a good book – let me say right off. I liked both the style of writing (very straightforward, employing limited amounts of jargon), and the methodical experience-based approach to explaining project management. Its definitely written from a software-development perspective (the author having worked on projects like Windows and Internet Explorer for Microsoft) but the insights contained would pretty much apply to any team-based project situation.

The author speaks from a place of experience. The book is littered with insights one could only gain from years of ground-level project management – probably with the same types of quirky software developers you and I deal with all the time (ourselves included, no doubt).

Topics covered include:

• How to make things happen
• How to make good decisions
• Specifications and requirements
• Where ideas come from
• How to manage ideas
• How not to annoy people
• Leadership and trust
• Midgame / endgame strategy
• The truth about making dates
• What to do when things go wrong
• Power and politics
• Team communication & relationships
• Visions and plans

These items above are the broad strokes (lifted from the author’s website). Getting into it, I also encountered such gems as:

• What to do when there are no winning choices
• How to use research as ammunition
• What to do if there is no time for project planning
• How to come up with new ideas
• Managing the chaos of idea generation
• How to know when specs are ‘complete’
• Why projects run long
• Managing difficult team members
• How to write diplomatic emails!
• Run meetings that don’t annoy people
• What to do when everything goes to hell
• How pressure affects the project and productivity
• All about the ‘Hero Complex’ (this is a good one)
• Basic tools for getting things done (prioritized lists and such)
• All about the politics of teams and projects

He caps each chapter off with some exercises, making this a useful resource for teaching a course on project management, although I rarely did more than just glance at them.

Rotten-tomatoes style I give this a rating of 90%. The only substantial criticism I would give is that sometimes it does seem a bit rambling, but those digressions were usually quite entertaining so its hardly a reason not to go pick up a copy of your own. BTW you can buy it right now from Amazon by clicking here: Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management (Theory in Practice (O’Reilly))