when your down and miserable

Posted by Ian Holsman Tue, 29 Jul 2008 03:24:00 GMT

 call your local realestate agent for an instant pickup..

 

sure.. your property is worth more than when you bought it 6 months ago from me..

yours is in a ‘special’ niche that people still want.. all the others have gone down 10%. don’t worry about the 3 properties for sale down the street, they bear no resemblance to yours

 

yeah.. right

Tags  | no comments

cuil. a brief look

Posted by Ian Holsman Mon, 28 Jul 2008 17:55:00 GMT

So Cuil opened up their doors.

 

my initial impressions is that they are doing the basic search quite well, but are pretty basic when it comes to categorization, related searches and typos. For example ‘madona’ doesn’t even mention that you might be interested in madonna the entertainer. and there is no link to recent news about her.

 

Their search results seems to be the same as google’s for some results, and very small for others, So I’m guessing they need a bit more work there.

 

Categorization also fails for something like ‘PLSI’ whose abbreviation means 3 different things. (a Law thing for native indians, a Learning Style, and a clustering algorithm).

 

so for now I’d say Cuil is interesting, but needs to beef up it’s IR/NLP capabilities before it gains parity with the other engines like yahoo, aol, gigablast, and of course google.

Tags  | no comments

Looking for an IT channel/sales manager role in Melbourne

Posted by Ian Holsman Mon, 14 Jul 2008 04:36:00 GMT

for a friend (honest)

if your company is currently on the lookout for a IT channel/sales person with years of experience ping me on ian at holsman.net and I’ll introduce you.

no comments

when it rains it pours - whats new in monitoring and metrics

Posted by Ian Holsman Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:59:00 GMT

so on the RRD mailing list there is a discussion on how to write a RRD server/accelerator to help speed up RRD. which is a great tool, but when you abuse it and try to capture hundreds of thousands of metrics it kinda uses a bit too much disk I/O. (read swamps the system)

So imagine my surprise when I noticed that orbitz has recently open sourced their monitoring framework

  • ERMA: the monitoring API
  • Graphite: a graphing component on top of it
  • Whisper: a fixed size db that stores the info

and imagine my surprise when I found out it was written in Django, my favorite framework.

and now I find out Theo Schlossnagle has just released reconnoiter (reconnoiter project home)

now.. to find a couple of hours in the day to actually get into them.

Tags , , , , ,  | 1 comment