Inside Search: The Knowledge Graph for mobile and tablet search

Inside Search: The Knowledge Graph for mobile and tablet search: Have you ever had a question pop into your head at an unexpected time? Maybe when you’re talking with a friend over lunch, watching TV at h...

Hey there stranger...

So sorry little blog, but you're priority in my world has been degraded. Wife, kids +1, weddings, bike rides, sun shine and moon shine.... they've all passed you by.  But I'll be back, just keep a low light on and the wine glass half full.

iPhone vs Droid

I'm a "long-time" Android user that recently switched to the iPhone 4s. This is my story.

To properly frame my profile, I've had 3 Android phones over the past 4 years. I use gmail very heavily. I favor Google Docs over Open (Libre) Office. I favor Open Office over Microsoft Office. I'm a pretty heavy Google fanboy. However, I also own an iPad (gen 1) and recently purchased an Apple TV. Both of which I love. By day I'm a Solutions Architect with more love for Java then .NET (much more). In that realm I'm an open source junky. So, all in all I'm really a fan of things that work and work they way I want/need them to.

So on to my 10 days with the iPhone 4s.
Fan-boy analysis:
The device is beautiful. The apps look sharp and are very snappy. The camera is my favorite part of the phone. I love having both a forward and backward lens. The pictures it takes are great and the in-photo editing capabilities are awesome. It does good in low and high light and takes good video as well. I love the somewhat seamless integration between the phone and apple tv. The mirroring technology is great.

The real:
All this glitter obviously demos and sells very well. But for me, it doesn't translate to being that useful in real life. Mainly because of a few BIG shortcomings.

• There is no application equivalent to the "Locale" app in the Android Market. This is one of those apps that you don't realize how much you love until its gone.
• You can't post pictures directly from the "Camera Roll" to Facebook or Google Plus.
• The keyboard is horrible, I miss "swype" based keyboards!
• To work with "iCloud" completely you need to update to the latest iOS.
• To use Photo Stream you have to BUY the latest iPhoto.

And some minor annoyances:

• The battery life is bad.
• No Google MyTracks. I'm sure there is something similar, but I haven't found it yet.

I'm still debating whether to go back to Android or stick with the iPhone. I've got a few more days left before my 14 day window expires. If anyone can help solve my issues above, I'd love to hear from you.

Founder LY - good luck, I'm cheering for you!

This site has a great idea and I hope it is able to get enough good content from some of the leading Entrepreneurs in the country and world. Unfortunately I think the interviewers themselves are horrible. They need to find better voices to ask the questions and seed the conversations, then just let the Entrepreneurs have the floor.
www.founderly.com

JDK 7 submitted by Oracle

Pains me to say that "... by Oracle", but none the less. I'm disappointed that project Lambda (closures) got pushed to jdk 8. I'm happy to see "scalable asynchronous I/O" capabilities and I'm undecided about the deprecation of "File" and the introduction of "Path". We shall see.

http://www.developer.com//java/get-ready-for-java-7-with-the-free-jdk-7-reference-card.html

Google Books Ngrams Viewer

Search for phrase occurrences in all of the books in the Google Books library. Why? Why not!

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/

JCP approves JSR-336 (Java 7) and JSR-337 (Java 8)

The JCP has approved the JSRs surrounding Java 7 & 8, even though Apache threatened to leave the JCP. Apache is not happy with the licensing terms that Oracle put in place in regards to the TCK. The ball is back in Apache's court, did the JCP call their bluff or will Apache pack their bags?

Read developer.com's article: http://www.developer.com//java/jcp-passes-java-specs-despite-apaches-objections-to-oracle-licensing-.html

Graph Your Gmail emails

Very cool Chrome Extension that puts your emails in Gmail, into graphs. Check it out...

Graph Your Inbox is a Google Chrome extension that allows you to graph Gmail activity over time. You can use it to visualize your communication with friends, your Facebook activity, when you purchased items on Amazon or how often you use certain words or phrases. We provide the same search functionality used by Gmail, but instead of a list of messages we show you graphs of email trends over time.

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/lghnjmocfihonjdijomigppjlpdgdeji

Google Instant Search

A new game that will come from this is the searching for "white words". White words being those search words that result in a white results screen. The easy ones are penis, boob....
Also... this may make people scared to do searches in front of other people, as the auto-populating nature is very revealing of ones private internet usage history. When you type "T" in the new instant search, is TMZ at the top? :)

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Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type...

Did you know:
- Before Google Instant, the typical searcher took more than 9 seconds to enter a search term, and we saw many examples of searches that took 30-90 seconds to type.
- Using Google Instant can save 2-5 seconds per search.
- If everyone uses Google Instant globally, we estimate this will save more than 3.5 billion seconds a day. That’s 11 hours saved every second.
- 15 new technologies contribute to Google Instant functionality.

http://www.google.com/instant/#utm_campaign=launch&utm_medium=van&utm_source=instant

Thats my Boy!!

Making Daddy proud...

Solaris falls to an Oracle upper cut

Damn you Oracle. I'm not a Solaris user, but still...
http://opensource.sys-con.com/node/1342962

St Patty's Day 2010

We've only got another month or so in our current location. Working above an Irish Pub on St Patty's Day will be missed... sort of

http://fetchback.typepad.com/fetchback/2010/03/st-patricks-day-fetchback-style.html

An age of incomplete thoughts

Is it just me or does it seem like us techies live in an age of incomplete thoughts? Maybe it is my inability to keep up with the industry but I'd like to think that is not it. Seemingly every time I check my tweets, blogs, buzz blah blah from colleagues in the IT industry they are talking about some new tool, pattern, language or framework. It seems like we are so concerned with discovering the next new thing that we don't bother to complete existing ideas.

Are we distracted by pretty birds or is all this just an effect of me having a 2 year old boy, a new baby girl at home and a new home?

Tia Jacklyn Sellers

.. entered the world on 2-17-2010 at 12:09pm. She weighed 6lbs 12.8oz, was 20 3/4 inches tall and scored a 9 on the APGARD. Head measured 13 inches. An incredible incredible experience, unexplainable so I won't even try for fear of not living up to what it actually was. All I can say is that my Wife is the strongest person in the world.

Mom and Baby are doing great. Both are napping as Daddy reconnects with the cyber world.

I'm now the Father of a beautiful little girl. All boys out there, this is your first and last official warning. Be afraid and be FAR away from Tia. I know people...

Having our baby!!!

We were admitted last night and are continuing with the labor into today, February 17th. So far so good, the people here have been great and the labor is going as well as it could. Keeping fingers and toes crossed. Hopefully little Pink will be here soon!

Finally a home owner again!

Well, it has finally happened. After 6+ months in Mesa living with my parents in a retirement community, we have finally moved into our new home in north Phoenix.

Too busy to write any more. Still love my family, love my friends and love my job.

More to come...

Hi blog, its me Jay

It has been quite awhile since we last spoke. Life has a way of being busy, when you have a one year old, you are selling a house, working at a new job, searching for homes in another state and preparing to move 1500 miles away.

With that said, lets get back to it. Where was I.... oh yes, Tapestry.

I am currently trying to figure out how to pop-up a window after a form submission. Sounds easy enough but its implementation is proving to be very elusive.

Since our last chat many positive things have been accomplished. We have confluence and jira installed and integrated. The dev team is slowly getting acclimated to making jira and confluence a part of their daily processes. We have stand-up meetings every morning. We have a new colo of servers, consisting of 10 new machines, dedicated to serving pixels. We recently got approval to treat the conversion of our existing project to a maven project, as a production task rather then a dev task. Thats a big win and will be the trailblazer for future requests.

All in all I still like my job. Its a good company with good people. It has the typical small-company issues but also the typical entrepreneurial spirit.

I will try to write more often, I promise.

Page Conversions - Tapestry

The past few days I've been working on converting existing tapestry pages. The conversion includes basic look and feel of the the html and some behind the scenes changes to how data is handled.

At this point I don't know if its Tapestry's fault or our own, but it seems like we're standing on our heads. I'm hoping that it is us, cause if its not I'm going to have to push hard to remove tapestry from this project.

Time will tell...

Is Enterprise Java dead?

I was unable to attend Java One this year and maybe its a good thing. After conversations with some respected colleagues who did attend the conference, it appears that enterprise java as we know it, is dead.

So what is taking its place? Clouds. We'll see where this takes us...

IDE auto-complete rant

You know what annoys me, the fact that IDEs such as NetBeans and Eclipse have wonderful auto-complete capabilities that are almost perfect.

For example, in NetBeans you can type sout and hit tab and it will produce System.out.println(""); for you (sysout in Eclipse). However, if you type System.out. it will bring up all the methods available for the "out" portion of that command. However it does not put a ';' at the end. The IDE should be smart enough to know that println() is a void method that can have no other operation after it, and insert the ";" for you. There are many different ways to apply logic to determine this but I won't go into that here. Just wanted to rant about it for a bit.