Grant's Grunts » Computers

How to restore Java 1.5 and 1.4 on OS X Snow Leopard

Grant Ingersoll — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 20:38:31 +0000

For as much as I like Apple, sometimes they just do really stupid things. For instance, I installed Snow Leopard the other day and then come to find out it automatically removed Java 1.5 and 1.4 from my machine, never mind the fact that I use them on a regular basis to develop software. It didn’t even ask. Oh the arrogance.

At any rate, if you wish to restore them, here are the directions to fix it:

OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard – OneSwarm Wiki.

Live by Google, die by Google

Grant Ingersoll — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 13:26:44 +0000

Ah, the joys of trying to convince Google that there is something wrong… For the past two months my site traffic has been way off, which, of course, leads to less ad revenue. I mean, upwards of 75% less than normal. In logging into Webmaster Tools, I quickly see the problem. My main pages that attract readers are not being indexed because it says there were Network Timeouts reading my site. Sigh. I checked my logs for all of the days that Google reported there being errors and could see that the Googlebot had hit my site 5+ times on each occasion and all of those hits returned successful results, not to mention the other engines had no problem crawling the site during those times. Mind you, there have been ZERO outages in this time period.

To try and fix this, I’ve done:

Asked for site reconsideration
Removed my sitemap from Webmaster tools (since all the errors were reported in sitemaps)
Asked on the forums
Asked for site reconsideration again.

The fact is, Google drives most of my traffic, even if the other engines are just as good at actually doing search. Not really sure what I should do, maybe I should buy some ad words.

If anyone has any ideas on how to fix, they would be most appreciated.

[sarcasm] Google Docs and the Power of the Cloud

Grant Ingersoll — Tue, 12 May 2009 13:04:42 +0000

I just logged into my Google Docs account to fill out a report and was met with:

Lovely. I guess I will tell my boss that I can’t get my report done in time because the cloud was unavailable. Is that the modern day equivalent of “The dog ate my homework”?

New iPod shuffle

Grant Ingersoll — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 13:18:28 +0000

Apple announced a new iPod Shuffle. Gut reaction: Voice Over is cool and all, but why not voice recognition, too? The Shuffle telling me it is playing Bach is pretty cool. Telling the Shuffle to “Play Bach” (or “Play ‘My Playlist’) would be a whole lot better. I suppose that will be next year.

Google Search Quality Team Message

Grant Ingersoll — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 13:23:11 +0000

Just got this about my Lucene blog:

———————

Dear site owner or webmaster of lucene.grantingersoll.com,

While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that are outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769&hl=en. This appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party. Typically, the offending party gains access to an insecure directory that has open permissions. Many times, they will upload files or modify existing ones, which then show up as spam in our index.

The following is some example hidden text we found at http://lucene.grantingersoll.com/:

[SPAM words]
In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from lucene.grantingersoll.com are scheduled to be removed temporarily from our search results for at least 30 days.

We would prefer to keep your pages in Google’s index. If you wish to be reconsidered, please correct or remove all pages (may not be limited to the examples provided) that are outside our quality guidelines. One potential remedy is to contact your web host technical support for assistance. For more information about security for webmasters, see http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/my-sites-been-hacked-now-what.html. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en to learn more and submit your site for reconsideration.

Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team

—————

What a useful message. Tell me my site has been hacked, but don’t tell me where and I simply can’t find the issue. Great. Furthermore, I can’t even go to Google to find the problem. WTF? Thanks, Google. You are ever so helpful. Furthermore, they don’t even give you an address of a real live person you can talk to. Talk about a monopoly. You live and die by Google and they can remove you whenever they see fit.

Here’s what I did to try to find it:

wget -m http://lucene.grantingersoll.com

I then grepped through every file looking for the offending keywords.

Lucene and me at ApacheCon EU in Amsterdam March 23-27

Grant Ingersoll — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 17:35:09 +0000

If you’re into Lucene and/or Apache techologies and will be in Amsterdam, check out all the Lucene happenings at ApacheCon Europe: Lucene and me at ApacheCon EU in Amsterdam March 23-27

iTunes App Store Pricing Bug?

Grant Ingersoll — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 18:00:56 +0000

Was looking at the newly added “Hellfire” game today. On the landing page for the app, the price is $4.99, as seen here:

Clicking the reviews section, I see:

I bought from the “reviews” page, but haven’t seen my receipt yet, to know which value I was charged.

Yahoo! Search. As good as Google these days?

Grant Ingersoll — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 17:07:46 +0000

Is it just me, or is Yahoo! search as good as GoogleMeister MeisterGoogle these days?

I’ve defaulted to Google for a long time, but lately I don’t like how “big” they’ve gotten and I think it is wise to spread my searches around. At any rate, up until 6 mos. ago I never felt Y! was as good for most of my searches. However, since then, I have now defaulted to Y! search and I have to say I am totally happy with the results. The biggest thing I notice is that Y! is doing a better job of calculating Authority (Google calls this PageRank) these days. The other thing I’ve noticed is that they seem to be taking advantage of some site specific knowledge for those authoritative sites. For instance, when I search for “Grant Ingersoll”, my picture shows up next to my LinkedIn profile “hit”.

Now, I don’t know what has changed, but with my Apache marketing hat on (not really, I don’t own such a hat), I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the improvement coincides with their change over to using Apache Hadoop for building their web graph (i.e. their authority calculator). Coincidence? I don’t know. Are they better for everyone? I don’t know. All I know is that Yahoo’s search quality is way up for me.

Bottom line, for me as someone who searches a lot and knows a thing or two about search, I’m putting my trust in Y! search these days as much as Google and I am totally happy with the results. Have I abandoned Google? No, I haven’t. Every few days, I just flip my Firefox Search plugin between the two.

Bad Apple iPod, Good Apple Inc.

Grant Ingersoll — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 03:15:39 +0000

The other day, I gave my first impressions of my new iPod Touch 2G. For the most part, I love the device, and it is never too far away.

However, today, I was listening to a song and then went to remove the headphones. Next thing I know, the music stopped and I can’t unlock the screen (I even had my wife try it). All the other buttons worked (volume, power and the other one) but the actual touch screen didn’t work. Thus, I rebooted. (On the iPod, you give a two finger salute instead of the good old three finger salute on Windows.) No change. Tried powering down, but couldn’t do that since the slider to do that didn’t work either. Sigh. Hooked it up to my computer. Came up no problem in iTunes. Sync’s no problem from iTunes. Still no touch screen. Battery was full. Everything seemed in good working order. Heck, I haven’t even dropped the thing yet, so it can’t be that. I then removed everything off of it that I could. Still no luck.

So, I trudged off to the Apple store at the mall (which was packed, despite most other stores being empty. Yet another good sign for my Apple stock, despite all the stupid Wall Street types freaking out about Steve’s health.) All the Genius’s were busy, so I got in the standby queue. Next thing you know, a Concierge dude pulls me out of the line and says “We’re just going to replace it. We know you are busy. Hang on, and I’ll go get you a replacement.” All I could stammer was “I didn’t even buy it here”, to which he responded “No problem”. Seriously, it was a Christmas present that my wife got at Target. The Apple Store guy took it back w/o even asking to see a receipt. I was in and out of there in 10 minutes.

All I can say is wow. That’s what I call customer service.

Thank you Apple. You done good.

iPod Touch Review

Grant Ingersoll — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 02:58:08 +0000

Santa was nice this year and I got an iPod Touch 2G. Pretty sweet device. No more lugging the laptop on family trips, I don’t think, since it has pretty much everything I need for those kind of trips:

Music
Videos
Games
Google Maps
Email
Internet
SSH

Naturally, it’s been said before, but it truly is a game changing device in my opinion. The big reason being the App Store and the large number of apps there available for cheap. I’ve already bought a fair share, and find myself browsing the store when I have a free moment.

Of course, the device isn’t perfect. Here’s my list of what’s missing or less than stellar:

Wi-fi speed. The wi-fi is fairly slow and not that sensitive. Pages don’t download as fast as you would like, but still, it is tolerable and usable. I realize there is probably a power and size issue, but still, I get good signal in rooms far away from my router on my laptop where the iPod doesn’t even get a sniff.
No cut-and-paste.
Poor application switching. You know, alt-tab or apple-tab on the computer. It needs this. I’ve already found a number of times where I’m in the middle of email and then I click a link to go to the web. Then, when I’m done, I have to exit Safari and relaunch mail. Thankfully, it does pick up where you left off.
Firefox (and other browser) bookmark syncing. Would be nice if I could sync my bookmarks from Firefox. Sorry, Apple, Safari just ain’t as good as FF.
No camera. I know you don’t want to encroach on the iPhone, but still there’s no reason not to have a camera.

At any rate, the iPod Touch is overall a pretty powerful device.