The Flow of Consciousness

I didn’t blog as much as I would have liked to this year, mostly because of my crazy busyness.

My article on how to install Gears on 64-bit Linux continues to see quite a bit of traffic. I even host a copy of Gears, even though it’s likely out of date. Also in the Linux vein, my articles on how to buy DRM-free music online with Amazon MP3 on Linux and Android were moderately popular. I wrote an article on how to add CACert root certificates to Chromium on Linux and it sees more traffic than most of my other posts combined.

I wasn’t as active in the open source community as I would have liked, but I did make some contributions to Gwibber, Astrid, Celtx, and Lernid. I mentioned the first three in my Launchpad activity update. The latter is a newer development by Jono Bacon. I contributed the entire Esperanto translation less than two days after it was available on Launchpad. I have no way of verifying it, but I think that the Esperanto translation was the first complete non-English variant translation available.

I recently wrote two brief articles on how to automate some tasks on Facebook. One was how to rapidly expunge friend suggestions, and the other was how to select all friends in a friend select dialog.

I met Tom Dickson of Will It Blend? fame at CES last year. He was really cool and friendly.

I also wrote a few articles on politics, my favorite being A Comment on Socialism Defined, a comment left on a friend’s blog, Strike the Root!. I’ll not go into how much I think Obama and his friends have screwed up the country already (it’s not all been bad—he has done some good things). That’s something for another article.

A new hobby this year for me has been stock trading. I’d saved up some money and decided to use some skills I learned in middle school to make a buck or two on the stock market. Ironically, not 12 hours after I blogged about my flagship stock being up near 200%, that stock, SPNG, dropped 27.66% in one day, costing me $23,000 of value on a $10,000 investment in 65 minutes. It recovered, and I still made out with a profit, but I learned a very, very valuable set of lessons. I still kick myself occasionally because of this and probably will for a long time. My goal of getting into stocks was to generate enough money that I could pay off my student loans really quickly. I could have paid off more than 2/3 and I didn’t cash out when I should have.

I did meet many, many new people in the stock world, especially Stockguy22 and the Bulls on Wall Street crew. I said goodbye to StockTwits after I was temporarily banned for cheering on Vonage (VG) when it was less than 50 cents, riding it to 80 cents, and cashing out. They called it a worthless, crappy penny stock. A few weeks later, it spiked to ~2.20 and has been above a dollar since. HA!

I got some neat advice from friends while considering the purchase of a MacBook Pro (which I got and love) and the acquisition of a PS3 (which I did get).

The biggest changes in my life were in my location and work. I got a new job in March at Vivísimo, a search platform maker in Pittsburgh–I even wrote a post on the corporate blog! I moved in with some friends in May, but realizing we were a little cramped, I moved into a new apartment in July (I didn’t write about that!).

I wrote more than 28 articles for Bob Buskirk‘s ThinkComputers. My favorites were the Masscool MP-1371RS Media Player and QNAP TS-809 Pro network attached storage device. I use the former alongside my PS3 for video formats my PS3 can’t stream from the latter. The NAS has become the central storage hub for all of my computers, replacing the QNAP TS-109 Pro I reviewed two years ago.

BIOS LEVEL was fairly inactive this year, largely because of a major server outage from May to August. I did write an article on the Orbita Mouse, which I still use to this day at work. I did record and post several videos from Ohio Linuxfest 2009, including Linux Journal editor Shawn Powers’s keynote, Jorge Castro‘s talk on building a community around an open source project, and more on licensing, making money from open source, democratized design, and talking to policymakers and legislators about open source. All Ohio Linuxfest videos with a write-up are available on BIOS LEVEL, or on BIOS LEVEL’s Blip.tv channel.

Jon Daniel and I spend most of November cranking out a beta version of Profyle.at, a personal profile directory service. We’re not entirely finished yet, but sign up for our Profyle.at beta and you’ll likely get in! We want to help people find you on the Internet so your friends and family can follow you on whatever sites and networks you like the most. We pitched for funding and didn’t get it, but were cordially invited to present again during the next round in a month.

Brigette and I are still together, and going strong. We’ve spent most of her winter break together, driving throughout western PA to be with friends and family, too. She’s been working on her web site for her beagle and vizsla show dogs, Glade Mill Sporting & Hound. She’s come a long way, from using a completely WYSIWYG editor to redoing it with a mix of code and WYSIWYG with Adobe Dreamweaver. I’m eager to see what she’s planning for it.

Vivísimo‘s Search Done Right™ blog posted an article I wrote a while ago entitled It’s All About the Metadata, Baby: Search Engine Optimization On The Intranet.

Here’s a snippet to whet your appetite:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a hot topic these days. SEO consultants are paid well for their expertise in telling a company how to improve its web search engine ranking. A high rank often means more traffic, which means more business, which means more money.

However, SEO consultants focus primarily on the World Wide Web. After all, it’s only the public that needs to find information on the company’s website, right?

Wrong. This fact is well established. Vivísimo and other vendors entered the enterprise search market years ago and their growing number of clients shows that employees need to find data within the company’s intranet sites and storage networks using a unified, easy-to-use interface.

Click your way to SDR and read the full article, It’s All About the Metadata, Baby: Search Engine Optimization On The Intranet. You can also check out my Search Done Right author page.

Update: Fixed the links. Thanks, pookiewookums.

I’ve been incredibly busy these past six weeks or so since my last entry.

I moved in early May to a new apartment much closer to work. I covered that mostly in my last entry. The new job is going fantastically; I’m really enjoying it. I’m building some professional relationships which I’m sure will last a lifetime.

I’ve gotten more into stock trading, too. I’m currently sitting at almost 100% all-time gain, with my flagship stock, SPNG, sitting at nearly 200% gain across all positions (one position is at 1200%!).

Bob Buskirk‘s ThinkComputers is nearing 1000 reviews. It’s been around for approximately six years–that’s a lot of reviews!

In mid-May, BigVPS, my VPS provider, had a five day outtage after some serious problems occurred after a datacenter migration. I didn’t lose anything but a little hair in the mess, though. During the fray, however, I signed up for a VPS with FSCKvps, a VAserv company. Just a few days ago, VAserv was hit by a massive outtage with data loss after a serious bug in HyperVM, the VPS management software the company uses, was exposed. My server was unaffected, but there are others who have lost everything.

The whole incident taught me a lesson which I have yet to act upon. I need to be more vigilant in my backup policies.

Also, Sean and I decided to pull down BIOS LEVEL for a few months while we overhaul it. We’d not posted a review since early April. It really, really sucks that we had to do that. Our current CMS is heavily integrated with phpBB 2, something which greatly affects the efficiency of the engine. Spam bots overran the forums and our traffic had dropped to a trickle. We’re going to update the look and feel and upgrade to phpBB 3, and hopefully unveil a new technology which will enable tech review sites to lessen each others’ burdens of posting affiliate news greatly.

The weekend of May 30, I saw a good friend of mine, news anchor Kathryn Larson, get married in Lockport, NY. Brigette and I toured the area and Buffalo, and enjoyed dinner at Mamma Mia’s in Clifton Hill, Ontario, just across the border.

Last night, I saw Street Sweeper Social Club, Nine Inch Nails, and Jane’s Addiction. I’ve got pictures up on Facebook and may soon post them on Picasa. I took a few videos; check YouTube, as they are still uploading as I write this.

I had planned to write several entries, but all had been derailed by other projects.

One was going to be on “sexting” and how the media—mostly CNN—was blowing it out of proportion and how state laws need to be updated to ensure that the real criminals—pedophiles—are being caught, convicted, and put away, not harmless teenagers exploring their new-found sexuality.

Another was going to be about Intranet SEO, but that may or may not end up on Vivisimo’s Search Done Right blog. If it’s not posted there, I may request permission to post it here.

Until next time,

Gxis la.

Near the end of March, I took a a job with Vivísimo as an applications engineer. Vivísimo sells Velocity, an enterprise-class search platform.

Essentially, a company wishing to increase the productivity of its workers by enabling those workers to leverage content created or acquired by other workers would use Velocity to built a search engine which consolidates and presents a single, searchable interface to a number of possible information repositories. Velocity can connect to network storage systems, web sites, email servers, wikis, and just about anything else which exposes some kind of interface, often called an API. It can restrict the content by user, maintaining critical document-level security.

The real power of Velocity is its clustering engine. This unique feature provides contextual choices based on the search results presented. For example, if I searched for the work “deck”, I might be presented with results about boat decks, a deck of playing cards, porch decks, Deckmaster (card games), flight decks, and so on. Velocity can detect this context based on the results and present a list of clusters, or essentially contexts.

In my job, I help clients develop their solutions. Most of my work thus far has been configuring web site crawls, but it will surely expand as I become more familiar with the platform and the company’s clients.

I really like Vivísimo and hope to grow professionally while there. It’s doing great: strong product, strong management, and strong financial status shows that Vivísimo will likely be around for a long time.

On a side note, in order to reduce the amount of time I spend commuting daily and to save some cash, I’m moving into a large apartment in Squirrel Hill with some friends. I’m sad to leave Forest Hills, but despite giving up my “I live alone” status, living in Squirrel Hill will negate my nix commute and cut my rent in half! I can’t pass that up.