Monthly Archive for May, 2004

Google & Yahoo results for Nigritude Ultramarine

Published on May 27, 2004 in Google. 1 Comment

Check out on my StereoSearch page how the search results for nigritude ultramarine compare for Google and Yahoo (or 7 other search engines).

NR GOOGLE (387.000 pgs) YAHOO (130.000 pgs)
1. www.sim64.co.uk www.sim64.co.uk
2. forums.merkey.net www.time2dine.co.nz
3. lookupcars.co.uk forums.merkey.net
4. www.internet-marketing-research.net lookupcars.co.uk
5. www.geneostar.com www.nigritude-ultramarine.co.uk

Before I forget: Nigritude Ultramarine for Baare

Baare’s Nigritude Ultramarine

Published on May 26, 2004 in Google. Closed

Baare Nigritude Ultramarine on Pixagogo

My friend Baare is participating in a contest for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) specialists. Goal is to get yourself as high as possible in the Google rankings for the search terms Nigritude Ultramarine.

By letting the contestants combine content creation (for example, having your fellow geeks write about it in their blogs), creative domain names (check nigritude-ultramarine.photo-web-site.com/nigritude_ultramarine, cross-linking, hoaxes, link farms, and more tricks from the book, this will probably prove to be a very useful experiment in Googlistics.

May your nigritude be ultramarine, Baare!

Organizing my CD collection

Published on May 24, 2004 in tool. Closed

I don’t know if it’s because I’m a Virgo or because it’s Spring, but this weekend I felt the irresistible urge to empty my CD racks and re-organize my CDs. I have about 400 CDs, and I have a tendency of messing them all up if I have no structure I can follow. It’s not as bad as my cousin Quasi-Modo, who keeps dozens of CDs and DVDs on one large stack, and owns LOADS of empty boxes, but anyway … (Weird, he’s a Virgo too?)

So how can I organize them? What should be the logic? I remembered this quote from Dave Winer

“Well, I think there are three ways of managing and finding information– chronology, which is blogs, search, and taxonomy (…)” Dave Winer, while visiting Microsoft.

Let me re-taxonomize this to: sorted, categorized and indexed.

Sorted

Storing in an certain order, defined by a number of sortable non-ambiguous parameters (numbers/text). Typically this leaves you with a one-dimensional space where each album has its coordinates. Micro-organization of a library: per author/title. Mental image: a sorted Excel sheet.
For CDs: release year, label, album, artist name (but watch out with Me’Shell Ndegeo’cello, The The), …

  • Release year/Artist name : nice for a historical overview but not practical. Who knows you should look for Original Musiquarium under 1982?
  • Date of purchase : like John Cusack in High Fidelity. If you remember in which sequence you bought all your CDs, you either don’t have many, or you need to get a life.
  • Artist name/Album Name : Like most record shops, but almost half of my CDs are compilations, so this means 200 albums under ‘Various Artists’?
  • By ASIN/ISBN/barcode number : feasible, but pointless. Good for warehousing, not for humans.

    • Categorized

    Storing in a taxonomy of preferably non-intersecting groups and subgroups, based on easy-to-discern characteristics. Macro-organization of a library: fiction/non-fiction/poetry/… Mental image: Outlook folders.
    For CDs: genre, compilation, record company, sleeve colour, artist gender, …

  • Genre : Where is the line between Electronic, Dance, Acid Jazz, Nu Jazz, Lounge, Chill-out, Deep House? Who is the authority on this? Does Quincy Jones go with Jazz? Even Stuff like that?
  • Compilation/not : I used this one because it’s an easy split. An album is either a compilation or not, right? What do I do with DJ Spinna’s Wonder of Stevie? I went with ‘compilation’.
  • Label : great for storing (the side logos all measure up nicely), less trivial for finding something
  • Artist Gender : male/female/group. (any other options I did not think of?) Diana Ross would be separate from Diana Ross & the Supremes? Where does Dana International go? :-)

    • Indexed

    Storing in a way that information can be found by searching on keywords and/or properties. Mental image: Google.

    This would be my ideal way of buying music: I purchase an album/a song – I get a token/proof of purchase – using this token, the music automatically ‘shows up’ on my PC in a format I can use for burning CDs, loading onto my portable player – I can search for artists, genre, title and even have collaborative filtering: ‘music that sound like Jazzanova’. Basically this is iTunes. Does this work with ‘real’ CDs? Apart from manually scrolling through your collection (which can be a physical pleasure with the occasional surprise) I see no implementation of this. Virgin Megastore used to have something inspiring though: you scrolled through their huge selection, took out any CD, showed its barcode to a reader, and could listen to 30-seconds excerpts of each song.

    Conclusion:
    So what did I end up with? A custom mix of Sorted & Categorized:

  • Category ‘Compilations’ -> Categories ‘Lounge’, ‘Jazz’, ‘Chill out’, … -> Sorted on Album name
  • Category ‘Non-Compilations’ -> Categories ‘Jazz’/'the rest’ -> Sorted on Artist/Album name
    Satisfying weekend ;-)

    [Listening to: "Jazz Mediterranee : Koop Remix - Henri Salvador" - DJ Smash - Phonography - Volume 2]

    • Converge already! (Struggling with WLBS)

    Published on May 19, 2004 in windows. Closed

    I hate when things don’t go my way. One server in our NLB (Network Load Balancing) cluster did not want to join the cluster anymore. When I issued a wlbs start, it tried for a couple of seconds to join the cluster, but then remained in ‘Converging’ state. A couple of times I saw an entry in the System Log " ... does not have the same number or type of port rules ...".

    I tried:

    • Reboot: worked 1st time, but after that: did not help
    • Compare rules 1: compared output of wlbs display: changed all load parameters to ‘Equal’ (I normally give the servers weights that take into account the # of processors and #MB RAM)
    • Compare rules 2: compared output of wlbs display: identical
    • Compare rules 3: compared output of regedit -e wlbs.reg.%COMPUTERNAME%.reg HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WLBS: no significant differences
    • Recreate rules 1: recreate all 18 port rules on rogue server (so much fun :-/ ): did not help
    • Recreate rules 2: change ALL servers to use only 1 rule: did not help
    • Curse: did not help
    • Restart service: disable NLB on network adapter, press OK, re-enable NLB => Bingo! Server back in the cluster without a blink.

    Now I only have to re-create the 18 rules on all servers and I’m done!

    Mental note to self: check out if I can build a dedicated load balancing device in Linux, one that (1) takes into account server load (give work to least busy server) (2) response time on individual ports (and automatically disable non-responsive ports) (3) has a web interface, so I can configure from any server in the subnet.