poo

There hasn’t been much improvement in web search recently, (aside from suggestions having been wonderful) we’re still using the basic keywords concept and trying to optimize it as much as possible. I think the future of search will be context based; this has been discussed before and hasn’t gotten far, but if we take it and combine with meta search engines, I think we may finally get somewhere.

Right now when I search for a song or movie, I can put the name of the song/band or movie into Google and hope for the best; but what happens when the title is a common word or god forbid has a technology homonym? I can add “song/movie” to the keywords, but once I’ve done this, shouldn’t the search engine be smart enough to realize one of the terms (eg. movie) is setting the context for the rest of the search. If it did, then it could use a specialized (and in theory more optimal) search engine like IMDB in this case to add to my results what should be the most relevant results. In the same way, if it’s clear that I’ve put a model number or brand name in the query, you can easily add Amazon search in as well.

If it were able to show context based results in one area of the screen (or highlight them) and standard results in another, then the user could very easily decide if context based search works for him or her. You can continue this line of thought and start using the concepts of the meta search engine to leverage the custom search engines that people are building on top of Google, Live and Yahoo. Put it together and we could have something revolutionary.

Right now I do this manually by deciding what the context is first (movie, video, song, science, tech) and choosing the right search provider in firefox (imdb, youtube, …); but there’s no reason this can’t be automated and made even better. First, understand the context (look for the generic terms in the keywords), choose a set of appropriate specialized search engines (rank these, …) and do a meta search across them along with the keyword search.

I may need to mock this up to show what I mean, but I think it’s going to be great, at least for the way I search

Watching TV today I realized entertainment for me has really changed and it’s lot more active. I was watching Lil Champs and saw a song that I liked. It went to commercial and I immediately went online on my laptop (conveniently located next to the couch and in the TV area) to find the song through a combination of search engines and youtube, figured out it was a hindi remake of an Amr Diab song. Once I found the name, I started to download it through peer to peer and while doing that browsed through youtube to find other songs from the same show. By this time the commercial was over and back to the next segment of the show. But of course by now I had the show on the TV and on youtbube clips, so everytime they would get to a break or too much talking on the show, the TV was muted and we’d watch a song clip online. I’m much more in control of what I want to see and when I see it (along the Tivo line) but I still like to have some passivity to just relax and find new things.

By the way you must check out this little girl singing.

As my previous posts should have made clear, I like music and when I hear a song that I like I need to find it. While in Bahrain I heard an arabic song on Melody Hits and which I was instantly addicted to. There was the standard trouble of not knowing the song name or the singer, but after about a day of asking everyone if they know a singer named “Aslam”, I found the song (Gaw Tany) magically on the Melody Hits website.

After this I needed a way to play it offline, the usual places I looked turned up no luck so it was back to the Youtube route. I found it there under a slightly different spelling, and was about to follow my old instructions. However a quick search turned up the coolest and simplest software, a youtube to MP3 converter. All you need to do is give it a youtube URL and you get back an MP3. No extra features, a simple UI, just great.

Update:
A friend has pointed me to Zamzar, which can do the conversion from flash to almost anything all online and sends you a link with the converted file. This is even better in some cases, but on the other end of intuitive UIs, if they have the ability to take in a URL as input, why can’t they just look at the input and see if it starts with http?:// then assume it’s one and not make me go a specific page just for uploading URLs.

I’m very close to finally having a photo sharing solution that I like. I’ve been trying to settle on one for a long time and in the meantime have not used any. I’ve tried Live spaces, PhotoBucket, Flickr, Facebook and each has its pros and cons. Here is what I’m looking for:

1. Easy uploading of photos
2. Direct access to picture (URL link to the actual picture file) for public photos
3. Ability to mark some pics as private
4. RSS feed for pics

And my final request which I still haven’t found:
5. Private RSS feed for private photos feed.

I’ll explain what I mean. I don’t want all my pics to be public, but I want to be able to use my pics (even private ones) in other applications. For example I created a quick mashup with Popfly to show my pictures in a book format and added it to Facebook. This is exactly what I want, sharing photos on Facebook without actually giving them control of the content. The problem is: the mashup works based on RSS feeds, and currently the settings for RSS feeds are either completely public or not at all. It would be fine if it’s plain text http://username:password@URL style.

Does anyone know if Flickr or Live Spaces photos allow a private pics RSS feed? Does such a thing exist?

I love this city. In the last post we covered where to eat, now what to do around all that eating. There’s always something to do and especially in the summer. Personally I’m into outdoor stuff and if it’s free, even better

On that note, no place is better than NYC:
Central Park Summerstage
Bryant Park Film Festival
Brooklyn Bridge Park Outdoor Films
River to River festival (all summer)

It’s been over a year since I left NY, and now I’m going back for a quick vacation. I’m very excited to see my city, old friends and definitely all the great food. There are a group of people heading there as well who have asked where to eat while in Manhattan so I’m putting up my list of favorite places. This list is by no means comprehensive and is not meant as the “BEST” places in NYC, it is the ones I like most. I’m going to try to eat at all the places in the 4 days I’m there and see how the last year has treated them. I know for sure Tony’s is sadly gone but hopefully that’s the only change.

(You can look up the addresses on menupages.com)

Sahara on 1st Ave for Turkish It’s near 28th St and 1st Ave.

Johns on Bleecker (Pizza) - Bleecker btwn 6th and 7thAve
(Bleeker is the street just south of W3rd)

Lombardis (Pizza) - Soho, Prince st near Mott I believe

For just a slice (the top 2 are whole pie places only), you can go to the place on the corner of 7thAve and Bleeker, I forget the name, but it’s right on the corner and get the Nonna Maria slice. Good for a west village snack.

Sullivan St. Bakery (Breadish Pizza) - if you’re shopping in Soho, hit this place for a bread snack.

Mamouns (Falafel, Schwarma), but I also like the place across the street, I think it’s called Ali Baba, they have pickles you can put on your falafel.

Pylos (Greek) on 6th I think, between 1st and Ave A, a sit down restaurant with great decor.

If you want fancy, go to Gramercy tavern one night, eat in the front room not the back room, but it’s pretty expensive.

For Sushi, hit Tomoe, on Thompson btwn bleeker and Houston, but be ready for a line at dinner time.

Right next to it is Lupa, Mario Battali’s rustic italian (not red sauce) less upscale place, but good in my opinion. Again, very likely a wait.

Katz deli on Houston, just past Ave A, Orchard. Huge sandwiches, I love the pastrami, but they have other stuff too. Overpriced but a must go for the Harry met Sally nostalgia.

If you like knitches, go to the place next to Russ and Daughters, whose name I’m forgetting, it’s famous, just ask and people will know.

If you’re going to a broadway show, you can go to Becco for all you can eat pasta that Jaime says is good, though I have never tried it. Or you can try the John’s Pizza near Times Sq, around 45th St and 7th

If for some reason you’re in midtown on the east side (which you really shouldn’t be unless you’re going to see the UN) go to Tony’s and get a parmagian sandwich (susage, chiken, meatball), on 2nd Ave btwn 42nd and 43rd. I don’t think this one is even on menupages, but one of the best damn sandwiches in the city.

Dessert:
Bruno’s on Laguardia btwn Bleeker and Houston, mmmm chocolate mousse.

Canoli = Rocco’s, Bleeker btwn 6th and 7th, very close to 6th Ave.

Cones (right next to Johns pizza) on Bleeker has good gelato, argentinian styke.
Laboratoria de Gelato is unbelievable, but it’ll be hard for you to find and it’s in the LES, kind of out of the way for most tourists, but well worth the trek.

In that same vein, doughnut planet is a good diversion.

That should be enough to get you started, there’s so many more, it’s tiring to write. I’m sure I’m forgetting a lot too and you’ll find your own hidden gems as well.

Joel Spolsky lists seven steps to remarkable customer service, some very valid points. I want to talk about part of number #1 Fix everything two ways. He hits on a major point that we knew very well at the startup I worked at:

“… it’s crucial that tech support have access to the development team. This means that you can’t outsource tech support: they have to be right there at the same street address as the developers, with a way to get things fixed. Many software companies still think that it’s “economical” to run tech support in Bangalore or the Philippines, or to outsource it to another company altogether. Yes, the cost of a single incident might be $10 instead of $50, but you’re going to have to pay $10 again and again.”

I don’t have a comment on the cost aspect, but I couldn’t agree more on the access to development team. No developer wants to work as support or deal with it on a daily basis, it’s not a generally fun job; people only call you when they have problems. But it is an important part of the sales process (post-sales) and reflects on the software and the company. So tech support should be valued and staffed with good people. My experience at a startup was that we had stellar customer service because the developers were the people who handled tech support calls in the early days, there was no one else available (we were also the sales people, receptionists and janitors). When I moved on to the technical sales side, the most valuable asset (besides knowing the code base) was having access to the development team and being able to interact with them during support issues. This turned things that could have taken days or weeks to fix into a 2 hour job and left our very large enterprise customers incredibly happy that they took a chance with a small company.

I’m not sure how this will scale for large companies but I can not stress enough how important it is to keep the link between the “field” and development. I was incredibly lucky to have worked with some of the best developers out there who not only wrote great code but also understood that making the customer happy should be the end result of all their hard work coding in the first place. This requires having developers who are committed to doing whats best for the company and having a development organization that understands that they’re building that great software for actual customers.

From the recent corporate games where we got killed, mainly due to me missing so many free throws. I’m not sure how, but somebody managed to capture video of me actually making one

I’ve been looking for music videos from songs I like (see last 2 posts) and was a little annoyed that there was no YouTube search plugin (readily available) for firefox provided. So I ended up writing one, well technically modifying the existing ones to do what I want. It was amazingly simple and felt nice to be able to build something useful in less than 5 minutes.

1. I started by first looking for an existing one through the “Manage Search Engines” and didn’t see one in the first 10 seconds so gave up on that.
2. Went to youtube to see if they would provide one, and point me to it (like yahoo does as soon as you go to their homepage), again no immediate luck.
3. Decided to build one mainly for the fun of it. During the process, it turned out that there were many already built but it was a fun and tiny project anyway.

First approach was to use Google/Live with the site:youtube.com and it worked perfectly well. Then decided to change and use Youtube’s own search which would take me right to the results on youtube rather than the search engine page. Really the hardest part was getting the icon to the right size and base64 encoding it.

To create your own, go to your Firefox installation directory/searchplugins, eg. “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins”, copy an existing one like the google.xml and modify it with your search URL and query parameters.

The icon image needs to be base64 encoded, so grab whatever image you want and process it online to based 64.

Mine ended up looking like this: (YouTube Search)
Having trouble with wordpress and showing code, will need to fix this and post the code.

I decided to keep the suggestions from Google since they were very useful for artist name spellings and I think this makes my version of the plugin more useful than the others.

I’ve been listening to a lot more arabic music lately, guess it makes sense with the move and all. It’s a slight problem finding the songs that I like since the english spelling of the singer and songs name is not standard, anyone can spell it the way they like (it’s the same problem with persian music as well). I’ve been finding various methods of getting the song I like, mainly relying on an amazing coworker who can find songs based on the smallest clues, to guessing the name and searching the internet for hours. Interestingly enough YouTube has turned out to be the easiest place to find the songs / music videos I like. I wonder if it’s an international music thing or if every music video is on there, will have to do some research later.

Anyway, here are the songs that I like a lot right now, and think you should check out:
Fadl Shaker & Yara - Akhedny Ma3ak
Hekmat - Gharib el hal
Cyrine Abdel Noor - Law bass f3einy
Nawal El Zoghbi - Aadi aadi
Mohamed Hamaki & Perry Mystique - A7la 7aga Feeki REMIX

If anyone would like to translate any of these songs for me, it would be appreciated