Google updates search algorithm

Links

Read @searchengineland
Read @google blog

What's new?

Google was lately (Jan '11) accused of allowing content farms to gain high page rank. We have their answer now (for US market). This is major change affecting 12% of search results, thus we have an revolution.

This actually is very impressive as Google is one of the biggest corporations in the world. They had a major flow undermining their credibility and they were able to come up with an proper answer in ... 3 weeks? Most medium companies wouldn't even had a plan in such a short term.

Changes

Google noticed that most of today's internet is copy & paste (aka webspam). They found a way to find out where the chain starts (ie. information/signal origin) and rank it waaay higher than copies. Good, wise, simple (to explain at least :).

Impact is on those who mainly copy content and on linking-only sites (without comments and so on). In short: the less home-brewn content, the lower the points in rank.

How that affects content farms

Since content farm is just automated copying of prepared content with little changes, whole farms hopefully get taken down with this change.

This is however a war for really big $money$ and webspammers might come up with something new, like using HBGary's idea of creating and managing whole fake societies (aka Sockpuppet Management Software). That would give them randomized social content, forums full of generated posts and so on. That would be hard to catch, because social activities are very, very hard to measure with math. Also facebook makes real humans' conversation very shallow:

• 
• see some more @images.google.com

End of Nokia?

There have been numerous posts about Nokia going down because of partnership with Microsoft.

• Tomi Ahonen announces huge Microsoft win and Nokia loosing market share to Apple and Android.

• jacquesmattheij.com says that Microsoft now owns Nokia

I can't imagine any other reason to write such things than "being first with any blog post".

Granded, Microsoft is rightly hated by all of linux/java developers and Apple lovers. But why would such a partnership be bad for Nokia? And why it would be bad for us, customers?

Pros of this partnership

1. Microsoft has way better developer tools than anyone. No, Eclipse cannot match Visual Studio for average developer. And this market needs thousands of developers, not just stars that code Java or lisp in simple text editor (like me :P).
2. Microsoft knows how to drive developers to platform, how to document APIs, how to lay an infrastructure to making money developing for their platforms. They are very, very good a that.
3. C#/ASP.NET community is huge and so far had nowhere serious to put their skills as far as mobile development goes.
4. Nokia knows what is important in mobile devices and how to keep high quality. Microsoft does not know that.
5. Nokia is light years ahead of Microsoft in terms of design of small devices. No, xbox 360 controller is not a small device. Kinect neither. They are great, but not small nor mobile.

What we have with Micronokia is a partnership of market leader in software development with strong player and recognized brand in mobile devices. Something like beer maker partnering with dvd-rental stores to make your evening even more enjoyable.

Now, what's BAD about that?

Cons of partnership

1. Microsoft is dangerous trojan-horse, unfair player and evil incarnation in one. That's a real problem until you consider that all mayor enterprises probably are the same, just not prooven to be that evil so far. Besides, who cares?
2. Microsoft is gonna sue everyone for infringing patents. Great, but that's american law problem and american market. And google has money for lawyers. I won't pay a penny no metter who wins the trial.
3. Nokia partners with most heated ... wait..

There arguments are all either based on accusations or emotions. Take a look at Pros and use pragmatic common sense. We may all only benefit from strong, prepared players joining the market. Like maybe devices would drop prices? Or maybe someone finally does some cool mobile Xbox-aware toy?

Have faith brothers in free market...

Simple bounce demo of HTML5 canvas animation

Animation in canvas

No images used!

One of frames embedded inline

as img src="data:image/png;base64

Developer Driven Development?

One of bloggers argues that in development process, the developer part is the most important. Not the tests nor the processes, but brilliant star-like personality.

See the post and discussion below
There has also been a discussion on Hacker News lately

Of course I fully support the bloggers opinion - developer is the key to project success. Tests and procedures are very important, but good design, and clean, simple code is much more.

Unfortunately, what I believe is most common is the Get Me Promoted Methodology (GMPM), described here. (along with Asshole Driven Development and so on ;-)

Supply and demand

The fundamental fact of the software industry is that the demand for software exceeds the supply of good programmers by about an order of magnitude.

The problem with good design is that it's good because it takes under consideration future changes and maintenance. But TDD allows for less painfull maintenance of bad code. So what does a bad programmer do? He sells quick-dirty-hack-shit to your boss and gets promoted for that over your ass.

Yeah, ever thought why bad code exists? Most people work for money, not for deep soul-clearing feeling of sending out perfect lines of holy code.
That's the sad reality besides TDD buzzword...

Math generates beauty

It's not the first time math shows beautiful face, but this time everyone can appreciate it: http://weavesilk.com/

This incredible silky-hazy image generator is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen on web. White background wallpaper with blue silk is like my dreams came true.

WebServices is a massive mess - AllegroWebAPI

Context note for non-Poland-based readers

Allegro is polish e-bay style auctioning service (actually e-bay was unable to compete with Allegro on local market). Allegro engeneers have set up a Web Service AllegroWebAPI, which is base for discussion below: http://webapi.allegro.pl/uploader.php?wsdl

First WebServices encounter

I have recently read SOAP: S stands for Simple article, and became a little worried.
Till that moment I haven't considered WebServices as Evil incarnation, the way article's author describes it. I respected that technology as is seemed so Big and Professional. One can even get a Sun's certificate for it: certyfikować.

I decided to finally take a first step towards learning WebServices and went for Allegro Web API. Downloaded Axix 1.4 (Allegro uses very old style of WSDL), generated SOAP Proxy as ant suggests (polish, see scripts only) and used it to login to allegro.

Next I have inspected the SOAP proxy code that Axis generated and, man this is scary!

• Proxy weights 1.5MB
• Code has > 8000 lines
• Coding style does not differ substantialy from C macro-cluttered garbage
• methods do not return values, instead relying on side effects on Holder objects

Now this is WRONG path. This is not object programming and this is functional programming neither. This is Big ball of mud heading straight to unmaintainable, buggy applications.
How such a mess can be so widely used?

Few days later..

API changed. Whoa, my app no longer works - I need to regenerate my SOAP proxy just to log in. There is no way to know for application that WSDL needs to be reprocessed. Unless of course application reads developer forums. Mine doesn't, I'm toast...

The moral of this story

From https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/REST

SOAP RPC over HTTP, on the other hand, encourages each application designer to define a new and arbitrary vocabulary of nouns and verbs (for example getUsers(), savePurchaseOrder(...)), usually overlaid onto the HTTP 'POST' verb. This disregards many of HTTP's existing capabilities such as authentication, caching and content type negotiation, and may leave the application designer re-inventing many of these features within the new vocabulary. Examples of doing so may include the addition of methods such as getNewUsersSince(Date date), savePurchaseOrder(string customerLogon, string password, ...).

UPDATE:
Please drop the SOAP - another rant about SOAP bloat.