My blogs stopped working through IE!
EDIT: Now they seem to be working again, with no action on my part and no known software updates through the whole process. Go figure. I do not know WordPress well enough to guess just exactly what had to have been broken and then fixed at my hosting provider to have caused these effects.
As of this writing, my blogs (DBMS2, the Monash Report, Text Technologies, and Software Memories) are all working in Firefox, and the top page of each is working in IE, but the rest of the pages/links are NOT working in IE. (But www.monash.com, a non-Wordpress site on the same host, IS still working through IE.) Naturallly, I’m addressing this problem as fast as I can. I imagine the fix will involve some sort of a reinstall and/or theme change, which could alter the blogs’ look-and-feel, maybe not for the better (especially at first). I apologize for the inconvenience!
| Categories: About this blog | 1 Comment |
When the result is a lousy paragaph
John Dvorak, who I recall as being pompous but funny at the Microsoft Windows 1.0 release event (yes, I’m that old) — and rarely funny thereafter — has a rant on machine translation. The second page has some examples of different translations of the same passage. They do make me wonder why translations aren’t run through a more complete grammar-fixing process. Or, if that would have too many risky side effects, why the same translation program doesn’t offer several DIFFERENT translations, tuned to optimize against different kinds of error.
The same principle, of course, could be applied to gists/summaries in other text technologies, such as search. Sometimes, a decent UI would have room to allow user configurability and/or multiple bites at the output apple.
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Why the BI vendors are integrating with Google OneBox
I’m hearing the same thing from multiple BI vendors, with SAS being the most recent and freshest in my mind — customers want them to “integrate” with Google OneBox. Why Google rather than a better enterprise search technology, such as FAST’s? So far as I’ve figured out, these are the reasons, in no particular order:
- Price.
- Ease of installation (real or imagined).
- The familiar Google brand name.
- The familiar Google UI.
- Google OneBox’s ability to search relational records, reports, etc. along with more tradtional record types.
The last point, I think, is the most interesting. Lots of people think text search is and/or should be the dominant UI of the future. Now, I’ve been a big fan of natural language command line interfaces ever since the days of Intellect and Lotus HAL. But judging by the market success of those products — or for that matter of voice command/control — I was in a very small minority. Maybe the even simpler search interface — words jumbled together without grammatical structure — will win out instead.
Who knows? Progress is a funny thing. Maybe the ultimate UI will be one that responds well to grunts, hand gestures, and stick-figure drawings. We could call it NeanderHAL, but that would wrong …
| Categories: BI integration, Enterprise search, FAST, Google, Natural language processing (NLP), SAS, Search engines | 1 Comment |