February 3, 2007

Please switch to my back-up e-mail address

At least for the moment.

monash.com e-mail has been turned off by my hosting company, due to what they claim is a still on-going attack. My backup address, however — FirstnameLastname@domain.com, where domain = dbms2 — is working fine. And my e-mail client traditionally checks them at the same time. So I suggest switching, at least for the moment.

Both are through the same hosting company (Hostgator, which I aspire to replace in the immediate future, given that I also lost admin access to the blogs on two separate occasions this week, and given that support claims over half my e-mails are unreadably empty and hence suitable for being ignored, despite me never having that problem elsewhere). Thus, for other kinds of problems there might be a single point of failure. But in this case, the dbms2 address is a working alternative to the standard one.

Categories: About this blog, Spam and antispam

What’s interesting about the FAST venture in BI

FAST is annoying me a bit these days. It’s nothing serious, but travel schedule screw-up’s, an annoying embargo, and a screw-up in the annoying embargo have all hit at once. So I’ll keep this telegraphic and move on to other subjects.

They’re doing fast queries without using a lot of RAM.
They’re doing the usual text search thing of indexing across multiple “databases,” only now it’s applied to, well, databases. (Not that there’s much new about that particular aspect. Actually, there seems to be a bit of kludge in that they export the databases to some kind of simple text files.)
They’re doing some level of concept identification ala the text mining guys. (They don’t call it “entity extraction” because the results aren’t dumped into a database anywhere, but instead are just used on the fly.) Of course, the text mining/search convergence goes both ways.
They bought a BI/dashboard tool and are using it both to analyze query logs and also to do normal BI/dashboard kinds of things.
They have big references for this stuff, at least the single-web-site query aspect. Well, actually, the customer names are confidential. Oh well.

And as another example of how this wasn’t the smoothest PR month for FAST, Steve Arnold somehow got the false idea that they were getting out of true text search altogether.