June 2009

idle : Bing Stomps Google.

posted 2009.06.29 at 00:25

Not Shown : It took Dogpile to find the third page, though it remained clueless about the first two. Half a point to Yahoo.

Yeah, I could find all CMS entries made on the fourth of July without using an external search engine... but in a week I'll need to do it in the new MT and the old. And until then, I'd get back everything posted in April of 2007. Google's always had a pissy attitude towards ATC, and its decision a couple of months ago that "solios" is a plural of "solio" has added more keystrokes to all future non-Bing googlebating... and that's hardly a step forward. Especially given that I have to throw in a -matrox and a -carbone and a -genga already. While that skeeved me, the Bing buzz made me curious... and lo and behold - Google gave me the finger and Bing gave me what I was looking for. Dogpile - through Yahoo - gave me one bit Bing didn't pick up on, which is also a bit Google considers irrelevant. Neither Google nor Dogpile caught the bits that Bing caught.*

Try it yourself.

GMail kicks ass. While it's not as ego-friendly as Webalizer, Google Analytics is a hell of a lot more featureful, and that's handy. Search... well, Search isn't anywhere near as omnipotent as the media would like us to believe. It just - by and large - sucks so much less than what has come before it.

Now there's Bing, which - SO FAR - is vastly more "do what I mean" than Google Search has ever been.

Maybe one of these days one of these engines will hit a point where it'll be able to tell me all about every single thing I've left on the internet. DWIM has one hell of a measurable impact on the user experience - I don't care how much pride you take in your bad ass algorithms, your server farms, your IPO... if one search engine gives me What I Want more than another does, I'm not going to wallow in brand loyalty. It's software. There's no such thing as "good" software - only software that sucks less. The only reason to stick with software that sucks is file format (or file system) lock-in, which isn't an issue when it comes to searching the intertub.

For at least one thing, Bing has pulverized Google.

Suck it, Stanford.

* This means that for serious rubbing-it-raw googlebating, you're now using at least three different websites. Progress!

website : Domain Renewal Weirdness

posted 2009.06.16 at 11:18

Apparently the ATC domain expired around 9am UTC today. I discovered this when I loaded the front page and noticed that all dualist.atc content was [?]. All subdomains unreachable but root works? Oh yeah - I'd stuck the server IP in my hosts file awhile back to work around a DNS issue and forgot about it.

I've hacked things on my end - I'll be able to update the site (not that any updates are pending) until the domain issue is resolved.

Bryan paid for renewal before the domain expired (we're good till 2011 according to WHOIS), so the lock and the nserver redirect to the provider's not-renewed subdomain is an anomaly that'll hopefully be sorted shortly.

If you've tried to load ATC recently and received a "Server not found" error or its equivalent instead, that's the cause.

Update, 2009.06.18 - Everything's back to normal. It was back to normal in most places yesterday afternoon, but my home DNS just recently got the memo.

Nothing to see here, move along.

the dualist : Briefing is up.

posted 2009.06.05 at 00:15

Eight pages of yammering, starting here. A couple of new renders, a little bit of cleanup, and some (hopefully funny) jokes. Jokes of DOOM.

Also backstory. More backstory than EVER BEFORE. Bits of the WGP, Dead City Radio, whatever Book One will be called... briefing is practically an outline of The Story To Date.

It makes my brain itch, but I'm happy it's over and done with. i actually get to do a couple of drawings for the new pages of the next scene - hopefully my drawing skills haven't atrophied to stick figure levels.

If it turns out they have, I can always do a comedy series...

Still Around 200 Pages Left. 185 plus the new intro for the second half - I still don't know how many pages it'll run yet.

So. ALMOST halfway. I hope I can cover the second half in less than seven months!

In unrelated news, a quarter pound of beef is TINY.