[update: sorry for the half-post, looks like it somehow got eaten. Here's the full deal:]

Some of our colleagues took us to the Bai Jia Da Zhai Man (白家大宅门), located at 海淀区苏州街29号乐家花园内 海淀桥南300米 路西. I don’t know where that is either, but I’m sure if you’re in Beijing somebody there can give you directions. The room we were in had two large tables, separated by a large area the size of another table. This is used for some Peking Opera bits to entertain the guests. The table I sat at started with a round of beer. The other table started with moutai.

Moutai is a lovely Chinese liquor, normally consumed via a shot (although normally just half-ounce). It comes in a couple different varieties, including one that’s 106 proof.

We had that one.

Well, we at the beer table had just finished a toast, when the folks at the moutai table, having just done about six shots themselves, started toasting us. OK, moutai all around. Not to be outdone, I went over to their table and had another round with them. Then people started moving between the two tables to have a round with each other.

In the 80s they coined a term for this. MAD.

I’m sure they had lovely food there… I remember a sea cucumber and this dish called monkey brains that was really just a big mushroom. And this fried chicken thing that was kinda close to General Tso’s Chicken without the sweet and sour sauce.

Oof.

You’d think that after a dinner like that we’d be done, right? Nope! Off to Baby Face, it was! Baby Face is a new disco in Shanghai and Beijing. Chinese apparently aren’t into bars, which are just sitting around and drinking. They prefer to do something while drinking, so discos with dancing and karaoke are good, as are restaurants with lots of food. So discos are where things are happening.

We got a private room that seated about 20, and started up the karaoke machine. Those of us able to stand started to sing, and had a great time. Some of our crew took the opportunity to rest for a bit, recovering from the ethyl alcohol deluge. It turns out I can sing pretty well. At least, that’s what I believe. And everyone there. But then again, we may not have had all our senses with us.

We finally stumbled home about 1 AM and sacked out. Meetings for the next day were moved to 11, as we knew we weren’t getting up early.

Except for one… he was flying out that day. So approximately 4 hours later, he got up, checked out, and headed out for a 16-hour 2-leg flight back to Seattle. That’s gotta hurt…

Sunday, a bunch of us in Shanghai went to the final Formula 1 race of
the year at the Shanghai Circuit. It’s the second year of the race in
Shanghai, and it’s a nice track for approximately 200,000 close friends.
Even though Ferrari had a bad year, there was plenty of red for the fans.

This was my first race of any kind (F1, IndyCar, NASCAR, etc.), and I
picked a good one. The driver championship had been decided the previous
race (the #1 Renault driver), and today was the manufacturer (team)
championship, between Renault and Maclaren / Mercedes. The race was
good, although it was decided early — one of the Maclarens pulled out
about half-way through, so that decided the championship there.

Something I hadn’t considered… even though it’s early October,
Shanghai is a hair further south than San Diego / Tijuana. So it was
sunny and warm with no shade.. bake bake bake! And to think I
intentionally took out the sunscreen from my toilet bag because I didn’t
think I’d need it in October… oops.

Here’s some fun while away. The question: What one feature would you add
to MSN Search? Sky’s the limit… imagine infinite money, infinite devs
and testers, etc. etc. It could be a big verticle, such as book search
(search within a book), a UI change (ditch MSN and just do search), or
something that’s a bit fanciful (do recipe search, and have the smell of
the dish with each result). Whatever you want, just name it.

Disclaimer: I’m not saying we’ll do any of these, and by saying
something you’re not going to get hired / patent rights / royalties /
etc. There’s no prizes / awards, this is just done for fun. We might
already be implementing what you suggest, or we might do it because of
your suggesting. Google, Yahoo, and other engines may do the same. So if
you have some killer idea that you think is worth some bucks, don’t tell
us! Go find a VC and do it yourself!

OK gang, have at it!

Well, this afternoon I hopped onto Northwest #7 to Tokyo en route to
Shanghai for just under two weeks of fun in the sun! Or good Chinese
food, at any rate. Seriously, it’s off to talk to the extremely poorly
named MSN CDC… China Development Center in Shanghai, followed by a
quick hop up to Beijing to get some face time with our pals at Microsoft
Research Asia. The first leg to Tokyo isn’t bad, but hard to sleep…
you leave at 2:30 PST, and even though they turn off the lights at 6:15
PST, you’re not even close to being ready to take a snooze. For
Shanghai, you get in about 8:45 PM (the next day from when you leave…
love that date line), so it’s just a matter of staying up until 10 or 11
and then crashing quickly.

Here’s an interesting factoid about flying out of SeaTac airport. About
half the time, you’re going to be sitting next to another Microsoft
employee that you don’t know. Or at least that seems to be the case for
me. Last time flying to Tokyo, the guy next to me was a business
development guy in the music group going over to see some clients, and
today I’m next to someone working on MSN who is based in Tokyo. It turns
out it’s pretty easy to spot Microsofties on the plane… look for the
standard issue Toshiba M200 tablet or the AudioVox 5600 Smartphone.
They’re always out, and it just yells Microsoft. At any rate, it’s just
one more cool thing about this company… you just find new colleagues
all over the place.

Disclaimer: just because I used to work for Real and now work for Microsoft doesn’t mean I actually know anything. In this case, I don’t, so I’m just offering speculation. It’s educated, but likely wrong.

As seen pretty much everywhere, Microsoft has agreed to settle with RealNetworks over Real’s anti-trust suit. Some interesting tidbits:

• $460 million cash money. So Real’s balance sheet goes from $263MM ($363M - $100MM debt) to $743MM… that’s almost triple!
• $301 million in cash and services. As near as I can tell, this means Microsoft advertises and includes Real stuff (which means Rhapsody) and gets a bounty for every subscriber Microsoft sends to Real. Presumably, there’s a minimum number of new subscribers per epoch, otherwise Microsoft coughs up more cash for that epoch.

Here’s another fun bit from the AP article:

Among other agreements, Microsoft’s MSN online unit will feature RealNetworks’ Rhapsody music subscription service on its MSN Music download site. It also will provide links in its MSN Search results that let people listen to songs through Rhapsody.

RealNetworks also will take steps to support Microsoft’s MSN Search, and the companies agreed to jointly promote use of Windows Media technologies with Rhapsody To Go, a music subscription services for portable devices.

Right now, say you do a search for Miles Davis on MSN. You’ll get an Instant Answer blurb about him. Presumably, this means you’ll see Rhapsody stuff there soon. It also means on Rhapsody, you’ll likely see some gateways to MSN Search.

Analysis, speculation, and wild guesses time:

• This is great for all the Real employees that stuck it out. If you’re an old-timer, Real did a stock option buy-back where the strike price was $7.22. Now, all those options for all those employees are above water! Granted, like $0.50 above water, and they could sink fast, but it’s better than hovering between $5 and $6 as it has for the past five years.
• This is the lottery for all the hired guns Real brought on in the past five years. Real has hired a bunch of folks lately, including some well paid execs and almost-execs, who are now liquid. Life isn’t fair, and timing is everything.
• RIP RealPlayer. OK, this is just a guess on my part, but at the end of the day, I think the Real format is dead, and Real is slowly but surely going to have to admit that. Nobody cares about formats, they just care about their music. Promoting Windows Media for portable Rhapsody To Go is the first step. That Cingular deal Real got may also turn positive for Microsoft (just a wild guess there).
• Real has no more excuses for failure. For a long time, Real has been griping that bad old Microsoft was the cause of its financial underperformance… I know a number of people, myself included, that would say at least part of the blame is on sub-par products. I won’t point out specifics, but I’ll just say that if you’re standing up against Microsoft, and the SlashDot crowd hates you, then you might be doing something wrong. With Microsoft no longer playing the Big Bad Wolf, Real is going to be forced to make good products… hopefully, this means some people will actually get back to writing specs and thinking about the end-to-end experience and what’s best for the customer, versus just hacking something out on a deadline.
• And the big one… Microsoft and Real have both realized that nobody gives a crap about either of them in the music space. The real business of streaming media is being able to sell streaming media. People aren’t going to buy players, and really they aren’t going to by servers or converters either. That’s commodity stuff nowadays. So you gotta sell music. The problem is, the only one selling music right now is Apple, because iPods are sexy, and everything else isn’t. So it’s time to join forces and hope that it isn’t too late to get into the game. Gonna be interesting for a few years I think!

Just a random point in space on the current round of Search Wars (III, by my counting… I was from 93 - 99, won largely by AltaVista, and II was the rise of Google over all).

The latest Media Metrix search market share numbers put the market share of search as 46.4% Google, 30.5% Yahoo, and 15.5% MSN. I’m counting AOL’s 9.9% share for Google, as Google powers AOL. The rest is Ask, InfoSpace (MetaCrawler, DogPile, and others), and others.

OK, these seems reasonable.

However, if I count the search referrers to my blog (most going to my Unlock AudioVox 5600 instructions post), then I get the following:


754 Google
93 MSN
54 Yahoo


In percentage terms: 83%, 10%, 5%.

I’m going to do some more digging… I’m in the top 3 results for all engines, so it can’t be a “Use MSN / Yahoo, fallback to Google” pattern. But really, are we saying that people looking for hard / esoteric stuff use Google THAT dominantly?

What really surprises me is the Yahoo number. I could believe (or make up) lots of reasons why the distribution for MSN is so low compared to Google… customer skew being what I’d guess (MSN has different customers than Google, and they tend not to be the type to go unlocking an AudioVox). But Yahoo being only 5% is just… well… weird. That’s really, really, really low…

Bloggers out there: if you have ‘em, I’d love to know what your referrer counts are! Here’s a quick one-line command if you’re on a linux / apache system (in /var/log):

zcat `/bin/ls -t access.log*gz | head` | cat access.log access.log.1 | egrep -v 'tide[0-9]*.microsoft.com’ | awk ‘{print $11}’ | egrep ‘google|yahoo|msn\.com’ | sed ’s/.*\(google\|msn\.com\|yahoo\).*/\1/’ | sort | uniq -c


[Update]

OK… so I thought that perhaps one reason for skewing is that perhaps Google rates my site overall very highly, MSN not so much, and Yahoo hates me. Or maybe Steph’s still mad about that dinner… Anyway, looking just at my unlock page, we have:


94 Google
2 MSN
0 Yahoo


Yow.. OK, so MSN has a 2% share there, but 0 for Yahoo? That’s just kinda bizarre… more later on what those Yahoo folks ARE looking for… although doesn’t seem to be much. Weird.

Just a quick update… for the astute, you’ll notice I’ve removed the links to the Rolling Duffel Project from my Unlock AudioVox page. They haven’t updated since mid-September, and so I’m assuming they’ve done what they could and have moved on.

However, I’d like to thank everyone who has donated to something for Katarina, especially those who chipped in to the Red Cross, Human Society, and Habitat for Humanity. If you haven’t, and you’re still feeling guilty, click on the links below and feel less guilty… just because FEMA botching things is yesterday’s news doesn’t mean people and pets have homes now.

I’d also like to talk a bit about the PETS act campaign that the Humane Society is helping to promote. You can see the latest congressional info on the Thomas site for HR 3858. So far, it’s got 40 co-sponsors from both parties.

This is good stuff, and I’m pretty sure a no-brainer like the above will sail through (who wants to go into the 2006 election as being anti-pet?). But it also got me thinking… what happens to pets when you have to evacuate in case of an emergency, be it a hurricane, wild fire, earthquake, or another Bush being elected to the White House? I can even remember most of the check-lists I went through in Boy Scouts (yes, I’m an Eagle) to make the emergency survival kits. 4 gallons of water per person per day (this was Utah, so we assumed desert). Non-perishable food for 3 days. Blankets, whistle, first-ait kid, etc etc.

What about an extra leash for each dog? Portable water bowl? And extra food / water for the dog?

How about space preparation? If you have to pack up the car, how much space will the dog take up? Or dogs? Cats?

And what do you need as far as first aid for your pet? Here’s one dog first aid kit, apparently given to the Cincinatti Police. The Humane Society also has a pretty reasonable pet disaster planning list.

For giggles, here’s FEMA’s Survival Kit Check-List. Again, here we assume no pets… no crate for the cat, and some extra kitty litter. No spare leashes for the dog. No extra tags for the dog either. Go team.

I suspect I’m like most of you, in that I barely have a first-aid kit, let alone a disaster kit to toss in the car as we head north / south / east to escape whatever. Hopefully I won’t procrastinate too much longer in putting something together… and I’d encourage you to do the same. Perhaps I’ll make it my New Year’s Resolution and knock off an easy one!

Anyway, here are the links to the Humane Society and Habitat for Humanity… please give what you can.

I haven’t had a search post in a while, but there’s some posts out there I thought I’d talk a bit about. In John Battelle’s book The Search, he expands a bit about where search ought to be in the last chapter of his book. Our own Robert Scoble adds his own $0.02 on the perfect search, followed by a response by Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Watch.

Here’s the gist: We used to have great features, many powered by people, and we don’t anymore. We want them back.

Yes and no.

There’s a lot less human editorial in search nowadays, and that’s a good thing. It allows us to scale, not just in the size of the web, but also globally. Anyone know what the best page for comparing cellular plans is in West Africa? Me neither, and we’re not hiring editors to figure that out. That’s why smart people develop algorithms to look at the web — links, body, etc. to figure that stuff out.

Anyone remember Magellan by McKinley? It was an early competitor to Yahoo back in about 1995. The idea was to hire a bunch of human editors to create a large “best of the Web” version of Yahoo, with each site rated and quality checked. McKinley isn’t even around anymore, at least according to the new real estate page at www.mckinley.com, let alone Magellan.

That being said, one thing we aren’t doing all that well at is enabling people to spread their own information. Yahoo is making some moves here with their social searching stuff, but it’s not even close to what I want.
For example, for an upcoming trip to China, I’m trying to figure out if GPRS works on a China Mobile prepaid SIM card. So I use the query “China Mobile prepaid SIM GPRS setup.” Google is crappy, so is ours at MSN (and they even look crappier), and Yahoo’s results don’t completely suck.
.

This should be an easy query, if not for the potential cross-lingual issue here. All I want to know is for a China Mobile prepaid account, how do I set up GPRS? Presumably, there’s a FAQ on the China Mobile website. Probably in Chinese, but I suspect it’s there. Or at least on some other support websites, as it seems that it’s there, just not quite what I want.

But yet nobody really gets it.

Human editors aren’t really going to help with this, but human beings might. This is where blogs and forums come in, especially forums. I managed to find a few where this question had been asked and answered, and so I’m pretty sure I know what to do now.

So now the question comes… how do we enable and harness human knowledge in a meaningful way? Not just indexing documents on the Web, but truly indexing knowledge for mass consumption. That’s the question. And while we used to have lots of nifty features on previous (and some still living) search engines, we still haven’t begun to tap into searching human knowledge. It’s just that tough of a problem.

Oh, and I’ll except this from Danny’s post, worth the read:

FYI, John asked me for thoughts on The Perfect Search that didn’t make the cut for the book. But if you’re curious, here’s what I emailed him back last September. I’ll ask him if I can add in the email I was responding to, that puts my response in better context. If so, you’ll see it added here later. My response:

I can’t imagine such a world. It makes a nice pitch for the search companies, but knowledge is a messy thing.

If we’re talking about indisputable facts, it’s a bit easier. Thomas Jefferson was the third president of the United States. I know of no one who questions that.

Who was the first person on the moon. Neil Armstrong — unless you are of the contingent that believes moon landings never happened. OK, I think those folks are crackpots. But the perfect search that comes back with Armstrong isn’t the perfect search for them.

What’s the answer to gay marriage? Who killed Kennedy? Was Bush right or wrong for going into Iraq? Is the MMR vaccine safe for children?

None of these can be answered definitively. They’re more than just questions with nuances. They’re questions that have answers ultimately determined the by reader themselves, answers that may be different for each person, based on what they choose to believe after reviewing many opinions.

I can envision a system that tries to collect for you a variety of references on topics. Maybe it even assembles them into an encyclopdia-like, wiki-like page. The assemby of this knowledge might be considered “answers” by some. To me, it still represents the start of a knowledge quest. It’s akin to exactly how search works now — a list of references, with the searcher still needing to explore.

I’m sure we’ll see search advance on simply pointing people to the easy stuff, the facts that can be produced, direct navigation to web sites and so on. I’m also sure we’ll see search improve to better understand what we’re interested in, based on past habit and visits. But all knowledge will never be accessible, unless they figure out a way to digitize the minds of everyone living and dead. Even when dealing with what knowledge we do have chronicled, distilling a perfect answer is impossible. God could provide a perfect search as you outline. Search engines aren’t God today, and they’ll never be.

Having said this, I was agast last year when some Wi-Fi exec likened Google to God in Friedman’s column. While we may not have the perfect search, nor will we, some people may believe search engines (and the web by extension) already offer it.

We’ve had articles about judges searching the web themselves to see if they can dig up evidence. Fox News lamely tries to defend calling the BBC anti-American by citing search counts. Students apparently are abandoning traditional research methods and assuming the magic little search box brings up the right answer. I’ve watched people spend tons of time searching for a company’s phone number rather than just calling information. Two television shows I watched this week had characters talking about how they “Googled” something, with the assumption that whatever they retrieved must be correct. Some people already believe a perfect search tool exists, and the way it is shaping them is that they’re relying on it too exclusively.

So the threat is this. In a world where people believe a perfect search exists, that world may fail to seek out knowledge in other ways. Someone blogs something that’s factually incorrect. Search picks this up. There are no other references out there. Search is perfect, ergo, what’s wrong becomes right. No one bothers to actually follow up on the fact.

I was fortunate enough in college to hear Loren Needles from Analytica talk about the need to fully question any facts. At the time, he talked about how a recent hurricane had been blamed for a dropoff in some economic indicators. In short order, he quickly demonstrated how there was no way the hurricane could have cause a dropoff of such extent. Despite this, newspapers across the country accepted the explanation as fact.

That’s what a perfect search potentially does for us, makes us less questioning because we think the answers are all in that little box. They aren’t, nor will they ever be.

OK… so, ever since Chappelle went away, Comedy Central has been trying
to find something to fill the 11:30 PM slot after The Daily Show. The
latest, which has been bumped to midnight by the /previous/ Daily
Show, is Too Late with Adam Carolla. Today, he had Steve O, famous for
Jackass and Wild Boys. Well, they had him get really, really drunk, and
he just destroyed the show. Apparently, Adam had to call in security to
get him restrained during the commercial break. Oops.

What was telling was the lack of laughter from the live studio
audience… total train wreck.

You know, The Man Show with Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Carolla was great. But
both solo shows suck. Maybe they can put them back
together again and get them to having fun versus stretching out on
things that is not quite working.

OK, end random gripe.

A HD decided to die on my server. Fortunately, all the important data is backed up (and I’ll describe how I do that one of these days), but the disk is still acting flaky (not sure if it was disk corruption or an impending disk error… all the self-tests check out, but I dunno….).

The old system was a Debian woody + unstable updates (3.0 + random updates)… I decided to re-install with Debian Sarge (3.1). Now, Debian, while not flashy on the UI, has always been extremely stable and relatively bug-free.

I downloaded the netinst and went with that, let the thing run overnight, and got things installed pretty easily. Then came time to start making the server like it was.

Already, I’ve found two glaring show-stopper Debian bugs… come on guys, what are you thinking?

There’s Bug #310887, Does not mount non-root partitions. Essentially, some lunkhead decided to fsck all partitions before loading any drivers, like SCSI or USB. So if you have a SCSI disk, which my previous server image was on, you’re out of luck. (note: the previous server image was on a ~10 year old 4G SCSI running RedHat 7.2 that has shown some signs of failure… but at least it’s still kicking as the impromptu backup). Haven’t figured out a work-around for this yet, but man is it a pain.

Then there’s Bug #271363 - kdm frozen at first boot. Debian uses gdm by default for gnome, which is fine. I prefer KDE and use kdm. So, I installed kdm, no problem, and switched it. But this dies a horrid death. Running things manually, I find errors about the ELF version of libkdeui.so.4… haven’t tracked down the culprit here yet either.

These are basic… sigh. But I guess people tend not to have SCSI anymore, or don’t use KDE. Um…. sure.

I’m re-installing my picture archive from backup, and will then update the new image to SID (Debian unstable… as Debian testing was the same as sarge). Or maybe I should just go back to Fedora… they seem to have gotten better about solving the rpm hell problem, so might be worth giving them a try again.

Oh, and for those paying attention — yes, these are all Linux servers, and yes, I do work at Microsoft. Why am I not considering Windows? Lots of reasons. Frankly, I don’t feel that Windows is up to the task of providing the roles I use the server for. In particular, DNS, mail serving, and file serving. Second, my main data is held on two 75G IBM Deskstar disks (still functioning after 5 years… go figure!) in RAID configuration. I’m not in the mood to consider how to migrate this over to Windows. Finally, Linux does great at headless operation, and mostly that’s what the servers are. I can ssh in, and check things out, from whereever I am. The Windows solution is this hokey Remote Terminal, where you suck a lot of bandwidth to get a remote GUI. Sometimes, I don’t have a lot of bandwidth, and all I need to do is get a command prompt and go. So, yeah, I still run some Linux boxes.