June 2009

We noticed last week sporadic hangs in our network coming in from the outside. They would come and go with no apparent pattern. It took a few days but we traced it down to a failing hard drive on our core router/firewall.

I set aside time to replace it Friday night at 10:30. Should have taken about an hour, at which time all services would be down. 5 hours later I put the failing drive back in service. Before I could get data copied off of it that I needed, I lost the C: drive partition. The good news is…I have really good backups, and used one of them. But it took a while to restore and there were some emails on that drive that needed to be recovered as well. So I got to bed about 3:30. At 6:30 my monitors went off—our T1 line went down. Qwest got that back up by 7:05, and I was able to rebuild the new drive successfully and put it in place in a 10 minute swap by 11 am Saturday. Then I ran a drive analysis program on the old drive and recovered all the data that had otherwise been lost, including all emails. Sometime I have to work for a living.

Search engines have been around for several years now and while there are minor differences in content from one to the other, they all operate pretty much the same way...you enter keywords and they return 10,000,000 pages where those keywords were found. Anything more useful than that is often an exercise in frustration.

The problem is that search engines collect and report on data--not information. Some of them are getting a little better, but not by much. Just as we need dentists to interpret someone's oral history, we need a search engine to examine facts and return answers to useful questions. Sometimes these questions will involve straight reporting of facts, other times it may require summarization of data or more complex interpretation. There have been attempts to provide search engines that did this but they have met with limited success.

The newest project to try this has gotten a lot of good press lately. It is the brainchild of the creator of a program called Mathematica. Mathematica started out years ago as a formula computation engine but grew well beyond it's initial roots. It now is a data collection and interpretation tool of immense proportions that has a well-deserved reputation in the industry. And the company has now turned this capability into a search engine.

You can ask questions of the search engine that involve what normally would be arduous data collection and summarization tasks and it provides fairly useful responses in a search engine format. Pretty cool.

The search engine is called WolframAlpha. You can get to it by going to www.wolframalpha.com.

Will it succeed in the search engine arena? Who knows. If nothing else, it's going to help a lot of kids avoid having to learn algebra. :)

Best wishes!

Sincerely,

Ben Conner