Being Mark Cohen

I bought my house at the peak of the market, and since then I have been stewing.  I like this new feature on domain.com.au – I found my home on this map, and it shows me the recent sales in the neighbourhood, with a decent amount of details on the map.  You can also click through to the house adverts and see what the houses look like.  It’s a mashup of data from APM and domain, using Google maps.

Snap website preview is a cool javascript addition to a website header, that gives you website previews if you hover on any hyperlinks. It’s really easy to implement, great eye candy for visitors at very little cost /effort to the webmaster. I like the element of depth it brings to my blog, although I suspect the novelty will wear off. I see on their site that they were reviewed on Tech Crunch. This won’t work for feed readers, it needs a reference to a script file that is in the page header.

The intelligent features that creep into Google search unannouned amaze me.  The calculator function is old hat.  I use it a fair bit out of laziness.  My homepage is Google Desktop so it’s usually quicker for me to get to Google than to calc.exe.  That in itself is saying something.

My son wanted to know how old Stephen Hawking is as he’s reading one of his books.  I went onto Google and typed How old is Stephen Hawking more out of curiosity than anything else.  I wanted to see how they’d handle my search, being in lay english as opposed to a keyword search.  The result amazed me:

Google returned a first result (under book matches) that gave simply his birthdate, followed by the source (wikipedia)

I tried a few more to see how it would do.  First result was similar for Larry Page (also Wikipedia), Second result for Sergey Brin gave me his age but not date of birth.  Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs all get a first result from wikipedia with their birthdate.  For some reason, Woz does not, but the fourth serp does give a direct indication in the teaser.

Sadly, they failed when I tried to find out how old Frank Arrigo is, but the internet movie database made up for that with interesting stuff about a lesser Frank Arrigo ;o)  I’m also an ageless piece of dust in Google’s eyes but I was very happy to see that out of the millions of Mark Cohen’s in the world, if you search for How old is Mark Cohen on Google, they assume the one you’re most likely to want to know about is me

I haven’t found many sql tools for os/x, but I did find this one tool that is really useful. It’s a lot like the new sql server management studio, which totally rocks if you’re running xp or above. There is a free version, the SQL Express Management Studio that I use on my laptop.

When I’m in os/x though, I have been enjoying using Aqua Data Studio, which is also a free download and is available for windows as well. My favourite feature is that it has intellisense in the query window, something I’ve been waiting for Microsoft to do for years and years. It also allows me to manage all my databases from one tool, including mysql, ms sql, and a whole lot of other formats.

The second time I have recently had the calling to link to Wikipedia for this particular definition.

Wikipedia defines chutzpah as

"… the quality of audacity, for good or for bad."

I don’t think that’s a good enough definition. Here’s my definition of "chutzpah":  I had reason to call a small-time operator today who is scraping our website and using the content in what could very very loosely be called a mashup, more honestly it’s an "aggregator" with maps.  The reason I called him was that today we actually found that he was ripping off and presenting enough content to go beyond what we can allow.  In response to me asking him to fix our concerns he tells me that our competitor has offered to pay him to come up above us, and asks who he should talk to in our organisation to try extract money from us.  He then sends me an email cc’ing his boss (thanks, good to know he’s formally involved )

Right there, that’s my new definition of chutzpah.