Category: Technology

My New Obsession with PageRank

This all started last week when I found a possible client for my friend Alley who does web design and, more importantly, knows about web advertising and Search Engine Optimization. (The client was asking me about SEO and as you’ll see, I knew nothing.) So one day last week as Alley and I were doing an analysis of the client’s website Alley started talking about the client’s PageRankTM.

…or maybe the title should read “Murray’s Website 4.0” This all started last week when I found a possible client for my friend Alley who does web design and, more importantly, knows about web advertising and Search Engine Optimization. (The client was asking me about SEO and as you’ll see, I knew nothing.) So one day last week as Alley and I were doing an analysis of the client’s website Alley started talking about the client’s PageRankTM.

I feel like a complete idiot for not knowing about this thing, like I’ve been hiding under a rock for the last few years. Alley explained how a PageRank of 2 was a pretty good starting place (for this client), how values of 3 or 4 were fairly realistic targets, and that values of 6 or higher are often reserved for super-powerful corporations with major websites. I finally downloaded the Google Toolbar for Firefox—that’s how you see PageRank values for specific web pages—and started looking at all sorts of websites to compare their rankings. There were a number of surprises.

First of all, my friend Dale’s website has a PageRank of freakin’ 7, thus placing him under the official title of Demigod! (Any pearls of wisdom for us mortals, Dale?) It also beats the ranking for the California Democratic Party and a lot of other major organizations. (Note: he’s tied with the national Democratic Party site.)
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Next format DVD prediction: HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray

In the upcoming format battle between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray for the standard that will bring HDTV to the DVD disk, the winner will be… neither.

This post will probably not be too interesting to most people. I’m writing it mostly as my “message in a bottle” or “time capsule” to the future to see how good my powers of prediction are. That being said, let me polish my crystal ball, gaze into it and forecast the future.

In the upcoming format battle between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray for the standard that will bring HDTV to the DVD disk, the winner will be… neither.
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idoit

For a brief moment I thought of i + Do It = iDoIt. I even like how it sounds when you pronounce it: I Do It. I typed ‘idoit’ into Google for a search and suddenly realized my folly, as Google politely asked me “Did you mean: idiot?” That could have been a disaster in the making. Kinda like the old Chevy Nova that didn’t sell well at all in Latin American communities because in Spanish “no va” means “doesn’t run”!

Although it’s jumping the gun a bit, I’m trying to figure out a name for my upcoming Task/Project Management application for the Mac. I’ve internally called it iProject, but a quick Google search comes up with a product that I think is made in Germany. I’ve tried the combination of adding “i” + any common related term: Task, Todo, GTD… everything there has been taken. Granted, my product doesn’t have to start with the letter “i” but I wanted to emphasize my own design goals which are (a) to have something that is as simple and easy-to-use as it is powerful and (b) an incredible level of integration and “plays well with others” with the existing iCal and other Apple applications.

For a brief moment I thought of i + Do It = iDoIt. I even like how it sounds when you pronounce it: I Do It. I typed ‘idoit’ into Google for a search and suddenly realized my folly, as Google politely asked me “Did you mean: idiot?” That could have been a disaster in the making. Kinda like the old Chevy Nova that didn’t sell well at all in Latin American communities because in Spanish “no va” means “doesn’t run”!

I’m happy to entertain any application name recommendations. Until then, I’m going to keep calling this thing iProject.

Learning OS X Cocoa Programming: MandleTry

MandleTry screenshotI wrote a few days ago about how I had this killer (simple but useful) Mac application idea bouncing around in my head for a year now. I have to confess I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the last three days in refreshing my Cocoa programming skills, and I’ve written my first decent test-app: a Mandelbrot generator.

Back when I was a teenager I was fascinated with the Mandelbrot set. It was kind of the “hallmark image” of the then-newly-emerging field of fractal geometry. This was the same field of Mathematics that was allowing computer-generated landscapes like moon in the Genesis Planet Demonstration video from Star Trek: Wrath of Kahn. I remember staring at the strangely beguiling image in a Scientific American article, fascinated with its strange features. Also incredible was the fact that no matter how closely you “zoomed-in” to a point of the Mandelbrot set, you got a uniquely different-yet-similar picture.

I remember being about 16 years old and reading and re-reading the article, trying to understand the relatively simple mathematics behind it. It was just the equation z=z2+c but in the complex number plane. I understood complex numbers and had a year or two of algebra under my belt, but couldn’t get it. Then one day I had that “eureka” moment and it all made sense. I jotted down the simple quadratic, translated it into a computer algorithm and set to writing a program to test it.
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Apple .vs. Windows, my own 2¢

In this article I come up with my own theory of how Apple could leverage the new Intel architecture and Microsoft’s failure to add anything substantial to the upcoming Windows Vista in order to take over the PC business—using the Apple playbook that has enabled them to move from Motorola 68xxx to PowerPC, from OS 9 to OS X, and now from PowerPC to Intel. The article also mentions how a similar “dual-OS” strategy had been accomplished with the now-defunct IBM OS/2.

There’s been so much wild speculation about what Steve Jobs is up to with the new Apple Boot Camp tool for Intel-based Macs. For those who haven’t been already inundated, Boot Camp is a boot manager that makes is possible to install both Max OS X and Microsoft Windows XP on 2 different partitions of an Intel Mac. When you start up the computer, you can pick which one will start up. (I don’t know if it provides any ability for one OS to see the partition of the other.)

Speculation has included some crazy ideas like Steve Jobs wanting to get out of the Operating System business by embracing Windows Vista, writing a OS X compatibility layer to cover old Mac software. Others talk about Windows Vista and OS X running “side by side” at the same time on Intel Macs. I’ve got my own 2¢ on a specific angle, and it has to do with my previous rant about how the new Windows Vista is nothing but Windows 2000/XP with a slight face-lift.
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