Rasmus' Toys Page

One of the things I have been playing with lately is Yahoo!'s SearchMonkey project. It appeals to me on many different levels. The geeky name is a play on GreaseMonkey. But instead of writing plugins that run locally in the browser, SearchMonkey is a way to write plugins for the Yahoo! Search results page that change the appearance of the results themselves. Best explained with an example. Assume I am looking for a Japanese restaurant, and on my search results page I see:



That's ok, I guess. It tells me it is somewhere in Redwood City and that it is a neighborhood restaurant, whatever that means. Compare that to:



This gets me a real address and phone number plus a number of other useful bits of information. That is the first level SearchMonkey appeals to me on. The usefulness is obvious. My usefulness test is to see if I can explain it to my mother. Having her search for recipes and get pictures of dishes, ingredients and preparation times right on the search results page makes this an easy sell.

The second level this appeals to me on is the way it is implemented. Writing these SearchMonkey plugins becomes much simpler if the site you are writing the plugin for uses microformats of some sort. hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, xfn or generic structured eRDF or RDFa tags. The data can also be collected via a separate XML feed that can then be converted via XSLT in the SearchMonkey developer tool. The microformat data is collected and indexed and when you go to write a plugin and specify the url pattern you are writing the plugin for, it will find whatever indexed metadata it has for that url. If it doesn't have what you are looking for, you can still write a custom data scraper to get it, but that gets a bit more involved. I really like that the easy path is to add some sort of semantic markup to the pages. Yes, as Micah points out, this is not the (uppercase) Semantic Web, but it is still a push towards semantic markup. Having such a tangible and visible result of adding semantic tags is going to encourage people other than microformat geeks to do so. The more semantic markup we get, the better off the Web is.

The third part that appeals to me is the way the plugins are written. You write a little snippet of PHP. It is actually a method in a class you can't see, but its job is to return an associative array of data such as the title to display, the summary, extra links to show and whatever other key/value pairs you might want in the output. Because you have a full-featured scripting language available, you can write quite complicated logic in one of these plugins and pull whatever data you want from the site the plugin is written for. You can also write an add-on to your plugin which is called an Infobar. It is a little bar that is shown below the plugin and from an Infobar you can access arbitrary external services. This example shows it well:



This one shows an OpenTable reservation link and a Yelp review, but almost anything can go there as long as you can squeeze it into the limited space you have.

The SearchMonkey is still in its infancy. It needs developer support. If you are in Silicon Valley, please come to the Developer Launch Party next week on Thursday May 15. See the link for details. If you aren't in the area, or even if you are, sign up for a developer account at http://developer.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/preview.html and help encourage the Web to become more semantic.

This server is well over 5 years old and really starting to show its age. It's a 2.66GHz P4 with a Gig of ram and mirrored 80G drives. I am constantly running out of disk space and spamd chews up all available cpu on a regular basis. Moving Bayes token expiration to a cron job helped spamd cpu usage a little bit, but it still isn't a happy server.
I need way more disk and way more ram. I'm looking for a dual-cpu, mirrored (software raid this time) 500G drives, and 4G of ram 1U box to stick in the colo. This http://www.siliconmechanics.com/i14740/Quad-Core-Xeon.php fits the bill, although I find the quad-core cpus a bit silly. I'd be fine with quick dual-core chips, but the bang-for-the-buck on the configs there seem to favour the 4-core chips.

This Supermicro http://www.xpcgear.com/sc813t50c1.html looks ok as well.

A Sun X2200 is a possibility, but they seem a bit pricy for what you get and I like the new 45nm Intel chips.

Has anybody run across any interesting new 1U servers?

A couple of early Christmas presents for the new house. A new iMac for the kitchen nook and a Sonos system. I guess I haven't bought ram in a while because it was under $100 to upgrade the iMac to 4G with ram from OWC. The iMac is a perfect fit for the kitchen. The black and aluminum matches the counters and appliances in the kitchen nicely.
I had been eyeing a Mac Mini for ages, but Apple doesn't seem very interested in the Mini and for the price the iMac seemed like a much better deal. Bought it from Amazon and it didn't come with Leopard but Apple has an update program so the upgrade is mostly free. They want $10 for shipping me the CD. I already have another copy, so it would be nice if they would just give me a serial number.

As nice as the iMac is, the Sonos system is more interesting. I have had various mechanisms for playing music from computers to decent speakers over the years, but they were all inconvenient hacks. I don't want to have to use a computer to control the music, and I definitely don't want to do it via a clunky TV-based interface either. The Sonos with its controller does a great job of taking the hack out of the system. It is basically a wireless meshing modular music system. You put either an amplified box with speakers connected, or an unamplified box connected to an existing stereo in each room and the single controller can then control each zone individually or you can link them all up so all the zones play the same music. Each box also has a Line-In that can be used as a source and played in any other zone

I wanted the iMac to be able to go to sleep without killing the music, so I used a 250G Simpleshare drive I had sitting around. One of these days I need to figure out a real NAS system for the house, but for now 250G is plenty as a Sonos media source. I pointed iTunes at the Simpleshare and copied all the music to the drive, then I pointed the Sonos system at the drive as well and it worked nicely.

Internet radio streaming, Rhapsody and Pandora are all working very nicely. I realize this turned out to be a bit of a boring post since there were no technical hurdles and thus no interesting hacks involved in getting any of this working. But that is afterall why people buy things like iMacs and Sonos systems. If they didn't just work without days of fiddling there are plenty of cheaper options that will let you hack and fiddle for months and in the end you get something that almost sorta mostly works.