Here are the pictures from our Yosemite trip.

Oh I forgot to mention. Dave is already back from WSOP. Sadly he was out the first day. He was really happy with his play, but he got big hands cracked a number of times and had a series of hands where he lost against 3 outs or less. Too bad for him.

Being able to save all my mail at Gmail allows me to compile the following statistics. I get about 6000 messages/month which is about 200/day. about 5300 of which was spam, 600+ not. so about 90% of my mail is spam. They really need to improve their spam filter. It’s almost the worst i’ve seen of real solutions. I have been training the spam filter for the full month that i’ve used it and it’s gotten better. It catches probably %60-70, but that’s still way worse than any of my other solutions. My well trained bogofilter catches at least %85+. With all the brainpower that google has you’d think they could do better. I’m not impressed with that. But everything else about gmail is great.

We had a weekend in Yosemite for my birthday. Tracy’s sister is in town for a conference so we took a long weekend up there, did some hiking and hanging out on the lake and relaxing. It was good. The weather was perfect. The views were amazing, all in all a great weekend. Work is going very well, we’re hiring a really good team.

With Blogger.com’s new interface they added a “post comment” feature to blogs. I’ve put one up so now you can post comments easily. I left mine wide open so I expect it to be overrun with anonymous link spammers shortly. Then I’ll have to change the permissions so only registered users can post which will mean pretty much no one can do it. But you can try it out anyways. Also I’ll probably need to tweak how the comments are formatted to make it look a bit nicer. Speaking of which, I could use a complete site overhaul at some point. I’m too busy at work to have time for that though.

Oh and my brother got me a blue mini-iPod for my birthday. That was a truly awesome gift. He must’ve had some sort of psychic knowledge that I had been looking for one. I’m busy digitizing music and transferring it to my ipod.

Work is going very well, I’m really excited about it. As the first engineer, I’m designing the way most of the systems work. The CTO and the other soon to start engineers will help me sanity check the design and code it up, but any new development work is always interesting. It’s also interesting to see other people’s solutions to the same programming test that I was given. Oh and I learned where the name Exava comes from. “exa” as in the metric prefix for 10^18(10 to the 18th power) and “va” is short for value so we want to be a great value to consumers. The name is pretty good and the origin is not bad either.

So I start work on Monday. But in other news, a friend lent me his copy of World of Warcraft so I’m playing just a bit of the beta. It is beautiful. Blizzard has always set the standard for graphics and having a nice consistent feel across its games and worlds, and WoW is no different. The game world must be pretty big, I’ve only explored a small part of one fraction of it and it feels large. It’s still kind of buggy. This is expected from a beta, but it does crash enough to make play testing a bit difficult. Part of it could be my machine. I have some weird networking issues that I can’t figure out. At some point this year I’m going to get a new box anyways, which might fix some of my problems. The game play is smooth and pretty intuitive. It seems a little easier to play alone than some other multiplayer RPG’s, but I am still low level. At higher levels, it could be significantly different.

Here are the photos from Wildflower. Here are Kojo’s photos, he looks kinda small don’t you think? He’s certainly not huge like me.. Also I forgot to link to the official age group results(m30-34)

I spent last night playing with Nutch which is an open source search engine. It comes complete with a crawler, a database, an indexer, and a query engine. I found it because I was having some issues with Lucene. Lucene is a really powerful text search engine library, but it is a developer’s library and the examples and tutorials aren’t that great. So after some searching, I found Nutch as a complete crawler and web search engine implementation. It looks really good in case you want to write your own web search engine. It’s still in beta, but looks solid and has some big name backers. Nutch is based on Lucene and is pure Java.

Nutch doesn’t want to be a Google. They want to be an engine, not a service. It takes quite a bit of hardware and bandwidth to run a service like Google. That’s one thing that has always impressed me about Google, was their operational scalability. They have tens of thousands of linux boxes to manage, and yet they still return responses in well under .5 seconds.

Oh and Google put up their own Google blog. It’s pretty weak imho, but you can’t expect a soon-to-public-company to share too much information.

I put up the search box on the left. I first tried to run my own search server using Lucene but I was running into some issues. It turned out to be kind of a hassle, partially because of my system configuration(I run apache without a java or jsp engine) and partially because Lucene isn’t that easy to work with. It’s powerful and fast, but it’s a developers tool and my blog just isn’t worth spending 30+ hours on just to implement complete whiz bang search when I can have a simple working search with Google in 20 minutes. Also Google just works better for a generalized search.