Thanks Guy.Where I work a colleague in New Jersey recently tossed a tape in the DHL to send the monthly snapshot of their servers to Atlanta for safe keeping. Can I say that, "tossed in the DHL?" It seems perfectly fair to say tossed in the mail. On second thought, I think I will correct myself and say that was incorrect. Perhaps if we said, "toss that in the Mail," then the DHL substitution would be Kosher (or kosher?), but I think I used it as mail not Mail so I'm FUBAR. Or is it just SNAFU? I think I need massive lessons if I ever wanted to entertain the notion of writing for a living.
Actually the thought entered my head just last night that I could in fact write SOMETHING that somebody would care to read. Combine my being able to compose a few sentences with my extraordinary web and IT skillz and I might actually be able to pull the wool over some eyes. Who knows. I might try to start tapping out something every now and then to see if I enjoy it. A friend of mine is attempting some self improvement by writing every day, perhaps I should as well.
But I digress. I was talking about DHL and Guy, a rep who works out of Minneapolis. The tape package thing failed in it's journey for some reason. Bad label or packaging, I don't know, but it got sent to the island of misfit toys where they opened it, catalogued it, and put up a tiny "found" poster in a large database. I called about two weeks later to see what had happened and Guy asked me to describe my lost tape to him. He found 2 matches, one being my tape, and the other being a VHS copy of Heathers. He said they would wrap up the little guy, pat him on his head, and send him on his way to Atlanta. That was Monday and today is Wednesday and I haven't heard boo from anybody so I call 1-800-CALL-DHL to see what they can tell me. After talking to another random person for a minute, Guy calls me back and we have a heart felt reunion. He tells me all is well and he apologizes for my not having the tape yet. The point of this whole thing is, that my experience with DHL was magnified by about 100 because they used some technology to let me talk to the same guy again. I know they are ULTRA-MEGA-GLOBO-CORP, but they don't feel like that because I called and talked to the same person twice. I don't know if Guy actually remembered me and my tape from Monday or if he is just reading his own notes, but to me it felt that way. I had a common frame of reference with them. I think that all of the other mega companies in the world would be wise to follow suit.
Looking for love is hard. Looking for code might not have to be.I read about something on Digg and it sounds mighty fine. I think it would be most radical to create a search engine to search through code for examples. Honest to god code, not crappy example code that some tutorials put up. Just slurp up the open source communities codebase and index the heck out of it. You could search by language and function name or keyword. It could look at comments for help indexing. Best of all you would get thousands of results to look at. As long as you can go through them quickly, it would be rad.
Here's where my idea really takes off. You can from behind the scenes see which place the user ended up from their query. They searched PHP for "string substitution" and if they ended up copying code from snippet #15, you can make some meta-notes on that guy as being a good match for "string substitution". You can also offer to allow the users to manually give feedback by marking hits as good or bad, or highlighting the important matching sections. You could also improve accuracy by allowing people to either submit very commented code, or to mark up existing code with "user added" comments. All of this allows for a self-adapting, self-tuning search engine. So what do ya say Google?
--LP
