tekArtist

Since I was addressing poor online business ethics in my last post, I might as well touch the following, as it came up while I was browsing the upcoming security stories thread on Digg.

I was googling my online trail recently, and was quite stirred that the nickname I use on a lot of online communities started showing up as a registered user of a number of social-networking-flavoured porn sites. Most of them pumping out (pardon the analogy) long lists of sites and videos one allegedly features on their profile as interesting, à la Digg et al.

I thought someone else was simply using the same moniker, but the following article and its author might just have provided me with some valuable insight: Why are my picture and name showing up on porn sites without my permission?

Thankfully, this seems limited to the user name for now, and my real name isn’t returning such search results. But it is definitely of interest to me professionally, since McGill does have, and is looking forward to further develop, people pages. We will definitely have to take this trend in consideration in the upcoming incarnation of the software and content.

Between the freshly announced Google Gears and the upcoming Firefox 3, I’m really happy to see the SQLite project picking up some massive and forefront industry momentum. And well deserved at that, since I’ve always thought it was an excellent venture in many respects, though often overlooked by the general development community.

Firefox will use it for their upcoming Places feature, which aims to be the evolution of bookmarks and history.

Google Gears, on the other hand, uses it for offline web app data storage. I have to say I’m getting a geeky kick out of seeing SQL queries passed directly via client-side Javascript (although as an offline app, I guess the client is the server too). And not even as a WTF post: bonus!

Kudos to the SQLite dev team, and good call to the two latest industry icons who chose it.

That install base sure is going to grow fast! Makes me giggle when I remember thinking that every PC would be running at least 6 different embedded copies of the tiny DB within a few years when I first played around with it, all without 99% of the end users even realizing this. I’d say we’re right on track. :)

Who’s taking bets on Adobe doing the same with Apollo?

Yes! We’ve done it. McGill is now using a Google Search Appliance as its main search engine backend, which is the main reason I have been so busy in the last while.

Despite early hardware issues and a few bugs I faced in the caching engine and XML APIs (most of which have been or are being addressed by the Google Enterprise team), I have to admit that it’s been one of the most motivating and enjoyable projects I have handled at McGill.

You can try it out for yourself on our main search page.

We also enabled other areas, such as our advanced course search, and classified search.

This is of course only the tip of the iceberg, since the architecture is quasi-infinitely extensible through the feeds and OneBox concepts (both of which we already use). And as usual, I already have a head full of ideas on how to further leverage the enormous amount of digital content on campus.

Fun times ahead!