Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Cuil the new search engine

Since hearing the news about this new search engine Cuil, which self proclaim to be the world's biggest search engine, I just can't wait to give a try on it and see how it is going to threaten Google.

The interface is pretty cool as compare to Google with an image beside each result that makes the search result page seems more lively. But playing with the search is a great disappointment. Intending to travel to UK probably in a couple of months, I decided to gather some info (weather, stay, transport) about UK using Cuil and Google.


For Cuil, the first page of the results return 11 results as shown above. Out of the 11, more half is about travel insurance. 2 of the first 11 results as shown return an error page. None of the result returned, provide what I want after going through all the 11 result. It also seems that most of the result return in the first page are link to a commercial sites (are they sponsored site?). So it makes me wondered what kind of algorithm is used in the search here???


For Google, the first page return link with information such as map, travel tips, guide which provide all the information that is what I wanted. Around 8 out of 10 result returned, offer information that I required. So I guess the verdict is pretty clear but I will do hope that Cuil will continue to improve and provide another good option for user.

Another interesting thing is while trying to search for Cuil itself, none of the result returned is link to itself. Have they forgotten to index themselves? Time provide another good overview of Cuil too.

Thursday, July 3, 2008

Added My Read List

Just added the list of books that I have read recently (for the past 1 year) . Of course, they did not include all the books that I have read recently but only those I will recommend. They are not purely technical stuff, but include stuff like management to self improvement. With the amount of technical document and article that I have been reading at work, I will not drown myself with more technical book. However, I am always tempted to read more books that cover technical stuff as they always improve my knowledge and help me in my work. To prevent reading of too much of technical book, I have aimed to read a non technical book for every book technical book I read to balance up and widen my knowledge outside my scope of work.

All the book list are currently linked to Amazon. I am not promoting them but just thought that they will be able to provide more information such as price and review from others about the book. I will come back again to discuss and highlight the content of these books.

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Upgrading to NANT 0.86 for .NET 3.5

Recently, having to upgrade the project I am working on from .NET 3.0 to 3.5, I did not realize that the NANT 0.85 is unable to support the building of .NET 3.5 project till I tried to build the project. In order to continue to automate the build process of the project, NANT 0.86 beta 1 have to be used. During the upgrade I have hit some problem and will like to share the problem I have and how to workaround them.

If you are using previous version of NANT 0.85 to build on .NET 3.0 and 2.0 project, you need to download the NANT 0.86 and unzip to your machine. Next, you will be required to change the environment variable of the NANT path to the bin folder location of the latest version of NANT. Restart your computer and add the following "<property name="nant.settings.currentframework" value="net-3.5" ⁄>" just after the project of the build files. This is enough for you to get your .NET 3.5 project built.

For project involving the reference of System.ServiceModel.dll, you might get some error message will trying to build the project. You will be required to change the referenced dll from the above mentioned to System.ServiceModel.Web.dll which usually can be found in the “Drive:\Program Files\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\v3.5\”.

Also, the nunit2report is also not working with the current version of NANT. For those preferring to run nunit test report with the nunit2report, you can just copy the following list of files found in the NANT 0.85 bin folder to the 0.86 bin folder and it should work fine:
  1. NAnt.NUnit2ReportTasks.dll
  2. i18n.xsl
  3. NUnit-Frame.xsl
  4. NUnit-NoFrame.xsl
  5. toolkit.xsl
With all this minor changes… everything should be up and running.