When I leave Google Reader running for a while, Firefox eventually enters some kind of crazy Javascript spin loop which eats 100% of one core until I kill the tab. This is an Intel-based OSX machine, and Firefox 2.0.0.1.
Has anyone else experienced this? Is there a solution?
Update: It seems like Google Toolbar might be the cuplrit. See this bug report for details. I’ll disable the toolbar and see how things go.
Update 2: Well that wasn’t it. I’m running no plugins at all now, and the problem persists. There must be some kind of bug in the Javascript interpreter.
Larry Osterman asks, “Where do you go to get answers to your technical questions?”
I know it is going to seem like I’m picking on Larry or Microsoft, but I’m not. I want to use this opportunity to point out something remarkable about Google, and about the search biz in general.
Just about every comment on Larry’s post gives the same obvious answer, to which he responds, “…for those of you proposing “Google” as the generic answer, what happens when the answer isn’t on the search engines?
Here’s my answer (prepare yourself): If Google doesn’t turn up the answer, I believe with very high probability that an answer simply does not exist.
Here’s how I Google: I enter a minimal combination of fairly specific search terms (ie, “nvidia vista rotate”) and scan the first page of results. If I don’t see what I am looking for in the first page of hits, I try different search terms. Stop and think about that for a minute. Google is so good that I readily blame myself for poor results. I think, “Google can’t be wrong — I must be using it stupidly.”
When I’m forced to make more than a few search attempts, or to look past the first couple pages of results, I have high confidence that the information I am seeking does not exist on the web*.
You can’t buy trust like that. This is the insurmountable challenge facing all competing search engines: search is a solved problem.
*Note: Sometimes this is because I am attempting to ask a very hard question. More often, it’s because I’m asking a question so stupid that the web can’t be bothered to answer it.
There are a huge number of Santa or Christmas-related ads on my site lately. I can only guess that this is because of my family (and domain) name. I find this quite amusing.
Seems like Adsense could use some tweaks in the relevance department.
If you like watching lecture videos, try searching for engEDU over at Google Video. Google is an important stop on the nerd lecture circuit, and they are cool enough to share their tech talks with the rest of us.
Here are a few good ones to get you started:
…you never know what you might find. I’ve done this many times, and it’s always fun.
Tonight, I was listening to the first episode of Triangulation, which was a disussion between Larry Lessig, John C Dvorak, and Leo Laporte about the Google Book Search project.
Afterwards, I Google-Booked myself and got a big surprise: it turns out that my name is actually in a book.
This is a chapter of ShaderX3 that was written by my coworker and good friend Kent Knox. My name is mentioned in the acknowledgments, along with our fellow team members Jim and Navreet.
Pretty cool.
As a side note, I also Google-Booked my rather Italian family name and found some references to organized crime.
Technorati beware, Google Blog Search has launched.
If you search for “craptimizing”, I’m the only hit.
Today I was looking for information on GCC’s -static switch. Naturally, I Googled gcc -static.
The results were horrible.
I was shaken to the core. How could this be? Google is infallible. Google is the second coming of Christ. Google can borrow my car and go on romantic vacations with my wife. I trusted Google.
I was just about to go on a profanity-laced tirade, when I realized: Google has a special meaning for minus.
To Google, a minus prefix means “please only give me results that do not include this word”. Thus, I was actually asking for pages about “gcc” but not “static”. The query gcc "-static" was far more effective.
Please forgive me, Google. I’m sorry I ever doubted you.
BTW, Google has a nice cheat sheet to help prevent such mishaps.
I just discovered the very cool Google “filetype” keyword. For example, you can search for “redhat filetype:torrent”.
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