For most tasks that I do Linux is by far my choice. I am not necessarily a Microsoft basher, as I believe that they definitely have their place in the world and in large have made the computing industry a better place. However, I was skeptical and did give an eye roll when I first heard about Bing, Microsoft's new "decision engine." To be fair I decided to change my default search engine for one week from Google to Bing. I changed my home page and the search provider in the Firefox search bar. Here are my impressions:

Home Page

There is a certain appeal to the sparse Google home page. I am an engineer and I love things that are straight to the point. So, Google appeals to me on that front. However, the Bing home page managed to be beautiful and sparse at the same time. To me it looks as if Bing stole the Google home page layout and then rearranged it slightly and added a background picture and some useful information. I must say that I am surprised by my decision on this one. I have been a huge fan of the to-the-point Google home page from day one. Sorry Google, but I really like the Bing home page.

Maps

Surprising to me this one goes to Bing. Not only is their presentation better, but the speed is much faster. For the last several months Google maps has been really slow in loading. I've talked to several people who have noticed the same thing. For what seems like forever Google Maps gets stuck on "loading..." for minutes. OK, I'm sure it's not minutes, but it feels like it.

When Google maps first came out they were so far ahead of Mapquest, the then standard for maps, that it was amazing. Unfortunatly, it seems that the maps have not continued to be the subject of much active development.

As far as presentation goes, I love the smooth zooming of the maps. It just seems so fluid in comparison to Google. Also, the "birds eye" view is a really nice touch and I just can't get by without it now. Good job Microsoft.

Shopping

I admit that I don't use the shopping feature very often, but from the few searches I've done I like the results in Bing better. The presentation of the results is far less confusing. What Bing does that I think makes it shine is they seem to group results by items and then to find the list of retailers you drill down into the item. Google presents all items from all retailers and I just get lost.

Search Results

Finally, we get to web search results. This is the feature I consider most important. After all, why do people visit these sites? To find information.

Although I like the way the information is shown in Bing their page ranking/searching algorithm falls short of Google. For many searches Bing shows useful results. However, too many times this last week I've had to revert back to using Google to find something. In the end these are portals to find information so although Google loses out in other categories this one carries far more weight.

Two of the searches in particular that dissapointed me are:

• findbugs
• perforce

I also tried variations and related searches with these and couldn't get the results I wanted. For example, when I searched for "findbugs" in Bing I got a bunch of pages that were about FindBugs, but not the home page. Just now I tried this search again and the home page is the top result, so their page ranking algorithm must have done some learning since I first tried. Another search term that gave me problems was "perforce." Now, I happen to know that the home page is perforce.com, but I wanted to see what Bing said. To my surprise it shows everything but the home page in the search results. There is the wikipedia article about them and a blog and even an Apache Ant task, but no link to perforce.com. So, I try the same thing in Google and get what I expect. Unfortunately, I didn't write down all of my failed Bing searches, but there were several where I ended up resorting to Google for help.

Conclusion

I don't use most of the other features of Google or Bing like news, videos, or images, so I didn't comment on them. Overall I like many things about Bing and will probably continue to use it for many tasks and searches. However, for the time being they still can't touch the search results from Google and until they improve their search ranking algorithm I'm going to have to stick with Google.

Sometimes the most interesting bugs are discovered by pure accident.  I was picking up a few items at one of the United States major pharmacy chains and discovered a flaw in their software.  But first, let me back up and explain something called IIAS.

Inventory Information Approval System (IIAS) is used (or supposed to be used) by all the grocery stores and drug stores through the USA.  When you go to make a purchase of eligible goods using your Flexible Spending Account (FSA) credit card the IIAS is consulted and the register gets a "yes" or "no" on the item.  If the item is eligible for FSA spending and a FSA card is presented for use then only those items given a thumbs up from IIAS are supposed to be charged to the card.  The remaining items are supposed to be paid for by some other means.

At the end of my little shopping trip to the pharmacy I had some items that I knew were eligible for FSA and some that weren't.  After the cashier scanned all the items I swiped my FSA card.  Here's where the accident happened.  The cashier, obviously unaware of FSA cards or the IIAS, was confused by the message her register was giving her.  So told me the card hadn't worked and asked me to swipe it again.  At this point I had no reason to doubt her, so I swiped my card again.  The sale completed and after a brief moment of confusion I realized what had happened.  IIAS and the FSA card authorization system had failed.

What happened was the first time I swiped my card it had actually worked and only the FSA eligible items had been charged to the card.  The cashier didn't know what happened or why the balance remaining was not zero.  So, she thought the card had failed and asked me to try again.  The second time the system should have recognized the card as FSA and that there were no more items eligible items and should have rejected the card.  It didn't.  It allowed the transaction to continue.

This really isn't a life or death bug, but it really is a nuisance.  I had them reverse the charges on the card and then check my items out again.  This time I swiped a different card the second time and everything was happy.  The irritation would come later if I hadn't had them credit the card back.  I would have been contacted and asked to pay back the card for the non eligible items.

This seems like a test case that should have been run but was missed.  Worse yet, it might have been run and a bug filed but never fixed.  I can only speculate why this behavior was allowed, so allow me to rant a bit about a common problem encountered while bug hunting.

By a show of hands how many testers have ever received the "no one will ever do that" response to a bug filed?  Why on earth would anyone swipe a FSA card twice or when no FSA items are pending payment?

A common push-back I've seen from developers is "our users are smarter than that."  OK, so I work on high technology products and our users should be smarter than that.  When it comes to software I don't think it makes a difference how smart your users are supposed to be.  If there is a flaw in the program sooner or later someone will do something they shouldn't have done and the flaw will show its ugly head.  There are certainly going to be higher priorities in many cases, but a wise tester will know when to push to get these "dumb" bugs fixed.

Since getting a video capable iPod I have been looking for good video podcasts. Most I've seen are only so-so, but GeekBrief gets my highest accolades. Cali Lewis stars in this podcast with her husband as producer. What I like about it is the up-to-date technology information and the fun way it is presented. The show is lively, entertaining, and informative. If you haven't already done so then go check it out.

I finally watched the promo video on Data Robotics web site and I must say that I see why. I've been wanting to get some external storage for my computer for quite some time and I must say now that all other solutions pale in comparison to the Drobo. I am totally sold.

In a traditional external storage setup you have an enclosure with one disk. When that disk fills up you need to by another disk and either transfer your files to the new disk or use the two in parallel. Spreading your files across different volumes. If a disk fails you are out of luck and your files are gone. There are external RAID enclosures that will protect you against drive failures, but upgrading their size is a huge problem. All the disks in a RAID array need to be the same size. So, if you have a four disk array and you want to upgrade the size then you need to buy four new disks. Expensive.

In contrast, the Drobo has all the advantages and none of the disadvantages of both single disk and RAID enclosures. With the Drobo you can stick up to four drives in the enclosure, but they appear as one disk. As the Drobo runs out of space you can add in another disk, of a differing size, and it will automatically distribute the data between disks. You can hotswap disks in and out and things just work. The demo video on their web site is really the best way to explain how it works. Essentially, this means that as drive prices come down and you want to swap an older smaller drive out for a larger drive that you need not worry about copying data. Just pull the old one out and stick the new one in. It is a hotswap operation and takes literally seconds. The new drive will be configured and the space will instantly become available to your computer.

My main interest in this technology is not the video aspect, but the storage. I remember when CD-R's first hit the market. Man, those were exciting times. You could fit 650MB of data onto one disc. How awesome was that?! Later, DVD-R's came out and we could now put several GB of data onto a disc. I use my DVD burner all the time for storage and backup purposes. But, I am getting really tired of that whole stack of DVD's that it takes to back up my computer.  What I really want is a Blu-ray or HD DVD burner.

I, of course, expect that the same trend we've seen with CD and then DVD burners will continue.  They start out priced very high, then come down to reasonable levels.  I still can't believe how cheap DVD burners have become.  I expect that once we see these new burners come down to around $100 that I will take the plunge.

One thing past experience has taught is that while technology itself advances the networking or interface protocols tend to remain for some time.  Consider ethernet and how long it has been around.  USB, bluetooth, and firewire have all become standard ways for devices to communicate with each other.  So, while these connection technologies may eventually face the same obsolescence as the devices they interconnect, they are likely to remain standards for a long time.

Automobile manufactures could capitalize on this and instead of pre-installing all the bells and whistles they could simply provide, for example, a car-wide USB hub where all devices could interconnect.  One could envision a vehicle with a built-in computer having a touch panel screen.  As "auto ready" devices are plugged in the computer would download the appropriate drivers, buttons, and screens from the device.  So, plug in an auto ready MP3 player and a new button representing that device would automatically show up.  Put a DVD player in your trunk and LCD screens on the back of each seat and the computer would link them together and stream video over USB (or bluetooth or cartooth or whatever protocol).

Having an in-car USB network would be the ultimate car hackers delight.  What if the engine computer provided read-only data on the USB bus.  A car could be customized the way personal computers are now.  You don't like your dash board?  Swap out the dash for a new one.

I, of course, am dreaming here, but the technology already exists to do this sort of thing.

Growing up watching Star Trek I always wanted one of those cool hand held tablets that always seemed to know everything. They could tap into the ship's computer and get at any information they needed. All from a small device they could carry with them. Gee, wouldn't it be cool if someone would make one of those?

Like all things Star Trek I am convinced that it is only a matter of time before they become a reality. Those magic know-it-all tablets are no different. So, when Amazon announced the Kindle I was keenly interested. Kindle is a small device with an LCD screen that is supposed to look like paper. It is also purported to hold something like 90,000 books and magazines. Crazy! The thing I find very cool is that you can purchase and download books over a wireless connection. There is no need to connect to a computer, the book is zapped to you. I guess that makes Amazon similar to the Enterprise computer. Anything you want is beamed directly to your little hand held tablet.

Of course this cool technology comes with a price. The Kindle retails for $399. Ouch! I know that if I read more real paper books instead of Internet blogs and web sites that I would end up saving money. After all, Kindle books are less expensive than their counterpart paper or hard cover books. Aside from that the wow factor is just not enough for me to justify $400 for a portable book reader.

Although it may be a few more years before I finally get my cool tablet with a direct interface into the main ship computer, I am glad to see that someone finally took the eBook to the next level.

This site now allows OpenID logins. I think OpenID is a great idea. All your information and credentials are maintained in one location, which you can give a secure password. On any site that support OpenID you can then log in. The cool thing is that your password is kept safe. The OpenID enabled sites never see your password.

Here's the basic flow: You navigate to a site that is OpenID enabled. You enter your ID and hit login. The site then contacts the OpenID issuer and asks if it is OK to log you in. You must separately log in to your OpenID provider and grant permission to that site. There is some encryption stuff that goes on under the covers to keep your password safe and to ensure that you are who you say you are. Finally, you are logged in without having to create yet another account or memorize another password.

For more information see the official OpenID website. As an OpenID provider I strongly recomend VeriSign. They are a very reputable company and well known for internet security. You can get your own OpenID by visiting their site here.