By: Steven Citron-Pousty (a)
Created: 1/16/08

While I am glad we got blogging going on the devZone  - I am greatly disappointed in the blogging platform in our devZone. I pulled the trigger on going live too soon but there is a plan to move forward (so no, Fake James you can not take credit).

 

First, we are looking to replace this blogging software with something more industrial strength. I will go back to bloggin on my personal blog until this solution is in place. I find it too frustrating blogging without comments or pingbacks. Matt and Marc are still writing content but I have also encouraged our other teams to hold off blogging until we get the new system in place.

 

Oh and by the way, I hate the urls as much as you do and this goes to show I am not that smart.

By: Steven Citron-Pousty (a)
Created: 1/2/08

Greetings everyone and welcome to the newest addition to the devZone - blogging.

 

If you want to get a feel for where we are coming from you can look at our blogging policy (which is heavily borrowed from IBM and Sun). One of the great things about deCarta is having a management staff (aka Marc and Louis) who "get" blogging and allowed for a sane policy on blogging.

 

Anyone can blog at deCarta and it is up to the teams to decide if they want individual or team blogs. Some of us in marketing have our own blogs but the JavaScript and Web Services team said they were too busy to have individual blogs but thought between all the members of the team they could maintain an interesting blog.

 

Our goal here is to increase the dialog with you. For now commenting is busted but our elves are furiously working on it. Once it is working anyone can read our blogs but you need to be a devZone member to comment on the blogs. Trackbacks will be coming along as well, once that is in place if you are not currently a devZone member and you don't feel like joining then go ahead and respond in your blog and we should get the trackback.

 

I am looking forward to the discussion and this should spur me into more frequent postings (I can't let Marc have the highest post count)!

 

By: Steven Citron-Pousty (a)
Created: 1/2/08

This "press release" was just darn fluffy not to have some fun with.

I mean the title alone is so over the top - Appistry Demonstrates World’s Fastest Geocoding Solution - did they call in Guiness Book on that one?

 

Of course this made the rounds, since who doesn't need a good laugh in the New Year. Given the lack of details in the release about things like say accuracy of results, structured versus unstructured geocoding, if they are all valid addresses, the speed or memory of the machines...  We already had a couple engineering solutions that beat the pants off the world's fastest geocoding solution:

 

Run the benchmark against a dataset with all the addresses in the U.S. pre-geocoded

 

and my favorite (in one line of perl no less)

 

while(<stdin>) { print "0.0 0.0\n"; }

 

 

 How you like me now! You ready for the press release on this one...

So if they really want to throw down the gauntlet on speed of geocoding why not actually publish some real specs and details on what they did. I am sure Appistry make some nice cloud computing software but when talking about benchmarking we could use some more details...