Delayed Commentary

Well, I'm very hesitant to post this at all, as it may be feeding the troll, or at least someone who's clearly interested in drawing traffic. So, I'll try to keep it short.

Here's the post; comments were disabled, or I'd have commented directly:

http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/001417.html

I know, nice of him to leave a comment on my original blog post first, amiright? Oh wait...well, maybe he's more interested in being right than setting people straight. Actually, that sounds more like the people that disagree with him (like Jimbo) than him.

Anyway, he totally missed the point here and on his original post. Wikia search was *never* about indexing. In fact, it was the exact opposite. Wikia search was about getting *away* from the mindset that computational indexing and ranking algorithms were the important part of search. BOSS gave them a base set of search results, but the social ranking algorithm was the important part. That was the innovation, and that's what SethF completely overlooked.

Of course, with Wikia Search gone, it's kind of a moot point, anyhow. That said, I'd love to see a similar project appear, especially once the economy gets better. It's clear that Google is doing some experimenting with user-rated search results, but it's not clear how much that impacts their rankings. I would be extremely surprised if the Google ratings have a significant effect.

Disk Utility Errors

Hi - thought I would write a quick note in case other people were having the same error. I'm not sure if this is a problem with just disk images or if it is true for normal (physical disk) partitions as well.

The error is that when you try to resize a partition to make it larger, you get the following message: "MediaKit reports partition (map) too small." Other posts online suggest that this can be due to certain types of other partitions on disks (such as NTFS) that OS X may have trouble resizing. In my case, however, the only partition on the disk image was an HFS+ (Mac OS X Extended) partition.

What ended up being the problem was that it was a GUID partition scheme. While I could increase the overall size of the disk image, I was not able to increase the size of the partition (leaving a bunch of empty, unpartitioned space at the end of the disk image). The solution I found was to reformat the disk image (WARNING: this WILL erase any data on the disk image) and partition it using an "Apple Partition Map" instead of the GUID Partition Map. Upon switching that, I was able to resize the HFS+ (Mac OS X Extended) partition.

This is kind of an odd error, because GUID is the partitioning scheme used to boot Intel Macs.

Hopefully this helps other people who may be having the same problem. To check what partitioning format your disk image uses, mount it, then open Disk Utility. Click the disk (not the partition), and look at the bottom of the window for "Partition Map Scheme." If it says GUID, and you're getting the error above when trying to resize partitions, that may just be the problem.

I put together an email of interesting observations from a 96 Taurus long-term review Motor Trend did. Fittingly for the market segment, they did a consumer-reports style poll of owners. Some interesting results; definitely not what I would have expected from my time spent win a Taurus. Anyway, figured I'd post it here since it's at least decently interesting:

"63.2 percent awarded the Taurus excellent marks for performance and 62.5 percent bestowed similarly high praise in response to our fun-to-drive question. "
"over two thirds of our respondents gave their Taurus excellent marks for handling "
"This is the most fun car I've driven in a long time. It handles extremely well, has adequate engine power and a great sound system...just wish it had less road noise."
"prime on the wish lists for future upgrades ... more interior room."
"Operating cost/mile 7.5¢"
"Braking, 60-0 mph, ft 137"
"I would buy another Ford
96.7%
I would recommend the Taurus
95.9%"


Curiously....
What influenced you
To consider a Ford Taurus?
Looks/style 70.3%
Yet:
SPECIFIC LIKES
Styling 44.1%
Huh? 70.3% of taurus buyers considered a taurus for the styling...but only 44.1% liked the styling?


http://www.motortrend.com/roadtests/oneyear/112_9708_1996_ford_taurus_lx/index.html

Elevators

So, I'm at Adobe this summer after all. I'm still getting into the swing of things, figuring out my schedule, etc. It seems like I really do better on Eastern time; I'm just a lot more alert and ready for action in the morning. Anyway, this is going to be a quick post, and I'll probably be relatively busy this summer, so I probably won't be making any giant posts. However, the elevators in the Almaden building are probably the coolest ones I've seen. They light up which one you should wait next to right after you press a button, so no waiting on which one it'll be. You can press again to de-select a floor, too. Oh, and the door close button lights up when you press it. Not sure if it actually does anything; it never seems like door close buttons do, but at least this one pretends to.

Oh, and this morning, I accidentally went out an emergency exit. Apparently the stairs in the parking garage are emergency-only, and worse, they lock behind you. So the only way out is down. Once you hit the bottom, a motion detector sets off a speaker that says it's an emergency pathway, and to go back to the stairs and use the courtesy phone to call for instructions if it's not an emergency. Only problem is, there wasn't a phone. So...I exited anyway, and it set off an alarm, but fortunately, there was a nice security guard nearby. She really didn't seem as upset as I would have thought. I wonder if that's a common occurance. Definitely an exciting start to my morning. I thought about making that an FML, but the happy ending made me reconsider :D.