All posts by Alistair Lattimore

About Alistair Lattimore

My name is Alistair Lattimore, I'm in my very early 30's and live on the sunny Gold Coast in Australia. I married my high school sweet heart & we've been together for longer than I can remember. Claire and I started our family in September 2008 when Hugo was born and added a gorgeous little girl named Evie in May 2010. You can find me online in the typical hangouts, Google+, Twitter & facebook. .

Channel Nine CEO Eddie McGuire Resigns

News

On Friday 18th May, Eddie McGuire announced that he will resign as the Chief Executive Officer for the Channel Nine television network. There hasn’t been a lot of coverage as to why he has resigned as the Channel Nine CEO, however he has confirmed that he wasn’t pushed out the door.

In February 2006, I couldn’t believe that Eddie McGuire was appointed as the chief executive office for the Channel Nine TV network in Australia. Soon after the appointment, the Channel Nine CEO dropped his existing television commitments to take care of the business. However, it wasn’t long before he couldn’t resist the pull of being on the television once more and started hosting the 1 vs 100 game show.

Statements released by Channel Nine and Eddie McGuire state that he has signed another five year contract with the Nine network and that he will be involved with program and development for the network in some sort of a creative capacity which apparently suits Eddie McGuire down to the ground. I wonder if he is going to regain the Eddie Everywhere title once more now that he doesn’t have to focus on the the less exciting aspects of running a television network.

Google Search Revolutionised Through Vertical Integration

Search, Websites

Google have announced a revolutionary change to their famed search engine and its called universal search. The millions of people that use Google Search every day of the week would have probably considered it fairly ‘universal’ before, however that hasn’t got a drop on what they’re releasing to the market now!

Google universal search is going to allow you to search, as you did before with the familiar single search box; however many additional sources will be used to formulate the search results. As most people are aware, Google houses many different indexes of information:

  • web sites
  • news
  • books
  • local
  • images

which have been available to internet users through different search locations such as http://www.google.com or http://news.google.com. While separating out various types of search information into different web sites might have made sense from a development and technical level initially, Google were not leveraging their various indexes to their potential. Even with the initial release of the universal search service, I’m sure there will be significant improvements to come in the near future.

The key to the Google universal search is that their disparate search indexes have been vertically integrated. For those that aren’t aware, vertical integration typically refers to taking totally separate sets, be it a business, process or data and combining them into a single unified service. By removing the barriers between their various search indexes, Google have knocked down the information silos they helped build during development.

To the average user, this will mean they are more likely to find the information they are looking for on the Google home page. When a user searches, results will be returned from various sources and combined based on relevance. It will now be common place to see:

  • web sites
  • news
  • books
  • local
  • images
  • video

all within a single search results page. Of course, it is unlikely that a search would return results from all indexes at the same time. After all, the algorithms are looking to return the most relevant content to the user – not the most sources. As such, if the algorithms deem it appropriate then you may only see web and image results with no video or book content.

This is an exciting space and it is going to be interesting watching how the search engine optimisation landscape changes now that Google universal search has been released into the wild!

Signs

Database, Programming

It’s a sign you need either:

  1. more sleep; or
  2. more coffee

when you find code committed into a source code repository that you don’t remember writing and realise when you find it that it was really handy that you wrote that code at some obscure hour of the morning a week ago.

Learning How To Scale An ASP.NET Application

Database, Programming, Work

For the last nine months, the development team at Stella Hospitality Group have been working on integrating a new piece of software into the enterprise. Throughout that process, we’ve come up against various stumbling blocks and subsequently learned how to climb over them.

One of the interesting parts of this project involved learning how to scale an ASP.NET web application. Unlike most other pieces of development we’ve previously worked on, we didn’t have access to hardware and services that were capable of delivering smoking performance (read: Oracle 10g clustered using RAC). As a by product of the constraints which were placed on us, scaling the new web application proved a little harder than it first looked.

Over the course of the next few weeks, I’ll be posting about various steps which we’ve taken to scale our ASP.NET application. Some of the points are hinged in the physical world, others operational and of course technical as well. Items which come to mind immediately include:

  • load balancers
  • clustering physical servers
  • clustering web servers
  • web gardens
  • user interface process control
  • session handling
  • web services & XML
  • spike testing

Microsoft Live Search Tactics To Claw Back Market Share

Internet, Search, Websites

I keep getting the annoying nag message from Microsoft MSN Messenger to upgrade and I’ve been ignoring it for months. I’ve currently got the clearly outdated version 7.5 installed, which is no where near bleeding edge enough – so apparently I need to upgrade post haste.

Microsoft 'MSN Messenger' search result pointing to Microsoft Live Search within Google pay per click marketingBeing the diligent computer user, I uninstalled MSN Messenger 7.5 and the original Windows Messenger that comes with Windows XP Professional. Not knowing the web address for MSN Messenger, I googled msn messenger to be presented with the search result to the left.

After glancing at the advertisement and seeing “Msn Messenger” as the advertising text, I clicked the link expecting to be taken to the Messenger home page on the Microsoft web site. No, that isn’t what I got at all – instead it redirected me to the new Microsoft Live Search web site, with my “MSN Messenger” search already performed. Not only that, they had a nifty JavaScript sliding panel with some useful advertising promoting Microsoft Live Search and telling me that it is “the ducks nuts”. After a few seconds, the useful advertising panel automatically slided away to leave the standard Microsoft Live Search page.

Microsoft Live Search presenting 'useful advertising' telling you why their service is so fantastic after getting to their search engine via a Google search!When the biggest software company in the world is required to participate in pay per click advertising on a competitors network to drive traffic to their own search engine, I think it is a pretty sure sign that their competitor is doing something right. I can understand that someone like Google and Yahoo! might advertise on their competitions web sites for pay per click marketing services but I’m yet to see an advertisement on Google or Yahoo! telling me that I should be using their competitors search engines.