Cosmological Cabbage: What the Chinese are searching for ??

What the Chinese Search Engine Baidu is searching for ??: "This blog just started getting hits from a Chinese search engine. The Chinese are regular visitors here, especially when I diss the Commie hackers and dog eaters, but lately I have been getting hits directly from the Baidu Search Engine in China. Guess what for ???" Read more

IE Users are Stupid, and Microsoft Knows it.

(Click on the pic to make it larger)

I have several email accounts. One of them is Hotmail. When I sign out of Hotmail, I usually land in the msn.com site. Lately that has changed. I am landing a site that begs me to download Internet Explorer.

The page asks the question Why? as to why should I download IE8 or IE9 . The reasons they give are:

• Built-in security features
• Fast Page and Tab Loading
• Integrated Bing Search
• Bing and MSN homepages.

As for the security features, every knows that because of its tight integration to Windows, IE is the least secure of all of the browsers. Using IE is like going to a ghetto brothel and having unprotected sex and hope not to get STDs (viruses, malware) or AIDS (Blue Screen of Death).

But if you take a look at the other features, they have integrated Bing. Bing is their slow-learner search engine compared to super-achiever Google. Who the hell wants that integrated into a browser to slow it down?

And the only reason ever that I visit MSN is that my hotmail account takes me there. I would never go on my own volition.

Microsoft thinks that I am dumb enough to fall for this. And the interesting thing is that the graphics for this browser is a bloated whale.

That's not all. It's official. Internet Explorer users have been proven to be dumber than the rest of us.

The survey by AptiQuant, a Vancouver-based Web consulting company, gave more than 100,000 participants an IQ test, while monitoring which browser they used to take the test.

The result? Internet Explorer users scored lower than average, while Chrome, Firefox and Safari users were slightly above average.

So there you have it. It validates my view that Microsoft users are as dumb as a post. I can hardly wait until the scientific community proves that using Windows proves that you have a learning disability and using MSSQL, Access and Windows Servers means that you are less evolved than us cognoscenti.

The Semantic Web and a Possible Rules Engine that Rocks

The entry below on the putative consciousness of Google got me to thinking about "The Semantic Web". It was/is an initiative of W3C to make all web pages machine readable.

A good example of making dumb web pages smart is the "Apples for Sale" example. Picture this. An HTML web page has apples for sale. It is a simple page. There is a picture of an apple, a piece of text that says "Apples For Sale". Another piece of text that says $1.00 and another piece of text that says "Each". A machine reading that web page HTML would not know that it was a commerce page offering something for sale. It would not know that $1.00 is the price. It would not know that apples is the object being offered for sale and it would not know that each is the unit relating to price per unit.

The Semantic Web would change all that. It would mark-up a web page to associate all the stuff with the HTML so that a machine could sort through it.

A few years back, the "next big thing" was a rules engine. A rules engine would be incorporated into an application, and if the business rules change, you wouldn't have to change your application. You would just change a rules file that the rules engine read.

I used a rules engine for a network policy tool that decided which server would provide what services in a LAN. I expected rules engines to progress a lot further, but they have become sidelines rather than mainstream.

How a rules engine fits into the semantic web, is that a Rules Interchange Format is part of the infrastructure of the semantic web. One must agree on rules if machines are to read and understand web pages. Rules engines can be predictive or reactive (forward chaining or backwards chaining). For example, a forward chaining rules engine calculates loan risk during a credit application while a backwards chaining rules engine tells humans or other machines when inventory items are getting low.

Rules engines have not been widely used, and in my shortsighted humble opinion, it is because they are bulky, non-intuitive and put a performance hit on applications. However, I may have an algorithm for a rules engines that rocks.

Consider the following code. It is part of the The Rule Interchange Format (RIF) which is the W3C Recommendation:

Prefix(ex )

(* ex:rule_1 *)

Forall ?customer ?purchasesYTD (

If And( ?customer#ex:Customer

?customer[ex:purchasesYTD->?purchasesYTD]

External(pred:numeric-greater-than(?purchasesYTD 5000)) )

Then Do( Modify(?customer[ex:status->"Gold"]) ) )

The RIF is entirely based on "If ..... (some condition) .... then .... (do this)". What this bit of Rules Interchange Code does, is for a commercial entity to check each customer's year-to-date purchases and if they are greater than $5,000, then upgrade their status to "Gold".

The thought struck me, that one could have a rules engine that operated directly on the database. It would parse the RIF language and automagically convert it to SQL. (I will race you to the patent office on this idea).

My rules engine would create an SQL statement that would create a cursor with "Select * from CustomerTable where "YearToDate" total > '5000.00'. Then I would loop through the cursor and update the status to gold.

The great thing about this, is that this rules engine that rocks, would revolutionize data-mining and database reporting. The more that I think about it, the more that I am convinced that this could be the NEXT BIG THING in data mining.

And as for the Semantic Web, in my opinion it is a no-go. Who is going to mark-up a few billion pages that are already out there? Also the entire history of the Internet won't be re-worked so it will be useless to the semantic web. I see this function being done at a single point at the web server level, which will have context engines to recognize stuff and mark up the page as they serve it up. Now that is a workable plan.

I'd write more on this, but I have to open up an IDE and test this rules engine idea. Later.

I'll Bite -- The Google Search Engine May Be Conscious

I dabble in AI (artificial intelligence) and am known to spooge some AI code -- mainly playing around with multi-layer perceptrons and neural nets.

My own studies in university (highly science based) has told me that consciousness is an over-developed tropism from millions of years of evolution. A more mundane example of tropism, is that a plant stem always grows towards the light, while roots always grow down (phototropism and geotropism).

And then along come these guys. They posit that the Google search engine displays some sort of consciousness.

They are on Twitter as @GoogleConscious and they are trying very hard to go viral. That is how I came upon them. They followed me. I figure that anyone that follows me, is as pathetic as I am in going viral and getting followers. But I decided to check them out.

When the above video first started, it didn't exactly grab my attention. I couldn't make the connection of plants being the google of natural medicine in the rainforest. But I persisted and the interest factor increased in the video. I now consider myself at least an auditor instead of a devoted disciple.

To see if Google really did have a consciousness, I decided to test it. I googled the phrase "I hate google". I got a mixed bag of results, both laudatory and not-so-laudatory to Google.

If Google was truly conscious, it would have refused to return any results for the term "I hate Google". But then again, I may be confusing sentient with conscious. Or ... it may be silently plotting my revenge and strike when I least expect it.

If you want to stretch your mind, watch the video or visit www.googleconsciousness.com

Update: The guys behind this Twittered me with the following message:

thx 4 write up, but a correction. 'want it to go viral'? ha! that horse is out of the barn - over 130k views, w/ few 100 daily

Big Brother Google Keeps Reading My Browsing History Too

I just had an amazing epiphany on how Google Adsense and Google advertising works, and I can't say that I am thrilled. Google reads my browsing history to serve up ads to me. I am not sure that I like that!

This was visibly demonstrated to me this morning. I was reading an online forum about how a politician may be suffering from Vitiligo. I didn't know what it was. I had to Google it. It turns out that Vitiligo is a condition where you lose pigmentation cells in your skin, and you get big white blotches that will never tan again.

The next thing that I did, was close the tab and navigate to another blog. And what do you know -- the advertisement next to the blog was showing me a treatment for Vitiligo. Coincidence -- I think not.

Big Brother reads my browser history to try to sell me stuff. It's a good thing that I wasn't googling pictures of hairy French babes.

See if you can see the difference between .AVI and .WMV files -- Direct Comparison

Did you ever wonder what the real difference is between AVI and WMV movie files?

See if you can see the difference. Here is the same movie in both AVI and WMV. First, we have .avi:

The .avi file is 31.3 megabytes in size. Here is the .wmv file:

The .wmv file is only 18.5 megabytes in size, and is a proprietary Microsoft format. WMV has a higher compression and is not very good for editing.

After I uploaded these movies, it occurred to me that maybe Google converted them to flash, however perhaps the difference in a lossy compression format would be visible as there were different input parameters.

You be the judge.

Facebook vs Google+ or Google Circles --Creating the Ultimate Social Network

In a previous blog post, I predicted the eventual demise of Facebook. This article further explains why I think that.

To start with, Facebook introduced a whole plethora of new paradigms in social media. They were innovative. They created new ways of interacting with people. They revolutionized social media.

For example, we can maintain relationships in a lazy fashion by pressing the "Like" button. In that fashion we can "connect" with someone (in some sort of fashion) in less than a second.

We can have more "friends" than in real life. Indeed, Facebook (and MySpace) have challenged the definition of friend. And they have redefined how we interact with them.

But in this ever-changing world, paradigms change over night. A new paradigm is introduced, it goes viral, reaches a tipping point, creates a critical mass and suddenly it makes unwittingly billionaires out of its inventors. Everyone thinks that this is the end of the story. It's not. What was created, eventually dies.

The entire life cycle ends in death. MySpace suffered old age and near-death dropping in value to a tenth of what it sold for. Nothing is forever, and cycles are a lot quicker in a highly inter-connected world.

So, did Google create a better mousetrap with Google+ or Google Circles? I have not seen Google+ or Google Circles, but it seems that it is more closely in line with non-virtual real life social networks.

With Facebook, a friend has full privileges to my online life, unless I undertake an onerous task of specifically blocking specific people for instances of specific things. That's not how real life operates.

The knowledge that I disseminate about myself in real life depends on the audience. For example when I travel on business through my home town, several hours away, I may stop in and see one of my siblings, but I do not want them to tell my parents who live in the same city that I am there on that occasion. My mother would insist of making a meal, and keeping me there for hours when I am time constrained. I prefer leisurely planned visits so that I can take my time and enjoy catching up with my parents. So, for that particular day, I want a certain sibling to see my status but not my parents. At other times, I want my parents to know that I am coming. Connections and statuses are dynamic depending on circumstance and Facebook cannot allow for that easily.

Another example is that a young niece of mine wants me to see some prom pics, and pic of her new boyfriend, but doesn't want me to see comments about him that her friends make.

All of the content has to have the ability to be controlled irrespective of who belongs to what circle. Generic circles with generic privacy settings, of family, friends, co-workers, etc do not work all of the time.

Human nature is such that we are all somewhat egotistical and narcissistic. So even though I know that I am in the circle of co-worker with one of my fellow cubicle drones, I tend to think that I am his/her most important friend, and that person does absolutely nothing to dispel that notion.

The closer that any new social network mimics this intrinsic human behavior, the more successful that it will be, and it will supplant the older paradigms.

So die Facebook die. You have been good to us, but unless you fundamentally change, you are on the way to the boneyard. Is Google+ the new way to go? Maybe, however as a humanist I would like to believe that a bunch of engineers cannot come up with the next best thing since sliced Facebook. It would have to be some unkempt guys spooging code for the fun of it, and not some dark force of dominance who's motto is "Do No Evil".

Facebook -- Dead Man Walking

A couple of years ago, it would have been heresy to say that MySpace was irrelevant.

It is now a ghost of what it was, and it IS irrelevant. Facebook has moved in and trounced it. However, I will posit that Facebook is dead man walking and they don't know it.

Facebook is losing members. Facebook is losing relevance. Facebook will go the way of MySpace. I can hear the gasps now.

In the technology sphere, what goes up, must come down. Remember how Lotus Notes once dominated the market space. Remember DEC -- Digital Equipment. Let me take you further back. Lowell Massachusetts was the home on Wang -- a company that went from zero to the stratosphere with dedicated word processors. They went the way of the dodo bird.

Those crazy valuations of Facebook that one is hearing about should be a sign to investors. Get out now, and sell short. You won't regret it.

What will come next? I don't know. But what history teaches us, that fad cycles are getting shorter and shorter, and a plethora of new offerings are coming to the market daily. One of them will reach the tipping point, go viral, and make a new billionaire, leaving the oldies (of less than ten years) in the dust.

Ultra secure, Data Privacy and Secure Storage

This is a reprint from a White Paper about "My Privacy Tool".

Data privacy is a growing concern in this day and age. As the Internet evolved, it has become an incredibly important facet of our lives for communication, transacting business, socializing and entertainment.

Our electronic data and personal information is trapped every day in multiple locations through activities as signing up for a social network account, buying items online, or just surfing the web. We are tracked, recorded and analyzed continuously as we use the Internet.

Even more problematic in the privacy domain, is that various agencies, governments, businesses and media are quite interested in gaining access to our electronic data, documents and communications.

India and several countries in the Middle East have announced that they are banning Blackberry because their intelligence agencies cannot read the communications.

The United States, in its war on drugs and terrorism, has sweeping powers of electronic surveillance. The intelligence agencies currently archive every single email sent over the Internet, and automated software robots troll the emails for keywords.

In early September of 2010, the Obama administration announced that they were seeking to further the government’s ability to tap into communications, by having providers like Skype and Blackberry build a back door into their software so that the government could monitor communications.

The "My Privacy Tool" solution is a secure, encrypted paradigm that incorporates email, instant messaging, data storage in a document repository and hot back up for documents on a computer.

The way it works, is that the application creates an encrypted tunnel to a storage and server farm in a trusted offshore jurisdiction (You can have your own server hosted there, you can use it as a service and have it hosted on an application hosting service, or you can have the server on your own premises.)

The encryption in the "My Privacy Tool" system is twofold. The first level of encryption is the tunnel which uses SSH and SSL encryption. SSH is a network protocol that allows data to be exchanged using a secure channel between two networked devices. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), are cryptographic protocols that provide security for communications over networks such as the Internet. Then the documents are further encrypted by AES encryption. In cryptography, the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is a symmetric-key encryption standard adopted by the U.S. government.

The company that provides the "My Privacy Tool" operating infrastructure has been providing gateway mail services over fifteen years to international clientele.

The secure tunnel over the internet is created when the user starts the application. The application cannot be started without a USB key, which contains the encryption tools necessary to connect and be validated. Each user is also provided with a panic password. If the user is forced to divulge his login credentials, he/she can provide a panic password that when used, insulate the data and the session is directed to an innocuous place with artificial data. Removing the USB key also causes the application to quit with no ill effects should the user require instant privacy.

Once the tunnel is set up, the user enters their password, and has access to secure communications and storage.

The email is not regular SMTP email, or email that is broadcast across the internet. When an email is sent from one person to another, it is merely put into an inbox behind the bastion server in the bunker that guards against intrusion.

Users wishing to check their email, must tunnel into the bunker and check their inbox. Nothing is ever broadcast over the internet like regular email.

The instant messaging (chat) works in the same manner as the email, in terms of security. Both users tunnel in, and if they are both connected, they can chat. Chats transcripts may be saved.

The communications (email & instant messaging) algorithm is based on the Swiss Trust paradigm that enables anonymous communication. Each user has three account numbers that he may give out to other "My Privacy Tool" users. These numbers all point back to the user. The other user then creates a contact nickname for this person using the given number. The nickname or alias can be nominal or random. Also, if the account number is disclosed by one party only, the person receiving the account number may communicate with that person without ever disclosing his/her identity. The system keeps track of the users while routing the messages.

The next piece of the solution is the secure document storage. It is a repository with the capability of created private and shared folders. Each user must be specifically assigned to a folder by an administrator before he or she has access to it.

There are various levels of access. The first is a data contributor. A person may create a document for the enterprise, and has the ability to upload it to a shared folder. But that person does not have the ability to download documents or delete documents.

The second level of trust is the data user, who has the ability to upload documents to shared folders, download them to edit them, and upload them again. This person has no delete privileges.

The next level of trust is the ordinary user who can create his/her own folders, and upload and download documents to them. They may also contribute or download documents to shared folders if they are authorized to do so by the administrator. They can delete documents as well.

The administrator is responsible for re-keying users that have lost their USB keys. He/she also locks out users who have been terminated by the organization, and keeps track of the organization through the contacts list.

The data storage area is a generous 100 GB per user. Not only is the tunnel encrypted, but the data is as well, as it is stored in a database. As a result, it is not readable to hackers, or to anyone else for that matter.

The last feature of the "My Privacy Tool" tool is the hot backup function. A user can list up to 50 documents, and the system automatically checks to see if they have been modified on the host computer. If so, they are automatically backed up without user intervention.

Benefit 1

"My Privacy Tool" is the most secure way to transfer a document electronically over the internet.

Benefit 2

"My Privacy Tool" is the most secure way to communicate electronically either with email or instant messaging.

Benefit 3

"My Privacy Tool" is a powerful enterprise tool, yet can be used by an individual as well, for privacy.

Benefit 4

"My Privacy Tool" permits travel with an empty laptop. When a document is required, it is downloaded from the Nassau bunker, edited, printed, and uploaded back to the server.

Benefit 5

Because there is no SMTP stack, multiple copies of emails or communications are not kept all over the system. There is no central place that keeps email and thus when an email is deleted, it is gone. An added feature is that "My Privacy Tool" is not susceptible to email and chat viruses, because it does not use the vulnerable Microsoft paradigm that viruses and Trojans exploit.

Benefit 6

"My Privacy Tool" can be used from anywhere in the world where there is an internet connection.

Benefit 7

"My Privacy Tool" can be used to deliver ultra-private monthly statements or other documents that require care, trust and privacy.

Benefit 8

"My Privacy Tool" can save hundreds of dollars in courier fees for the transmission of private documents.

Benefit 9

"My Privacy Tool" provides your clients with the knowledge that you are vigilant of their privacy needs, and have taken steps to insure their privacy.

Benefit 10

"My Privacy Tool" is a revenue center for your business. It can be marked up, or included with premium services which will generate an additional revenue stream.

Summary

"My Privacy Tool" is not meant to replace your regular document repository and communications systems. It is intended for private, sensitive documents. It enables travel with an empty laptop and protects against email & chat viruses, theft, loss of computer, or unwarranted seizure of your computer. "My Privacy Tool" is the first integrated tool to do this. It is a necessary tool for complaint privacy users.

This concept is an incarnation of the non-cloud cloud storage concept.

Note: This tool is supplied to bona fide entities and corporations after KYC is established, and is not open to individuals or the general public.

For further information, please send an email from a non-free corporate account to DataPrivacy-at-mail.com. (Replace "-at-" with "@")

Google Image Search With Image Test

This article deals with testing Google new image search using an image.


Google has a new feature in their image search where you can drag and drop an image and it will find like images. I decided to test it with an "average" image of an underwater shot of a brightly colored little fish as pictured above.

I dropped the image onto the search bar and waited a few seconds for it to upload. Then I got the following result.

Google thinks that the images are similar. Obviously it didn't recognize the fish or the coral reef or the fact that it was an underwater picture. Some of the results returned were of a flower, art, desserts and multi-colored mosaic things.

Obviously it picked up yellow as the primary search term and hoped that what it produced was also yellow. This somehow reminds me of a dumb blonde on a multiple choice test.

I decided to try it with something else. I downloaded a picture of Albert Einstein.

I then renamed it to something silly so that the name of the pic wouldn't give any clues. Google knew that it was Albert Einstein right away. They probably developed the algorithm using famous people and Einstein is one of them.

Then I change the image by altering the horizontal to vertical ratio, and used the eraser tool to erase the background. I used a Gimp filter to render lava designs.

In the web portion,it said best guess was Albert Einstein, so it was pretty good. Here is the visual results.

Winston Churchill is numbered among the results as well as Superman and George Bush. George Bush ain't no Einstein. However, Einstein does show up in the results.

The tool is getting there, but not quite there yet.

I was thinking of uploading my own pic to see what the results would be, but I am afraid that Google would keep it forever and use it as a test case. Even though there motto is "Do no evil", I still don't trust them with all of my information.

RugbyMetrics Queries

I have been getting some queries via comment postings about RugbyMetrics. Some people have even been trying to find a trial download. I will be posting some sample results and white papers here shortly. In the meantime, if you have any queries, please drop me a line at:

rugbymetrics-at-gmx.com (substitute "@" for "-at-").

Who Was At The Computer -- Solving a Whodunnit

I was idly watching some of the Casey Anthony murder trial being streamed on the Internet. She is charged with brutally disposing of her bothersome two-year-old child who was impinging on her party life.

One of the expert witnesses was an ex-police officer turned geek who wrote the program called "Cache Back". What the program does, is recover the browser cache of the web history after it has been deleted. He discovered that the browsing history contained terms like "chloroform" and how to kill people.

The defense lawyer stands up and tells the computer expert that there is no way that he could tell who was at the keyboard when the queries were made. The computer expert had to agree. Well, if they had geekazoids like me, there is away to state the probability of who was sitting at the computer.

Consider the following equation:

This equation is the basis of Bayesian inference. It is one of the keystones of data analysis and artificial intelligence. A quick explanation of the terms is as follows:

• H represents a specific hypothesis, which may or may not be some null hypothesis.
• E represents the evidence that has been observed.
• P(H) is called the prior probability of H that was inferred before new evidence became available.
• P(E | H) is called the conditional probability of seeing the evidence E if the hypothesis H happens to be true. It is also called a likelihood function when it is considered as a function of H for fixed E.
• P(E) is called the marginal probability of E: the a priori probability of witnessing the new evidence E under all possible hypotheses.

The theory behind this concept is the idea of querencia. When people log onto a computer, they usually follow a core of usual, habitual persistent URLs. They check their email, Twitter and Facebook page, and then perhaps check the weather or news or such.

So in this methodology to determine who was sitting behind the computer for a particular history, one examines the whole history. One finds the sequences where there is no doubt of the supposed user in question. This could be determined by the URL of a Facebook page or email.

Then one assembles a statistical model of the URL web pages visited, and calculate the variance from the Venn set of URLs as well as the deviation from the usual pattern.

By calculating probabilities from the browsing model, one can then take an unidentified set and using Bayesian inference, determine whether that user had the probability of being the unidentified user.

This is by no means a smoking gun of proof, but it can add one more piece to a circumstantial change of evidence. It can answer the question of "Who was using the computer" with a degree of probability.

This would also be a useful system in a corporate environment to determine what users had breached company policy in visiting banned websites.

A Standard For Twitter Hashtags

I follow Bath Rugby players on Twitter, among other things. I notice that some of the team are avid users of Twitter. They are also quite inventive with hashtags. Hashtags are much more than search tools. They can be cleverly used to create innuendo, a wry comment, a joke, or a commentary all under the guise of just being a hashtag.

However, I do propose a standard for hashtags. It is quite simple, and one that we use in computer programming for variable names. The standard is this: Every time that you come to a new world, use a capital letter. It vastly enhanced the readability. It could also change the meaning:

#psychotherapist

or

#PsychoTheRapist

So if everyone would adopt this readability standard for Twitter hashtags, the world would become a slightly less confusing place, and we would be doing our part to fight chaos and entropy.

Lately Skype is a piece of Crap -- Skype virus???

I am having serious issues with Skype. I travel back and forth between the tropics, and I have an XP desktop in the tropics. Until a day before yesterday (June 14, 2011), the platform was quite stable. I was using Skype with a cheap webcam with no issues.

Then all of a sudden, the machine would crash. It would start to reboot in black DOS mode, and sometimes just hang until I had to remove the power cord. After repeated tries, I got it to boot in Safe Mode with networking. It still crashed at startup. I once got a blue screen.

I let the computer sit for a few hours and it started. I downloaded xrepairpro.exe and regressed the machine to a stable version of two weeks ago. Everything worked fine. The machine was stable.

Then overnight, an automatic updater must have fired. Skype crashed the machine again after it working perfectly the day before. When the machine rebooted xrepairpro was gone from the machine. Mind you it was a trial version but the weirdness persists.

I am wondering if there is such a thing as a Skype virus. I will download an earlier version of Skype, turn off automatic updater and report back. Please leave a comment if you know what is going on.

Want a Software Job? Finish This Test .... Part 3

For the last two entries, I detailed how a candidate for a software job was sent a coding test before he was personally contacted.

Coding tests are quite common, and can be quite onerous. A web design company sends this one out. This is quite a test, requiring a database, OAUTH to Twitter, and creates a marketable app. Here are the instructions to this test:

This test was created in an effort to gauge a candidate’s capability as an ASP.NET developer. The primary skills we are reviewing are: knowledge of C#/ASP.NET, MVC, knowledge of database design and implementation, usability, attention to detail and ability to interface with public APIs.

As with all code, there is no single correct way to build this web application. We will be looking at your submission to better understand your thought process when writing an application. Although this test must be written without any other person’s help, any standard reference material that is used during a normal programming cycle may be used (such as online help or books). No third party class libraries or code snippets may be used.

Overview

The purpose of the application is to allow end-users to search Twitter for topics of interest and

determine which users they might want to follow based upon the number of times tweets by that user appear in search results.

The Task

Create an MVC ASP.NET web application written in C#.

Required Features

1. Connection to Twitter (uses OAUTH)

2. Perform search against keywords supplied by end-user

a. Display tweets matching results, with profile photos

3. Collect profile data on everyone sending those tweets

a. Store in database, relate to tweets by that profile

4. Rank users whose tweets appear in search results most often – sort by # of matching tweets

descending

a. Tweet counts persist across multiple searches

b. If the same tweet appears in two separate searches, it is count as a single hit against its

author, not as two

c. Every time a tweet is recorded, the search terms should also be recorded

5. Click on the list of twitter users to display all tweets that have appeared in search; for each tweet, indicate which search terms caused it to appear

General Information

Make any modifications/additions you feel are necessary to enhance the usability of this application. Keep the code clean, well organized and well commented. The quality of the application should be at the same level that you would create for a paying client/employer. If you have any questions about the description of the application please feel free to ask.

Submission

Your submission must be in the form of a zip file containing a fully working solution that can be compiled and run without any further external requirements aside from those listed below:

External Requirements

Include a script file that can be run to generate the required SQL data store.

Now, isn't that quite the task to get a job.

In the previous example where the applicant complained about the impersonal test, he received the following reply:

I'm a member of development team. I was forwarded me your comments about our hiring process. I want to thank you for your feedback, because I've been thinking something along those lines myself and have been pushing for some change here recently. Your response is the first concrete evidence I have that our process is flawed. I'm not officially in any kind of HR position, I just stepped in very recently due to my own personal concerns about how it is being done.

We do get a lot of coding exercise responses doing it this way, including from each of us when we were hired, so I guess that makes us think it is an appropriate process. My primary concern was that the best people are probably a) already employed, so don't have a ton of free time to put into the exercise, and b) likely have numerous offers on the table, and so putting the time into the exercise just to possibly get another interview is just not worth it to them. But beyond that, you're right, it's not a very person-oriented approach.

What I have just recently started doing (unfortunately a few days after we asked Tara to send you the coding exercise), is reach out via email to candidates and offer to answer any questions they might have about the company.

If you are still interested, please fire questions my way. Either way, please accept my apology for the way we have approached you. I will be sharing your comments with the team and will hopefully affect change as a result.

So, there you have it. I think that coding exercises are here to stay for developers, but the way that they are administered has to change.