Surprised me with the marketing tagline: The new Dell Streak.  More than a smartphone.  More than a tablet. 

While it’s interesting that Dell has a phone that is based on Google Android, what I actually find most interested about this is that it uses Gorilla Glass.  For those that don’t know, Corning invented Gorilla glass back in 1962 as a super strong glass.  It has pretty much sit lifeless as a product ahead of its time and didn’t have any real applications until recently.  Gorilla glass is perfect for tablets, phones, flat screen televisions because of it’s strength and durability. 

I know that Dell has been in the PDA market for years, and I also knew that the Dell super megastore has sells phones.  The Dell Streak is finally here!  Looks like you can have one for only $549.99, and only $299.99 with a 2 year contract on AT&T.  Another funny thing is that the Dell phone isn’t listed on the Dell store! 

Directly from the Dell Streak site:

Introducing the Dell Streak. The perfectly-sized, go-anywhere entertainment, social connection and navigation device.

• Widescreen display optimally designed for mobile web, video and movies
• Integrated social networking widgets and apps, plus tons of apps through the Android Marketplace
• Crystal-clear damage-resistant Gorilla^®  glass screen
• Google Maps^TM  with navigation and text-to-voice, turn-by-turn directions with Street View
• Multitasking Google Android OS that give you the freedom to do what you want

Time Lapse Photography is actually a cinematography technique where a series of photos are taken at one rate and then played back as a video at a much faster rate than they were taken.  In this instance, I programmed the camera to take a photo every 15 seconds. 

This was all shot using my old Canon PowerShot SD 950 on a $10 mini tripod just sitting on the dashboard.  To the best of my knowledge, there are very few (if any) point and shoot cameras that will actually do time lapse photography, and this one doesn’t either.  Thanks to a great group of developers, we have the CHDK!

What is CHDK?

• Canon Hack Development Kit;
• Temporary – No permanent changes are made to the camera.
• Experimental – No warranty. Read about the risks in the FAQ
• Free – free to use and modify, released under the GPL.
• Professional control – RAW files, bracketing, full manual control over exposure, Zebra-Mode, Live histogram, Grids, etc.
• Motion detection – Trigger exposure in response to motion, fast enough to catch lightning.
• USB remote – Simple DIY remote allows you to control your camera remotely.
• Scripting – Control CHDK and camera features using ubasic and Lua scripts. Enables time lapse, motion detection, advanced bracketing, and much more.
• More – read the Manual & explore this wiki.

Then I used Picasa to make the time lapse movie.  Within Picasa, you can select all of the photos that you want to stitch together in a movie.  Click ‘CREATE’ in the top navigation bar, and then select ‘MOVIE’.  A very simple dialog opens that lets you add Slides (text), load an audio track, pick the transitions between videos, and then even publish the video straight to YouTube.

I am a huge fan of free software.  I think that there are tons of great free software packages available: WordPress, Ubuntu, Microsoft SharePoint Foundation, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Express,  Picasa, TeraCopy and many more.  When most people hear FREE software, they hear Open Source.  However, not all free software is open source.  One of the absolute greatest free software packages available for you to use today is Microsoft Search Server 2010 Express.  Any association, nonprofit, charity, school or company can use this software to significantly improve their search capabilities.  Internally searching the S:\ drive or externally on you existing public facing website – Microsoft Search Server 2010 brings a lot of great capabilities to the table – for free.

This is just a series of screen caps of the vanilla install environment.  Keep in mind the requirements for Search Server 2010 Express are similar to those of Search Server 2010 and SharePoint 2010: 64-bit edition of Windows Server 2008 Standard, Enterprise, Data Center, or Web Server with Service Pack 2 (SP2) or 64-bit Windows Server 2008 R2 (various flavors).

I’ve installed this on 64-bit Windows Server 2008 R2.

After downloading and launching the executable, you should see:
 

There are various links in the splash screen, but basically under Install, you can let the wizard install all of the prerequisites needed (including IIS).  If you want, you can manually download and install all prereqs to ensure they are installed exactly how you want, see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb905370.aspx.

Even if you install the prereqs manually, it’s still a pretty good idea to run the wizard to validate your environment.  The wizard will check that everything is right as rain before installing.

After accepting the Ts & Cs, the prereq wizard will run through…

Complete!  The prerequisites are now installed (or validated) and you can run the actual Search Server 2010 Express install.

There are two modes for installing Search Server 2010 Express:

• Complete – allows you to specify a SQL Server installation
• Stand-alone – automatically installs and configures an instance of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Express (which is also free!)

I’ve selected Stand-alone which should go through and configure absolutely everything I need to have Search Server 2010 Express running.

The actual install goes fairly quickly.  The installation provides an opportunity to run the Configuration Wizard immediately or not. 

With Search Server 2010 Express in Stand-alone mode, the configuration wizard is pretty straightforward. 

Simple dialog making sure you know that some services may be restarted.

After clicking Yes, sit back and relax for a bit.  I have a pretty fast virtual environment and the configuration screens take about ten minutes.

And…

After the configuration wizard finishes, you should automatically be taken to the Central Administration screen with a few steps listing how to begin configuration of your specific search implementation.

You should also notice that you now have some new Administrative shortcuts installed, namely a folder with shortcuts to the SharePoint 2010 Central Administration, SharePoint 2010 Products Configuration Wizard, and the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell and a second folder called Microsoft SQL Server 2008.  What?  SharePoint 2010?  SQL Server 2008?  But I thought I installed Search Server 2010 Express.  Several Microsoft products utilize SharePoint as the interface for the applications.  SharePoint uses SQL Server.  SharePoint Foundation is free and provides a great user interface experience, security components, an application development framework, a deployment framework, and so much more.  SQL Server 2008 Express is free and is, well, SQL Server – arguably one of the strongest database management platforms on the market. Once any developer learns to leverage the SharePoint framework, the time and effort required to write a web based application can be significantly shortened.  After all, that’s what frameworks and APIs provide – the ability to leverage existing ‘stuff’ and not having to write everything from scratch every time.

Get more info directly from Microsoft.
Marketing site: http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/searchserverexpress/en/us/default.aspx
Download site: http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/searchserverexpress/en/us/download.aspx
TechNet site: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/enterprisesearch/ee263912.aspx#tab=1

While I wrote a very generic overview of search technology as a favor in a blog post today, it appears that I’m not alone in thinking about the history of search today.  Xeni pointed out two other History of Search items today as well.  It appears that my text heavy approach to the topic has been trumped by these great infographics!

Infographic by the PPC Blog.com

Infographic byWordStream Internet Marketing

Original Photo by JohnStover

There are literally hundreds and thousands of ‘search engines’ out there. Some of these search engines are for finding stuff on the Internet, like Google, Bing and Yahoo. Some search engines are more specialized, like the search box you see on a single web site that searches only that single website. Search is an incredibly complex topic that has an astounding number of factors that contribute to finding that single important piece of content that you are trying to find. Frankly, Google spoiled all of us. I expect to find exactly what I’m looking for out of the millions of pages of stuff all over the internet by simply typing a single word into a single little box. If I don’t find what I want on the first page of results, I might try changing my search a little bit or adding two words, but I won’t keep trying for long.

The Internet contains at least 27.5 billion pages, as of Tuesday, 03 August, 2010, according to http://www.worldwidewebsize.com. Not only do I expect to find exactly what I want on the Internet, but if I use the search on your website, I get EXTREMELY frustrated when it doesn’t find exactly what I want when I want. How is this possible? I know what I want is on your website somewhere. Figure out what I want and show it to me! And please do it in under a second if it’s not too much trouble!

In the beginning, search was simple. Search was based on keyword matching. If I typed in a keyword, the ‘search engine’ scanned the content and found instances of that word and showed me hyperlinks with those results. I could search for ‘blog’ and the search would show me any page that had the word ‘blog’ in it. That was perfect! It’s all anyone needed. Then websites started to grow in complexity. Soon, each website had thousands of pages. If I did a simple keyword search, I would get hundreds of results. This wasn’t useful anymore. Search had to get better.

Search introduced major improvements. Boolean search operators were introduced. I could search for “SharePoint AND WordPress”. I could search for “SharePoint NOT WordPress”. I had some control on what I was searching for exactly. I also got search result sorting. I could sort all of the results to see the most recently created pages at the top. After all, if the page was newer then it clearly was more relevant, right?

That statement introduces a very important topic: RELEVANCE. Relevance denotes how well the results meet the need of the user searching; see the all-knowing Wikipedia for more details at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relevance_(information_retrieval). Relevance is determined by the search algorithm. That’s right; a computer programmer wrote a mathematical formula that uses the available information to determine the relevance of the content to your search word. In reality, that algorithm was written by a very large team of programmers, analysts, mathematicians, executives and many others. And the search is getting more complicated and far better every day.

Most modern search engines are comprised of two different primary components: the INDEX and the QUERY. The index is just like the index at the back of a book. Rather than scanning all of the content in real time, the search engine builds a big index of all of the content. This is much faster than scouring through the content in real time. Furthermore, the index can be optimized for the type(s) of searches being performed. Your individual website search is responsible for searching your website. Facebook search searches Facebook – the profiles, comments, photos, tags, etc. Google and Bing try to search everything – your website, my website, her website, their website. Your website search should search ALL of your content – web pages, HTML, PDF files, Word docs, PowerPoint files, Excel files, images, comments. The index should include ALL of your content.

So how is the index built? Usually indexes are built by a Web crawler – some type of automated software that scours all of the links and content on your site. The index uses the concept of word breaker to look for different words. In the English language, there are many characters that break words apart. Spaces, hyphens, periods, colons, semicolons, exclamation points all separate words in English. When you get into multi-lingual content, the story gets even more complicated because other languages don’t even use the same characters. So the crawler goes through all of the content and builds this enormous index for use in queries. The index contains the words, counts, metadata, information about where the words were found, information about the pages, information about the documents, titles, cached portions of pages and much more.

When a user enters a query, the search engine uses it’s algorithm to provide the most relevant information possible. What determines relevancy? There are many factors that should determine relevancy…

• Content Type. What type of content is the word found on? PowerPoint files typically have fewer words. If your keyword is one of the 20 words on a slide, that file is likely more relevant than a Word document or web page that has 2000 words.
• Location. If your keyword is found on the homepage or main landing page it is likely more relevant than if the page is found 30 nodes away through some obscure navigation.
• Popularity and linking.  How popular is the page? How many other pages and documents link to the page? How frequently is the page visited?
• Analytics.  How frequently is the page visited with similar queries? If 50 other people searched for the same keyword(s) you searched for, which pages did they eventually go to?
• Words. How many times is the keyword on the page?  How many
• Metadata. Is your keyword in the metadata or just the main content area? Is your keyword in the page title?
• Language Detection. Is my browser set to Spanish? Should documents in Spanish show up with a higher ranking in the search results?
• Variants (Word Stemming). What if I search for the word “Flying”? Should the search engine also search for Fly and Flew and Flown? What if it’s a different language? Should the search engine be aware of other word variations?
• Human Influence. What about best bets, synonyms and keyword mapping. If someone is on the Association site and searches for the word Meeting, do you want to artificially influence the search results to show ‘Sign up for the Annual Conference’ as the first result?  I bet the conference organizers do!

As you can see, the effectiveness of the search engine depends on the ability to determine relevance and then use that relevance to rank the search results. Modern search engines are available both inherently integrated and completely independent from your website content management technology. WordPress, for example, has a built in search that is pretty simple (and thus largely ineffective).  It’s great for finding a keyword, but I would hardly call it a search engine.  Both Microsoft and Google provide real search solutions.  The have solutions for you at every level: your desktop, your enterprise, your website, and the Internet.  We are focusing primarily on your website and to a lesser extent your enterprise. The Google Search Appliance provides a great solution that provides excellent relevancy that can be customized for your particular web site needs. The Google Search Appliance and Google Mini require annual maintenance fees.

Microsoft provides a free solution to search for your website and for the enterprise. That’s right; Microsoft provides enterprise level search capabilities for FREE. Microsoft Search Server 2010 Express provides the search capabilities described in this overview for FREE. While this solution may not be the perfect fit for every website, I think it is at least worth evaluating. You can download the software for free, install it, and configure it in a matter of minutes. If it works for you, implementing it with your website is as simple as replacing the search box.

The most-wished-for, most-gifted, and has the most 5-star reviews of any product on Amazon: Kindle!  Thinner, lighter, easier-to-read, and CHEAPER.  New wi-fi only Kindle is only $139 new!

You don’t need to purchase a Kindle device to utilize Amazon to purchase eBooks.  You can download (for free) Kindle applications for PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, and Android.  Then you can access thousands of FREE books or purchase any of the books for sale and use the free Kindle applications as reading devices.  Using the Kindle is far superior as a READING device than any of these devices – especially the phones.

Outside of the price, the best improvement over the current 2nd gen Kindle or the iPad (or any other e-reader):  Battery life of up to 1 month!  That is AWESOME!  I assume that’s in standby most of the time to get a full month between charges, but that is still incredible.  My 2 year old iPhone now lasts about 6 hours between charges. My laptop only lasts about 2 hours on a charge.

They are hyping some things that I personally don’t care about.  New web browser.  Don’t care – it’s an eReader – not an iPad or netbook.  Something else I don’t care about is the 20% faster page turns.  Maybe if I were a speed reader this would help, but I’m not.  I never noticed the page turning being slow before, but I’ll pay attention.

• All-New, High-Contrast E-Ink Screen – 50% better contrast than any other e-reader
• Read in Bright Sunlight – No glare
• New and Improved Fonts – New crisper, darker fonts
• New Sleek Design – 21% smaller body while keeping the same 6″ size reading area
• 17% Lighter – Only 8.5 ounces, weighs less than a paperback
• Battery Life of Up to One Month – A single charge lasts up to one month with wireless off
• Double the Storage – Up to 3,500 Books
• Built-In Wi-Fi – Shop and download books in less than 60 seconds
• 20% Faster Page Turns – Seamless reading
• Enhanced PDF Reader – With dictionary lookup, notes, and highlights
• New WebKit-Based Browser – Browse the web over Wi-Fi (experimental)