If you’re anything like me, you’ve subscribed to all of the recent social media trends. Starting with MySpace, evolving to Facebook and throwing a little Twitter in there somewhere along the way with a sprinkle of Buzz at the end and a forgotten dabble of Orkut and hi5 to keep your palette tasteful along the years. Even more is you, like me, have probably joined each of your favorites together with a smidgen of application glue so you only have to update one network before it propagates out to piss off the rest of the network nodes you now call friends. Sleepless nights patrolling the internet, looking for something witty, interesting or off-your-rocker stupid. Like a predator searching for his next meal in the desolate brush of an African terrain, you must show all your social friends just how cool you are in 140 characters or less. Well NO MORE, my friends .. no more.
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March, 2010
13
Mar 10
Internets Amn’t Hard
To the six of you actively pretending to pay attention to this blog and the surges of random Google search-masters landing on what was once a delightful melancholy of brilliance and potatos brought to you by the Internets Am Hard genius’: sorry, it doesn’t exist any more. It’s moved under this domain as I’ve been wanting to add some of my personal ramblings and figured a personalized domain would be appropriate. But don’t fret. The articles, references and flashes of brilliance have all been retained and can now be found here, on the imtrevor.com blog (and I’m keeping the old domain, forwarding everything here).
2
Mar 10
Don’t forget your stems, smokey
Maybe I’ve been in this industry too long. Maybe I’m a complete moron. Maybe it’s a little shade of both and some of a third. Who knows. The point is that everywhere I seem to look, nobody knows about one of the most useful word matching algorithms. Not text matching as that’s a horse of a different color. Words. Word. The difference is subtle, but it is something that seems to come up a few times a year over the past decade for me, where if I had known about it earlier in my career I would probably have more hair now. The difference is this: word matching, you want to match near-exact gramatical terms. Not necessarily something that rhymes or sounds similar (that’s a something else entirely), but words that are one in the same with different suffixes. Yeah, it’s a little weird and out there, but it’s a problem that seems to bolster its head about every once in a while and knowing about Word Stemming will make your life just a little easier. Again, maybe everyone learned about this in their infancy and I’m just an idiot. Though, every time I use it in a solution, I surprise at least one person… hence why I bring it up now.