Erik Turnquist

Cuil is a new search engine that went live today. Its goal is to provide more search results with greater accuracy than existing search engines such as Google. Currently it indexes over 120 billion web pages, which is substantially lower than Google’s claim of 1 Trillion unique web pages. Cuil was founded by former Google employees Anna Patterson, Russel Power, Louis Monier, and former IBM employee Tom Costello.

Cuil has some positive qualities, but currently it is not polished enough to replace my preferred search engine, Google.

Pros

• UI: I tend to like darker screen user interfaces than most people, so I especially liked the contrasting black, dark, blue, and white elements. Actually, it fits nicely with the theme of my blog. Overall, the look and feel seems uncluttered, which is largely due to the multi-column view search results. This seems to prevents excessive scrolling when browsing the results.
• Search Categories: When searching for “Seattle”, it divided the search into suggestions that were common for this search. Results included “Seattle Culture”, “Landmarks in Seattle”, etc. Below each category were listed search terms that fit into these categories.

Cons

• Search Results: Several searches that I often do, returned results that were not useful to me. Typing in my own name, “Erik Turnquist”, did not return my website, nor ericturnquist.com which always occurs when searching google. When searching for “Soccer wiki”, “Digg wiki”, “California wiki”, or even “California wikipedia”, did not return a single search result that had Wikipedia. This is highly personal, but searches I do often proved to return useless results. 
• Load Times: Page load times were far too long. Using Webkit r35417, searching for “Apple” took 8.20 seconds, compared to Google’s 355 milliseconds.

Although Cuil is currently having scaling and relevancy issues, I assume that many of those problems will be worked out over time. Conclusion: stick with Google.

The last thing you expect while crossing the street.

I couldn’t find this mentioned on the web anywhere, but it might be useful if your iPhone is always crashing.

1. Download and install the iPhone Configuration Utility
2. Plug your iPhone into your computer.
3. Launch the iPhone Configuration Utility located under /Applications/Utilities/iPhone Configuration Utility
4. Click on the name of your iPhone under “Connected Devices”
5. Open the “Console” tab
6. Debug away!

I finally did it. I got an iPhone. I have been interested in purchasing one for some time, but still had about a year left in my T-Mobile contract. Using the advice from Consumerist, I was able to cancel my contract early because they were going to raise text messaging rates.

It took me two days to actually get the phone. Actually, it’s a funny story.

Day One

On Monday, I went to the Valley Fair Apple Store. When I arrived at 7:31pm I was told that the line had been capped and they would not be able to let me stand in line. I told them that I had taken the bus there, could not get off of work any earlier, and I was wearing an Apple t-shirt (thankfully). After some convincing, I was finally let into the line.

Then, my three hour wait began. At around 10:30pm, a group of six people and I were let into the Apple Store. At 10:35pm I was told, “Sorry, the AT&T servers have just shut down.” My response, “WHAT!?” Apparently, all of AT&T’s activation servers were unresponsive nationwide. Awesome. Thankfully, I was given a card that stated I had 24 hours to claim my iPhone with the guarantee that I would not have to stand in line again.

Day Two

I arrived at the Apple Store at about 9:10pm waited about 10 minutes for someone to actually be available to help me (the employees looked really drained by this point). Finally, I was handed by 8GB black iPhone and within 10 minutes my activation was complete.

As far as I could see.

We have all heard of web streaming music services such as last.fm and Pandora, but I recently had the opportunity to use a desktop streaming music software called Spotify and was amazed.

Spotify, the company, was founded by entrepreneurs Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon and has its headquarters in Luxembourg. Spotify, the software, has been in beta for a little over a year, and gone through a number of revisions in the process. Currently, it offers an iTunes like interface for both playing music and searching through their extensive collection of songs. Songs are organized into playlists simply by dragging them from the Spotify music library. Playing a song is as simple as double clicking on it. Finding a song involves typing the title, artist, etc. into the search bar and then browsing through the search results.

Several areas of the product I especially enjoyed were:

Buffer Time

While using Spotify there was none. None while playing songs that had been streamed previously. None while playing obscure Seattle bands. It was incredible. Even my local music library takes longer to start playing songs when the hard drive has to spin up. I continued to test this with as many songs as I could and was not able to make it pause before a song started playing.

Overall Speed

Spotify offers clients for Windows and Mac OS X (could not find information about Linux). Everything in the interface was responsive. Search results were returned incredibly fast. Spotify felt solid and lightweight while being feature rich.

Library Size

The Spotify library had all of the popular music that I expected it to have, but it also included artists which many main stream stores have difficulty supplying content from.

Although I had the experience of playing with the Spotify beta, there were no ads in the version I was using. In the future, and for the final release ads will be added to the product, but they will be done in a non-instrusive manner outline here.

Although I am not a part of the beta, I was able to get a glimpse at software that I believe could change the streaming music market and possibly change the way I listen to music. While online, being able to play any song you want to, anytime, at no cost is extremely hard to resist.

Special thanks to Erik Hammar for showing me this software.

So, I realized I never officially announced this, but this summer I am working at Apple as an intern in the Development Technologies group. Specifically, I will be working on Core Data with a small team of engineers.

Core Data allows Cocoa developers to create sophisticated data models which are automatically stored in XML, Binary, SQLite, or their own database formats. Through the use of Xcode’s Data Model Design tool developers can graphically specify entities, their attributes as well as their relationships to other entities. During runtime these objects are represented through NSManagedObjectModel objects. Data is saved, loaded, and fetched through the NSManagedObjectContext object, which serves as the front end controller for the database. Data can be distributed across multiple database and multiple NSMangedObjectContext objects can interact with a single database.

For useful tutorials on CoreData, take a look at:

• Core Data Class Overview
• Tutorial:Build a Core Data App
• More advanced:Low-Level Core Data Tutorial
• For developing your own atomic store:Atomic Store Programming

I’ve known for a while that Google Maps has had the ability to plan bus routes in the bay area, but did not know that it also works for Seattle. This includes both King County Metro and Sound Transit. Here is a little how to on using the service.

Go to maps.google.com and click on the “Get Directions” link. In my I want to go from the Paul G. Allen Center to Pike Place Market. After I click the “Get Directions” button it shows me how to drive from my starting point to my destination. However you can click “Public Transit” directly below “Search Results” to be shown which bus routes allow you to get to your destination. Below is a photo showing my search results.

It tells me that I can take the 68 to the 73. Cool! Also listed are alternate departure times and buses that I could take to get to my destination. Under “Options” I can also specify my Depart Time or Arrival Time.

What I especially enjoy about this is being able to see exactly where the bus route will take me, as well as where I need to catch the bus and where it drops me off. A significant improvement over Trip Planner if you ask me.

For a list of all cities supported, go to Google Transit.

From Polaus on deviantART.

Two days ago, I joined a social network called Twitter. It functions through small (140 characters or less) status updates called “tweets” that you post about what you are currently doing. Think of it like Facebook status updates. Check me out at twitter.com/erikturnquist and become a follower! Join Now!