Today Brazil woke up to the terrible news that an Air France Airbus with over 200 passengers aboard had disappeared near the Fernando de Noronha archipelago, offshore the Northeast state of Pernambuco. It is one of Brazil’s closest places to Europe, on the tip of the continent. Air Force officials estimate the plane had just flown off Brazilian air space during last contact, but Fernando de Noronha will likely be the rescue efforts’ headquarters.

Early morning and everyone was anxious for some news, any news, maybe the transponder broke down but the pilot managed to land somewhere. Maybe we’d have our own Hudson River miracle…

Noronha is one of the most beautiful islands in Brazil. The natural reserve and strict regulations for tourism make it one of the most sought after tourism destinations in this country. The island is of difficult access and Brazil’s Navy ships will take until tomorrow to reach the region of a probable crash. Even the exact search area is still uncertain according to local officials. Helicopters need to refuel to reach the region and manage to get some work done. Only one local civilian airline is authorized to ferry tourists and resources there and back.

Rescue efforts will be bery difficult but nothing can be harder than the pain the families here and in Europe must be feeling today. My hopes for positive news are still alive, despite knowing the chances are small. My thoughts and prayers go to all of you who had friends and family aboard flight AF 447.

It may be a mistake to speak at such an early stage but my first impression of Bing.com was a very positive one. The system still has a few rough edges, some snippets were made up of nonsensical text, a search for allinurl for example would result in a completely blank page and so forth. If Gmail is still BETA, this is definitely ALPHA code. But a pretty good one at that.

I was planning on waiting a few more weeks for the media hoopla do die down a bit before giving it a try, but this interview with Woz sent Bing.com to my priority list. What, Steve Wozniak praising a presentation by Steve Ballmer? Something’s different here….

So, I’ve decided to give Bing.com a try. It’ll be my default search engine for the near future, I’ll see how productive I am with it.

Changes on v. 0.12

Namespace move to Twitter::

The Zen::Twitter library has been moved to the Twitter:: namespace. To avoid creating yet another root namespace(Zen::) we’ll use an existing root NS from CPAN, namely Twitter::

The base Zen::Twitter module now becomes Twitter::ZenTwitter. This module implements the friends_not_followers and its counterpart followers_not_friends functions. The Zen Twitter Tools scripts have all been modified to work with the new namespaces and should work just fine.

Tools and Library are now separate releases

Zen Twitter Tools has been broken in two: the library has been packaged into CPAN-standard form and the scripts are now zen-twitter-tools 0.12

This has the advantage of allowing the module to be listed in CPAN in the future, decoupling the library from the scripts(previously coupled by the include directory path being set to “./lib/”).

Installation

Download the libraries and tools below.
- Unpack Twitter-0.12.tar.gz

For a systemwide install this needs to be run as root:
- cd Twitter
- perl Makefile.PL
- make
- make install

Zen Twitter Tools:
- Unpack zen-twitter-tools-0.12.tar.gz
- cd zen-twitter-tools
- Edit credentials.xml and add your secret Twitter user/pass
- Now you can use Twitter from your command line!

Download

Library: Twitter-0.12.tar.gz
Tools: zen-twitter-tools-0.12.tar.gz

After a short email dialogue with Marc Mims of Net::Twitter, I’ve decided to remove Twitter::ZenTwitter from CPAN. He never requested that I do it, though I could understand from our dialogue that leaving my modules there would confuse things when he clearly looked forward to make Net::Twitter the default Perl interface to that service. This is entirely my opinion, none of this was even brought up in the emails. This short post is a quick explanation as to why the modules vanished from CPAN and from my directory there.

Zen::Twitter started as a script to find out which friends did not follow me back on Twitter. Not that I care, I have about 30 followers today and I know them all personally, so I never needed to know who did or didn’t follow me back…but it was meant as a followup to someone who posted a Ruby script to do the same some time ago.

Then I added functionality to find out which followers you had not befriended yet(the opposite direction). From there, to implementing nearly the full Twitter API it was a short hop – mainly because I had already implemented the User class, the HTTP request class and so on.

In the meantime, I had not even had a look at Net::Twitter. So…. After I released the Twitter::* modules and sent them to CPAN, Marc contacted me and asked if there was anything wrong with Net::Twitter. I said, of course, no, there wasn’t.

So then he asked why I hadn’t used Net::Twitter and chose instead to release my own modules. I felt bad that I had done all of this without giving it much thought or researching things further.

If nobody had said anything I’d probably have carried on without even knowing the other modules were there. I suppose CPAN is meant to accommodate everyone’s ideas so really we could have both coexist, but for something as trivial as Twitter I think I was just taking space.

Added that Doug Williams of Twitter didn’t think my libraries should be listed on http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Libraries I can just conclude this whole Twitter programming thing wasn’t meant for me. Let’s move on. For anyone interested in hacking around with Twitter and Perl, I’m leaving these modules as they are frozen in time.

So, here are a few random notes about my first week using Bing.com as my default search engine:

1) They fixed the issue with allinurl.

2) It correctly returned most API functions I searched for this week – I needed lots of PHP queries to fix a phpBB installation for a customer, then Prototype.JS for another customer and of course all my Perl experiments which required API function search cheat sheet(I feel anxious that all my $50 reference books are just sitting idle collecting dust, what a waste of money – NEVER buy reference books, buy only the timeless ones).

3) Their image search is really nice. Active/smart pagination is smooth and the results are definitely not Cuil-ish(nothing personal, Cuil).

4) Alexa has it that Bing.com is gaining ranks quickly, but they still seem to be around position 1000 in traffic. I have seen a few Bing.com referrals on customer’s sites but in proportion to Google referrals they are still very low.

5) The Miserable Failure bomb still works on Bing.com …

6) Bing.com’s 10 highest “PR”(or whatever their concept of a PageRank may be) are :
tv.adobe.com
www.adobe.com
www.flickr.com
www.google.com
www.w3.org
www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer
www.adobe.com/downloads
www.statcounter.com
www.php.net
www.apple.com/contact

Note 1: Sometimes www.apple.com/contact would alternate with www.apache.org for 10th place.
Note 2: Apparently, unlike Google, Bing.com doesn’t think Yahoo.com is PR 100%…

7) Bing.com index size: There are apparently 11.2 billion pages on Bing.com’s index. – I couldn’t find a search which returned more than 11.5 billion. If you do, it’d be really nice if you shared it with us on the comments form. I’ll give credit to whoever is able to craft a search on Bing.com that returns the highest ammount of results. At this time the search which returns most results is :

a | b

Returns 11.2 to 11.5 billion results.