Eric Bergen

At first glance Instant search appears to be our answer to Google Suggest Both provide instant results to search queries as the user types. The differences appear in the actual results that come back.

When I first saw Google Suggest I was amazed. Once again Google had shown me something painfully obvious that, as a developer I had never thought about doing. The idea of using basic css to extend a native browser widget had never occured to me. It’s an elegant solution to the problem of try and miss searching. Instead of clicking back in the search box on the next page the user can now simply backspace and try again. Simple and elegant.

I have used it maybe 10 times. The idea doesn’t really work with the reasons why I try searches again. I do that because the results I get don’t match, not because the possible result count isn’t high enough. I also type fast enough not to need auto complete on my search results. Suggest in it’s existing format would have a better chance of making it into my daily tool set if it provided spell checking on results as I type. It doesn’t as far as I can tell.

I hadn’t thought about suggest in months until I spotted Instant Search on next.yahoo.com. Instant search is one step closer towards being my home page. It provides real results without waiting for the search results page. A few of my favorite demo searches are:

Many of the things I commonly look for are now at my finger tips. I can check the weather in my town and the towns of most of my family (weather is a big thing in my family) in a few seconds. If I missed some football on sunday I can quickly check the scores of all the teams I care about. I don’t have to think about a bookmark or click to a different website. Most of it is right here, most of it.

I want my spelling hints! This is a vital component missing from both Instant Search and Suggest. Both services will suggest alternate spellings if I submit the page but they leave me guessing while typing in the text area. Dyslexics like myself constantly need our spelling corrected. It’s not that we can’t spell it’s just that a lot of time signals from our brains come out in the wrong order and it’s very hard to spot in a quick glance.

Letting me get instant results for many queries from the same search box is good. It’s impressive, but I’m ready for the next step. Skip the browser. I would like instant results (including spelling suggestions, please) from my firefox toolbar, thunderbird, messenger, treo, tv, and the stereo in my truck.

That’s it. I give up. I have tried every pen ever made and I can’t write with any of them. I’ve been fighting this battle for years. I finally got sick of not being able to read any of my notes about two weeks ago and went hunting, once again for a solution. I found it in the form of a device that I once used almost exclusively in grade school. The PENCIL! More precisely the mechanical pencil. Amazing! This device, with the ability to have it’s marks erased instead of scratched out has saved me much frustration over the past weeks. If I focus and write slowly I can actually read my notes. It’s amazing. I do still catch myself writing to quickly and smearing words but when I do this I simply erase it and write it again slower.

As you may know I have been a dedicated SuSE use for a few years. Most distributions support many desktop environments but have only one that they focus their development on. SuSE uses the ‘K’ Desktop Environment or KDE as their primary desktop environment. They maintain packages for several others but the default is always KDE and is the best supported. Gnome is second followed by several others. As I was researching for this entry I ran across some features screen shots for SuSE from Novell. From what I can see they are all Gnome based. This makes me think either somebody wasn’t paying attention or SuSE is switching to Gnome as their default desktop environment. However the current SuSE Live CD uses KDE as it’s default.

After a few weeks of using Gnome 2.6 both at work and at home from SuSE I have noticed a few things. Most important is that Gnome Terminal is horribly slow. Even on my snappy Athlon it devours resources like a football player at a free buffet. I do have a pimped out xterm config somewhere but this is about default installs and what I can get to from menus. The rest of Gnome seems to run very well. It’s theme support extends to more of my default applications such as Gaim and X-Chat. This is a big plus over KDE which left most GTK theme based applications wearing drab federal prison garb.

Both environments took only a few minutes to setup my default keyboard shortcuts and quick links. From SuSE Gnome wins for speed and KDE wins for Konsole and default applications. So far it’s almost even. An update article will come when I get both of my workstations up and running with Fedora Core 3.

If you have a better suggestion of a Gnome default distribution let me know!

While doing research for my desktop environment post I decided to install Fedora Core 3. In my opinion Redhat has always had a clean Gnome setup. My burner has been on the fritz for a few months now so I have been using my iBook for all my burning needs. Well it is also sick so I can’t burn anything to install Fedora. After a bit of research I found some docs describing how to do a Fedora install with the ISOs on a different partition and booting off of a USB drive. This beats the pants off of the old days of switching out 4 different floppy disks. I did run into one small problem. SELinux doesn’t support reiserfs. No big deal. The second problem is the installer won’t allow the partition containing the ISOs to be /. I’m sure they did this so people wouldn’t format the partition that containted the ISOs but the installer wouldn’t let me just assign that partition to be mounted as root.

Tonight I will swap around some partitions and have another go at it.

Quest For The Perfect Working Environment. This is the first entry into a disorganized series called “Quest For The Perfect Working Environment”. It will consist of several installments of things I am trying in order to find my perfect developing environment. This will attempt to cover everything from text editors to office desks and coffee intake. Really anything I can come up with that effects the way I work. The first installment “Desktop Environments” is coming soon.