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Information on information technology. Mostly a collection of how-to — or, how-I-did — articles.

Google search going downhill?

Oct 13th, 2011
by Craig.
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After being frustrated by the results in a Google search yet again, I submitted the following feedback to Google under the category “Google’s search results weren’t helpful” and the sub-category “The results included a page that was irrelevant”:

You searched for shaw vod 33319.

Please list which site or sites were irrelevant.

http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?t=55214
http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?t=127023
https://secure.shaw.ca/apps/digital_services/GuideErrors.asp

… and probably the rest of the results, but I didn’t go past the top three.

Why were they irrelevant?

I’m finding more and more that Google ignores one or more of my search terms, trying to be too clever for its own good. For example, while the third result on the secure.shaw.ca domain would be relevant if I was looking for a way to contact my cable company (Shaw) about the VOD (video on demand) error (33319) I am receiving, it’s absolutely useless as a result that tells me immediately what error 33319 is.

In this case “33319” does not even appear anywhere in the page at any of the top three search results. Why then are these pages included in the results if I’m searching for “all of the words” (Google’s wording) I have entered, and not “one or more of these words”? And this happens even when all of my search terms are actually words, unlike this case where one of the search terms is a string of numbers.

Please don’t make me use a Microsoft product for my searches. The last time I switched search engines was from AltaVista to Google.

For those of you with short memories or who weren’t around “BG” (before Google), AltaVista was the search engine back in the day. They even provided search results for Yahoo, before going into decline and eventually becoming a part of Yahoo. Now it’s just a point of entry into the Yahoo search system. I don’t even remember exactly when I switched, but it was probably in the early 2000’s.

Installing Zend Optimiser

Nov 28th, 2010
by Craig.
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I had a bit of an education on the confusing array of Zend products recently. A client needed Zend Optimizer (which, of course, Zend spells with a “z” to cater to the all-powerful American market) installed on their virtual private server (running Linux, of course), as the installation routine for a web application wouldn’t proceed without it. Fair enough. Some web applications are encoded so that they can’t be hacked (as opposed to cracked; see the difference), reverse engineered, modified, etc., and Zend Optimiser interprets the encoded PHP files so that they can run.

But I was confused. I thought Zend was installed with PHP by default. Turns out it’s Zend Engine that’s installed with PHP. So off I go to the interwebs to do some research. Take a look at these pages:

  • Zend Products: Here are listed Zend Server, Zend Server Cluster Manager, Zend Studio and Zend Guard — four products.
  • Zend Downloads: Here are listed Zend Server, Zend Server Cluster Manager, Zend Server Community Edition, Zend Studio, Zend Guard, Zend Optimizer, Zend Framework, Zend Core and Zend Platform. Phew! Nine products!

You don’t even see Zend Engine listed on either of the above pages, presumably because it’s installed with PHP by default.

So you click on Zend Optimiser and you’re presented with downloads for Zend Guard, Zend Optimiser and Zend Guard Loader. Huh? What’s what, where did Zend Guard Loader come from, and what is it?

Add to that that, in the back of my mind, I thought I had been down this road before on a different server that I’m sure already had a decoder installed. However, I figured out that I was probably thinking of Ioncube, and it had likely been installed with a control panel on that server.

Add further to that confusion the plethora of different instructions you find in a web search, some of which (including the “user guide” that is linked to right next to the Zend Optimizer download link) refer to an installation script which doesn’t exist in the download, and you can see why I was left scratching my head. At one point I even started following the RPM installation instructions on the Zend website, until I said to myself, “Wait a minute. This isn’t right.” Sure enough, those instructions were for a different Zend product.

The download does include what are referred to on some websites as “manual” installation instructions. They’re straightforward, but the confusing array of different options out there threw me off. In the end, the “manual” instructions did indeed work — and given the choice I’d prefer them anyway — and took all of about three minutes, far less time than I had already wasted.

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