Why Bing Is the Wrong Name
Thursday, July 02, 2009   

Microsoft is striking terror into the hearts of prescriptive grammarians everywhere by suggesting that millions of people could start using the word Bing (the recently unveiled latest-and-greatest search engine from Microsoft) as a verb in everyday speech.

And if Bing turns into a verb like, say, Xerox, TiVo or, well, Google, that would be nice too. Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said Thursday that he liked Bing’s potential to “verb up.” Plus, he said, “it works globally, and doesn’t have negative, unusual connotations.”

One of the oft-cited reasons for Google's success, other than the fact that it offered a decent ground floor product at a time when the world was full of search engine suckery, is that it had a name which was susceptible to being immortalized as a household verb. To Google is to search the web, and to search the web is to Google.

Microsoft desperately wants this for Bing.

And I'm sure they thoroughly focus-grouped and psychology-tested and committee-reviewed the name ad infinitem/absurdum. At this level, the billions of dollars level, you don't draw names out of a hat. So the name went through the review and acceptance process and the experts pulled out their pocket protectors and proclaimed that YES, Bing is a GOOD NAME!

The only problem is, the experts were wrong.

While I won't go so far as to say that Bing is a stupid-ass name for a search engine, I will say that as a label for a mass-market search product, Bing sucks like a bag of three-day-old cheese puffs. And by the way: I like Microsoft. I've been using Microsoft technologies my entire adult life. That doesn't make the choice of "Bing" as a cultural moniker any less daft.

Allow me to explain.

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Online Poker and the Intelligent Note
Tuesday, June 30, 2009   

The ability to take notes on your opponents has been a standard feature of online poker software since approximately the Dark Ages (also known as, the late 1990s/early 2000s.) If you're an online poker player, odds are you've typed up a few of these yourself.

I've invested heavily in player notes over the years. Even though robust hand history analyzers and real-time HUDs have relaxed the need for hardcore note-taking, I still find that player notes are useful for storing all the "other stuff".

  • Player psychology and personality
  • Records from Sharkscope, OPR, PTR, and PokerDB
  • Blogs or websites found by Googling the player's handle

Unfortunately, if there's one thing all this squinting at player notes has done, it's convince me that the online poker note-authoring experience is tedious, uninspiring, and ergonomically broken.

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The Open-Sourcing of Poker and Poker Bots
Tuesday, June 02, 2009   

Online poker botting is hard work. Trust me.

Whether you're using a third-party poker bot or implementing one from scratch: be prepared to invest a lot of time. Depending on your needs, creating a mature poker bot can take anywhere from several months (in the simplest possible scenario) to a year or more. You've got to:

  • Get the Input/Output mechanisms working smoothly.
  • Produce an effective Poker A.I.
  • Choose a stealthing mechanism.
  • Set up the poker botting hardware and environment.
  • Leverage rakeback and promotions.
  • Handle various other meta-botting aspects.

That's a mountain of work, and unless you're dedicated and have a lot of time, you'll probably fail (however, you'll still have all that hard-won programming and poker knowledge, which is valuable in its own right). I've written three or four bots and only one was successful, and it was built with the advantage of a) a backer and b) ample time and c) obsession.

And I have to wonder: what if we made poker botting a lot easier and more accessible?

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Dartboard-Driven Design
Saturday, May 30, 2009   

I swear. Sometimes I think certain software architects must have a dartboard, each segment containing a design pattern, you know, Adapter here, Observer there, Factory over there. When it comes time to design something, they throw a dart.

“Ooh, Memento!”

Like you, I'm a fan of classic Gang of Four design patterns. But all too often it seems like architects pick their design patterns out of a hat. "Hmm, I've never used Visitor before, let's try that." You could call it dartboard-driven design. Just pick your pattern and go!

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OCR = 0nline P0ken 0pticaL Chanacter Recogrition
Friday, May 29, 2009   

Online poker, meet optical character recognition. Optical character recognition, meet online poker. I'm sure the two of you will get along just fine.

Optical character recognition or OCR is one of those cool technologies which occupies a boring space. Document scanning is nifty and all, very useful from an office productivity standpoint, but it's not sexy. But take that same OCR component and embed it as a cog in the gearworks of an intricate real-time online poker botting rig...

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