Searching documents in MOSS 2007

August 9th, 2009

I’m doing some work on SharePoint search recently. while the tool is fairly impressive, it comes with its own pitfalls, one of them I will discuss now: from a certain content scope, you want to return only documents, the scope contains content crawled from a web site file share, external to SharePoint. this is somewhat less common and most examples do not refer to it which may be the cause to this peculiarity. now searching the web on how to go along with this requirement will result with several suggestions :

1. add a scope property rule : IsDocument = 1 – not working, no results are returned from any query (not to try on production)

2. add your query with different variations of : (“IsDocument” = 1) – gives an array of weird results and COM exceptions

3. add your query with : freetext(DEFAULTPROPERTIES,’IsDocument:1’) – this is actually documented to be unsupported  and while it did gave promising results, further tests proved it to be inaccurate and insufficient.

so after much fiddling with scope rules I came up with the following solution, since folders do not have contenttype I created a scope rule like so: [contenttype = ] , yes blank. it works for me, hope it will work for you too.

contentTypeRule

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Controlling risk

July 21st, 2009

w: Gee, B these hurricanes really slammed us last year,
B: sure W.
W: if only we could sell catastrophe insurance while making sure it will never happen…
W: think of the potential, we could have made billions…
B: Billions W? I’m sure i can think of something in my next reading vacation…

while I’m not sure this conversation had really took place, it certainly could have been.
In an article last week the Times said a group of scientists, Gates among them had submitted a patent application for a system that will protect against hurricanes by tackle them when they are still small and
remotely at sea.

searching through the records makes me positive a conversation of such actually did occurred, consider patent application 20090177569 which is aimed at:

“A method of managing risk includes selling individual insurance policies regarding areas to be protected by storm suppression equipment. The method discussed also includes finding at least one of purchase, operation, or maintenance of the storm suppression equipment at least partially through premiums collected from the selling. ”  

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in the application it is stated that the application method comprises of selling the insurance to individuals and/or Government agencies and/or oil companies, you get the idea.

One of Buffett strongest investment motifs was never to stray out of his circle of competence, Gates never hesitated to do exactly that..

godly acts, that’s sure is out there.

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Google Finance – a new version

July 17th, 2009

 

some more impressions on the new version :

the entire ajax feature-set appears to be working better and lighter, prices and graphs updates in the background over long periods of idle time. 

one thing i do not like is the removal of basic financial and fundamental data from the stock details page, this means you can get the Mkt cap / book value ratio of a company only by checking its financial tab.

there’s nice play in the ticker which highlight in red/or green the current change in price.

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the related companies table is buggie, but you only notice it if your browser is set to debug script errors, its a nice feature though could have been kept at its own tab instead of appearing twice.

Extending the blogs and discussion parts in the stock details page is useless, these parts have long been taken by spammers of all sorts, i minimized them.

the portfolio : i don’t get the checkbox on the left column (its a common trick of UI created by dev tools to know the first column is a checkbox but i find it hard to believe this is the case), i mean, how many times do i actually compare or delete a stock from a portfolio? it should have been placed at the right column.

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the on page history is an interesting feature, not sure it is very useful but time tell

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the stock details key figures part is all cluttered at the left part of the screen (why is that?)

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there are no major changes to the stock screener, it would have been nice to be able to save screeners and to create screener based portfolios.some more search criteria’s would have been nice (long term value metrics come to mind)

on the home page the world markets is a nice addition, bonds and currencies shows improvement as well.

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the news section (as the news service) requires further improvement, the new portfolio related news display is useless if you have 10 portfolios.

that’s it for this update.

update : this is odd, the version discussed below was pulled back the night i had posted it, it has not came back up since, it was good, i guess they want to make it better.

update 2 : researching a bit, i had found that Google are running some experiments. here (filling like a guinea pig, i don’t mind)

Google had come up with a new version for Google finance today.

I should have guessed when I got a server error (500) yesterday.

While (IMO) the home page only turns worse from version to version, it had been added a degree of control and you can now move the different web parts up and down in the page or close it all together.

Another major improvement is the “ubbercool chart” as Google liked to call its flashy quote chart. it had been added a much missing technical analysis graphs, different graph display (candlesticks and more) and much smaller intervals for the more sophisticated displays.

A feature that was already in the last version just got its proper place and now much more fun to play with is linking a feed to the chart.(why cant you link to it-with the plotted feed, or embed the chart altogether?)

On the left added some sort of a menu with links to summary,news, a much improved historical prices page, and recent quotes.

The stock screener had been improved as well, now allowing to screen stocks in the US, China and HK (peculiar choices..).

Some long term investing criteria had been added to the screeners.(as I have suggested in the past)

The quote page had been changed, while the company information seems now a bit scattered on the page, the overall look is nice, I liked the related companies table with the new trend line feature and additional columns, that’s really good.

Management mug shots are gone, shame, its was an important feature (the face of the company tells a lot)

There are too many changes in the portfolio to count them now, will carry on later.

Nice work Google team :)

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Stocks for the long run – really?

July 11th, 2009

Prof. Jeremy Siegel gets a pretty tough criticism by Jason Zweig, WSJ,

My take from the article is this cool site, EH.net, added to my research favorites.

Using one of the many options on site, I found out that the annualized inflation rate (in the US) from my inception (;)) to date was 4.06, much higher than the target rate of about 2% makes you wonder, isn’t it?

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Inflation – my dear ||

July 2nd, 2009

A larger compilation of Buffett comments about inflation can be found here

A good point about recovery was made at the NYT a few days ago: "How do you put together a consumer economy that works when the consumers are out of work?”

Jeremy Siegel was way off mark just a week ago when predicting a low unemployment rate turning in in june: “And in fact, there are some economists who think that the June figures, which will be announced the first week of July, will show a loss of employment only of 275,000. This is less than half of what we’ve been seeing in monthly losses over the last six months.”

As unemployment rate hiked to 9.5% (10 men, 7.6 women) recovery hides behind the corner again.

market took a plunge today, S&P500 closing below 900.

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Hyperinflation movie – Beware

June 29th, 2009

So this movie is circulating the blogosphere

With respect to the people appearing in this movie,
This movie was written by Jonathan Lebed
have you Wikipedia Jonathan Lebed?
having done so, and to cut a long story short: as a minor the guy was prosecuted by the SEC for running penny stocks in internet chat rooms and settled for some 285K.

He is currently an active trader and sells his advice through a newsletter.

Let me state the following :
The movie sounds like a hard sale push talk.
You would not accept such a hard sale conversation from the ordinary salesman.
Note the scary music, loud towards the end to make the message stick.
Most respected persona in the movie are shown via clips taken from the networks.
I would look further into the material before jumping to conclusions.
I am long gold though.

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Too big to fail – Google

June 24th, 2009

This post is a work in progress and reflects my current thoughts and fillings about the great Google experience.

Let me clarify up front: i do not think that Google is evil despite what Krugman says. Granted, I would never choose a motto that emphasize what not to do, in a way, Warren buffet strives to achieve the same effect by asking his CEO’s to imagine their decisions on the front page of their community newspaper which has a much stronger effect, though not quite catchy as a motto.

No. this started as a feeling that all is not well in the happy place, services quirked, there were blackout periods and i even got some JavaScript errors(oh, the horror!), in main web pages (such as the search front page),I was starting to think that Google had recruited just a little bit too much newbies and let them get on production code just a little too fast.

Then  I heard Eric Schmidt at this podcast and it left me excited but also extremely concerned, Google does store all this data…

this feeling did not crystallized to anything specifically until i stumbled upon this little (extremely technical) article by Nicholas Nassim Taleb(the Black Swan, not an excellent book, but a very good point) and then it hit me : Google is not evil, it is simply too big to fail.

Let me elaborate, Contrary to other software giants like Microsoft(Bad Bad), Oracle and even Internet Giants like Yahoo and Amazon, Google second motto is to crawl and index ALL the data that is out there, not just your surfing and shopping habits, simply everything, your cellphone location and direction (Latitude), through your search history, shopping behavior, media habits, investment preferences,mails, meetings,documents, health,images,social network connections. If its online it will be indexed, if not Google will go to great lengths to get it online.

In the podcast (minute 29), the moderator (Edward Felten) asks Eric  “to what extent do this privacy issues limit your ability to get new business.. i might say I’m a little scared of all the information that Google has about me..personally I’m not so worried but if Google fell into evil hands i would be pretty concerned to what happened to all that data” to which Eric promptly answers “We have a rule of don’t be evil” then he elaborate: the entire Google business is based upon trust, if Google will fail to honor this contract, the business will go elsewhere immediately.

While that’s just plain wrong, users are bound to Google services and will find it extremely difficult to migrate to competitors, Google will suffer tremendously from such a scandal.

But here is the case, Eric refers to Google as a single entity while in fact Google is the sum of all it’s workers, datacenters, code, bugs and users. as Nassim Explains simply in the article, a rogue trader can take down a bank, a malfunctioning machine can take down a software service (Gmail was down numerous times lately) and a rogue employee can take down a company.

Later that month Simon Johnson coined the phrase “Anything that is too big to fail is too big to exist” in his article at the Atlantic, which summed things up pretty neatly.

Google is a wonderful organization, which invest heavily in wonderful innovations that will benefit all mankind, it holds though, ever increasing hidden risks, that can and will affect all of its users.

For the latest funny bug, check out this link in ie8 (the Firefox version is less buggie but still have some weird behavior) now scroll down as much as you can, really, now go back up, i get a big wide white gap. I was not looking or bugs just stumble upon it.

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AtBroker.exe remote desktop error

June 23rd, 2009

this had been a long time issue for me.

When you are trying connect to a remote desktop which happens to be a windows server 2008 – but can be a vista edition as well, you sometimes get this despicable error message :

AtBroker.exe

The application failed to initialized properly…

And than the black screen of death. (yes black)

What i used to do was restart the machine from another machine using command line, or just go to sleep. (embarrassing i know)

Strangely enough, I was not able to find a solution to this problem.

Today, finally, after receiving this error once again, the Google karma was in my favor and the solution popped up immediately at Spat’s blog

CTRL+ALT+END will get you to the logoff screen, I just choose to lock the machine than entered the password again.

And I was in.

Ahh.. the pains one will go through to stay late at night and work…

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inflation my dear

June 22nd, 2009

 

Ah… the inflation threat, i know, am worried too.

What should one do, buy a Parisian retailer like like the Dankner do? or dig gold like paulson and  Spitznagel?

A tough dilemma..

I pulled out an old article by Warren Buffett to shed some light on investment expectations and strategies.

The deflation/inflation debate appears to be leaning towards inflation these days while stagflation had returned to the discussion as a threat-term.

On a side note: Nouriel roubini looks like he partied too much, this sign alone may signal the end of the recession. (no, not really).

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Bernanke’s Gold

June 4th, 2009

 

Ben Bernanke says that he believes inflation will remain low.

Peter Boockvar via Barry’s brings an old quote of Greenspan saying that gold is a good indicator of inflation.

Now gold is a few percentage points below its all time high.

So which of the great Fed Chairman’s is wrong?

I think Bernanke is saying “the right thing” much in the same way his famous “soft landing” remarks were said.

I preferred that to Ben being wrong on inflation expectations.

Interesting enough, Krugman take side with Ben, while Kasriel disagree.

I’ve put a table of current inflation predictions:

High Low
Gold Paul Krugman
Paul Kasriel Ben Bernanke
Me  

 

Fill free to vote in the comments, ill update the table as long as ill see fit.

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