Sending out the good vibes.

Just posted a job online in search of a marketing maestro to help us with all the marketing and business development work. It is very exciting.

I'm now set up in my new office, the LAN network is ready to go and there is a spare desk waiting for someone to fill.

I'm sending out some good vibes and hope we can find the right person.

The New Cycle of Search

Here is a draft version of a diagram that shows how Trexy works.

We just need to make sure the diagram is easy to read even at a small size! It tries to describe the flow of using Trexy by looking at the psychology of search.

It's like a love letter to yourself.

For my 30th birthday present, a group of friends gave me a gift voucher for a weekend away at the Mistley Thorn Hotel with a cooking class at the Mistley Kitchen.

I had registered for a cooking class in June but realised I can no longer attend it. Last night I searched for the Mistley Kitchen website on MSN with the Trailbar installed and blazed a trail. I wanted to see what other classes are available later in the year. After finding the cooking class schedule on their site, I decided that the Thai class in September looked good. It was getting late so I stopped searching and went to bed.

This morning I decided to email the Chef at the Mistley Kitchen to ask whether it is possible to change courses. To do this I needed the following information:

• what's their website address again?
• what are the details of the Thai class I want to register for?
• what is the email address of the chef?

To find this information again, I would have normally re-constructed my complete search from last night. Which search engine did I use? What keywords did I use? Which links did I click on to find the class schedule?

Instead this morning, knowing that I had blazed a trail last night, I searched on 'My Trails'.

My trails for Mistley Thorn showed exactly where I had searched the night before. A trail contains individual links to the pages I visited. So I could quickly link to the Mistley Kitchen schedule to find the details of the Thai cooking class in September and the contact email address without having to re-search for it all.

It is likely I'll need to re-visit their site in the future too. For example, just before the weekend away I'll need to double check the address of the hotel to work out the best travel arrangements. And if I really like the Mistley Thorn I might be tempted to email friends about it. Having a trail to rely on is like a creating a love letter for yourself into the future.

Trexy's Lunar Landing

Trailblazers like going where no one has gone before. Here is the latest version of Trexy blazing a trail lunar-style.

Walk like an Egyption II

Here is the latest version of the "Discovering Discovery" image. Adz, first drew a freehand draft before digitally mastering this image. Meg and I just have a few suggestions and then we'll be ready to merge these images with our site template. It's exciting to see the finishing touches coming together!

BCS Lovelace Lecture - Machines that Learn

I went to a great lecture last night. I'm an active member of the British Computer Society (BCS) and every year a distinguished computer scientist is invited to give the Lovelace Lecture. This year, Professor Chris Bishop inspired the audience with a talk on "Machines that Learn: Adaptive Computing in the 21st Century".

Machine learning is used to solve lots of problems: identifying cancerous cells, filtering email spam, face detection, speech recognition etc. The cornerstone of machine learning is modeling uncertainty with Bayesian statistical methods. This method enables an algorithm to take new evidence and 'home in', statistically speaking, on a solution. The algorithm gets better and better at making predictions in the light of new evidence - it learns.

Our goat trail algorithm will use machine learning techniques to 'home in' on the best trail for a given search. Machine learning can also help identify the best search engine on which to blaze a new trail. This in turn will help solve the holy grail of metasearch.

First Aid

Nige and I are going to take a look into the health of our cluster today. We've got eight known crook cases and at least one machine sitting on the sidelines.

It is important while we are testing Trexy that we catch the right bugs and not bugs caused by machines that are not in sync with the others.

Meta Idea Storm

I've been having one this morning!

One of the projects going on behind the scenes supports my own process of programming. It started off as a way of writing programs that write programs. But now it's extending to other "artefacts" (e.g., emails, templates, and "Things" etc). It uses many of the design principles applied to Trexy. It considers association, augmentation, cognitive load, context switching, chunking and trails.

The last two Sunday mornings I've woken up a buzz with new ideas. My latest idea involves managing new ideas: ideas about ideas. The open source project is called "The Goo" and it helps me to stick ideas and artefacts together.

Always stay DRY

Programmers love acronyms: WYSIWYG, TMTOWTDI, RTFM etc. Here is one acronym that helps programmers deal with complexity:

DRY = Don't Repeat Yourself.

Whenever we search we juggle search terms, scrollbars, result links, and result pages. This all takes mental effort.

The principle of DRY should also apply to search.

We've only got so much time to spend and limited mental bandwidth to throw at our searching problems. One way to save our precious time is to make sure the tools we use don't make us repeat ourselves. The last thing we should be doing is repeating the same search. Where did I search for that? What did I search on again? Which result did I click on?

Ideally you should search for something once and for all.

Walk like an Egyptian

This is a draft version of Trexy entering an Egyptian crypt. In the final version we will show hieroglyphics on the wall lit by Trexy's helmet. The hieroglyphics will include a picture of Trexy leading the way followed by Egyptian kings and queens. The message is: "Trexy's been blazing trails for a long time." It's also a graphical way of making this point about discovering discovery.

Going where no one has gone before ...

That's what trailblazers do and we want our system to reward those who are willing to share their trails and be the first to blaze them.

As a first step we will be awarding the very first trail for a keyword(s) a blue 1st ribbon. This will prominently mark the trail as the first for a given keyword.

More ideas for rewarding trailblazers coming soon ...

Engines Fired

We asked Adz to add a trail to each of Trexy's action shots. Here is a draft of Trexy's moon landing showing a star trail.

Cold turkey

Happy to say that I am finally re-connected to the Internet. Yeah!

It has been a long 5 days without it. Started to get the 'must connect' twitch on the second day. Almost went cold turkey on the third day. Luckily, saved by working over at Nige's place on the 4th and 5th days.

My office/house move has gone pretty well. Now I just have to get my wireless connection organised so I can use my printer...and untangle all the cables...and extend the phone line...and then get some music playing. A bit of Bee Gees should help. Jive talkin...

First Impressions from the Tester

First impressions count and we wanted to find out if the tester could easily understand what Trexy does. So we asked him what he thought Trexy does? Here is his synopsis:

"The primary feature of Trexy is blazing trails. This involves automatically maintaining a trail or record of whatever I have searched using any of my favourite search engines. The distinguishing feature of this functionality is that it not only records my trails but also keeps a track of the trails of other people, who have searched the same thing before me. In this way, Trexy provides an additional layer of search results that no single search engine can provide, by presenting the information that other people have already looked for. This automatic directory of links would keep on increasing as more and more people use Trexy. In order to blaze trials, all I need to do is to download and install the free Trexy trailbar. Before I start blazing trails, I need to add my favourite search engines with which I usually carry out my search, to Trexy. Once done, with the Trexy trailbar installed, I can carry out the search by using the trailbar."

Indrajit Ghatak, Web Tester.

That's pretty much it! :-)

As well as this description he also sent us another round of bugs. Speaking of which ...

Strike a Pose!

We've asked one of our designers, Adz, to create action images of Trexy blazing trails. Today Adz sent through some wonderful draft images of Trexy in a variety of trailblazing scenes such as:

• Trexy trailblazes to the moon
• Trexy planting his flag of flags on a summit
• Trexy the deep sea diver
• Trexy uncovering hieroglyphics in an Egyptian tomb
• Trexy on a boat looking out to sea

Adz has sketched the images in the first instance. Once we agree on the final design he'll create the image in Illustrator.

If you can can think of any other trailblazing positions for our adventurous goat please let us know!

Bugs - V1

Nige and I whipped through our first bug report from the testers today.

Some of the bugs found by our testers include:

• images not appearing on content pages.
• some functional buttons not working such as the 'Find' button on our Engines list.
• one of our testers tried entering a 100 word query which produced no results.
• pop-up messages appearing when trying to blaze trails.

We are ignoring some of these bugs such as missing images because the final design of the content pages has yet to be published.

With the 100 word query problem, we decided that we will truncate a query and count only the first 70 characters which we feel is enough to find information that you or someone else has already found.

Also Nige had included a number of prompt messages to help debug, which caused several problems for our testers. We have now turned these prompts off.

We've just sent a version back and await their next installment!

Trexy powered by Open Source

In future blogs I'll be describing more about the technical innards of Trexy (and Turbo10). I owe a huge debt to the legion of open source software developers out there. Trexy and Turbo10 is built on a foundation of open source software: perl, mysql and linux.

I've planned for a long time to give something back, "what would my fellow programmer want?" So for the last five years I've been thinking about augmenting a programmer's mental powers - thinking about thinking. How can I make programming easier? faster? smarter?

Pardon the pun, but I started 'on the trail' to this programming nirvana two years ago and my own productivity keeps going up and up. Cognitive fit, association and augmentation is as important for programmers as it is for trailblazers.

I'm looking forward to freely releasing the source to this project later in the year!

The Art of War

I've just read Sun-tzu's, "The Art of War". Even though the text is over 2000 years old there's some great strategic advice for "little armies." I don't know if there is such a thing as a two person army but here are some of the quotes I liked:

• "The skillful warrior does not rely on the enemy's not coming, but on his own preparedness."
• "Know the enemy, know yourself, and victory is never in doubt, not in a hundred battles."
• "If an opponent is strong enter from the side."
• "Ultimate excellence lies not in winning every battle but in defeating the enemy without ever fighting."

OK. Right. Now back to the bugs ... what was that one on line 671 again? ;-)

Seriously though, we're getting prepared! We don't want to get knocked out again. ;-)

New Company

We're getting a new office and a new company too! Fleetfoot Internet Solutions is the current corporate entity behind Trexy.com. However, for legal reasons we need a new company structure.

I will remain as CEO and Megan will become a director and shareholder of a company for the first time. Our new accountant is doing a fantastic job and he's just sent us a hefty set of documents to make all these changes. Meg and I are both trained barristers and until now we've have had to do all the legal documentation ourselves! It's such a relief to be able to afford help - phew - we can now hand this workload over.

One of our philosophies is to remain 'lean-and-mean' and our corporate structure needs to reflect this - we also need to plan for the future ...

Heath the Cluster Health Checker

Heath is our newest dutiful robot.

He has the important job of checking the health of nodes on the cluster. He reports whether a node is 'crook' or 'well' - if he could speak he'd sound like an Aussie. He has just reported that we have 7 crook nodes. This sounds bad but the 43 remaining nodes are easily handling our current load so I don't need to attend to them just yet.

Next week I'll see if I can get these crook nodes well again. I'm looking forward to Heath giving the cluster a clean bill of health.

New Office

One of our offices is on the move! That is, Meg's moving house. After many years at "Burrells Wharf" in London's Docklands, Meg and Marty felt like a change of scene.

They're moving to "Ivory Wharf" on Elephant Lane in London. This historic part of London is next to the Thames where ivory was once unloaded from merchant ships. The new office is a combined living and workspace in a converted warehouse. The workspace is much larger so we could possibly double the size of our current workforce! ;-)

Last night everyone helped out with the move. Meg and Marty's vision of "industrial chic" means lots of metal. We dived into the Ikea flat-packs. My Dad was the first flat-pack victim - a nasty screwdriver accident drew blood. Next to go was Marty, "Shiiizzzer!!!" My brother Andrew was handling his flat-pack like a veteran - I was sure I'd be next. But the Ikea gods must have decided enough blood had been spilt and I was spared.

Despite the injuries, the beer and jokes kept flowing and at the end of the night Meg and Marty's new home was taking shape and I think they'll be really happy there.

KISS this Bug!

Meg and I are in in the middle of the "code zone"!

We've been up since 6am this morning. We've turned up the 'hard rock' to help stay awake. ;-)

Our latest band is KISS!

So we're gently head banging away - and busting BUGS!

Bugathon 3 - the Revenge

This week we're on a roll. The nasty bugs of last week are behind us - phew!

We are preparing for the pre-BETA testing phase by the external QA testing company. This will expose more bugs but they should be easier to deal with. We need to do lots of quick "test -> fix -> test" iterations.

Hopefully this phase will go quickly - but we don't want to let ourselves down by going too quickly. We're determined that even our BETA product should be a high standard.

External QA Testing - Turning up the heat on BUGS!

Meg and I are turning up the heat on the bugs!

We've asked an external software testing company to give Trexy a workout over the next two weeks. They will provide valuable 'third party' feedback and testing prior to our BETA release.

Bugs can't stand eyeballs and we need a few more in this crucial pre-BETA stage.

WebTrailBar War

Meg and I intensively debugged the WebTrailBar over the last two days. Sometimes debugging feels like a war where complexity is the enemy.

The WebTrailBar's functionality will appear simple to the user but behind the scenes there is a maze of complexity with a high 'funky factor'. We were so tired on Tuesday night we lost a battle with one bug and let it survive an extra night. Early the next morning Meg and I rallied. With fresh minds and sheer persistence we managed to squash it!

So even though we lost one battle to the bugs we're still winning the war!

What is the WebTrailBar?

The WebTrailBar is a temporary TrailBar that appears when you blaze a new trail and you haven't yet installed a full TrailBar.

It enables you to blaze trails on the Web without needing to install any extra software! For the BETA version you can blaze trails on six engines - Google, Lycos, MSN, Teoma, Wisenut and Yahoo.

We hope most users will find the WebTrailBar easy and intuitive to use. I hear you ask, "so why would I bother to download and install the Firefox/IE TrailBar?"

Installing your own TrailBar offers these advantages over the WebTrailBar:

• trailblazing is faster
• you can blaze trails on thousands of engines not just six
• you don't have to come to Trexy to start a trail - just go directly to your favourite engine (e.g., Google, Yahoo, MSN etc.)
• the TrailBar doesn't disappear when you finish a Trail

In search of the Holy Trail

Yesterday, Martin, our graphic designer created a few templates for the information pages of Trexy incorporating a new trail.

Instead of using pebbles, Martin designed hoof prints to illustrate the goat trail.

Now we have to choose a template or combine some of the elements from each design.

Vulture Capitalists

Scaling up a search engine cluster is hard - but scaling up a business is sadly harder. Meg and I wasted six months talking to these guys - "Vulture Capitalists".

To be fair to the VC's, they're only doing their job - which is to get an answer to this question: "show me the money?" Our conversations went something like this:

We've developed cool technology.
"Show me the money?"
It's a multi-billion dollar industry.
"Show me the money?"
Intellectual capital.
"Ohhh ... Show meeee the moneeeeyy????!!"

Ok, it wasn't quite like that, but you get the idea. Unfortunately, at the time we didn't have any money, which is why we were seeking funding in the first place. Even though we didn't manage to convince any VC's that we were a sure-bet we were totally convinced.

Technically speaking our business just had a scalability problem - in the financial department. Meg and I discussed a change to our business model so we could gracefully grow the business without funding. Within one month we turned a corner and haven't looked back since - and there's no VC in sight!