What Do Search Engines Know that is NOT on the Internet?

When a company is as secretive as Apple, everyone loves to speculate about what they're going to do next. The latest rumor is that apple is about to jump into low-cost, ultra portable PCs (aka Netbooks). While this may or may not be true, something in one speculative article caught my eye.

That would seem to confirm findings that a search engine company shared with me on condition that I not reveal its name: The company spotted Web visits from an unannounced Apple product with a display somewhere between an iPhone and a MacBook. Is it the iPhone 3.0 or the NetMac 1.0?

Forget the stuff about the NetMac and the iPhone. What's interesting is the source: a "search engine company". They may be in the business of organizing the information ON the internet, but because of their position, they actually have MORE information than is on the internet. Given their vast search logs, what else do they know that none of us COULD know?

You Need to Know Marketing, Start with Seth Godin

I've been following Seth Godin for a while now. His book, Purple Cow, is a great read, and I just discovered that one of his earlier books, Unleashing the Ideavirus, is available online as a free eBook. You can download it here.

We geeks tend not to care much for marketing. I know I've my share of unpleasant run-ins, but instead of avoiding the business end, I've decided to learn more about it. Seth's books and his blog have turned out to be great resources.

VCBUILD : error Message: '9.00' violates enumeration constraint of '7.00 7,00 7.10 7,10 8.00 8,00'

I upgraded a Visual C++ project from Visual Studio 2005 to 2008 today, and my MSBuild script stopped working. It spat out the error message below and Google was no help.

VCBUILD : error Message:
'9.00' violates enumeration constraint of '7.00 7,00 7.10 7,10 8.00 8,00'

I made two changes that seemed to fix the problem:

1. Use the MSBuild.exe in \Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\ instead of \Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.xx.

2. Pass MSBuild the "/toolsversion:3.5" flag.

I hope someone out there finds this useful.

Check out this Good Video on Getting Real

Heard of Getting Real? Here's a video of Jason Fried (one of the authors) speaking at Business of Software. Check it out. If you have or haven't read the book its a good resource for familiarizing yourself with the concepts.



Thanks to Balsamiq for the pointer.

Also, I just found these videos over at Carsonified. I'll be checking them out this evening.