Thursday, December 29, 2011

Bing 2.0 API is useless

Bing's 2.0 Search API is basically useless. The results dosen't match up with the Bing.com website and so testing is almost impossible.

And worse the results returned by the API are mostly irrelevant. I think Microsoft needs to seriously look at what are they targeting the Bing API for. Because as a developer i won't want to use it.

But there is a lack of freely available search apis out there.
Google Custom search requires you to search only specific websites that you specify and not google itself.
Yahoo BOSS requires payment so its out for me.

Anyone knows of what other options are out there?

Links to the issue:
Stack Overflow
Bing Community 

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Sheevaplug Debian Install

Upgraded from the default Ubuntu install to Debian today, mainly followed the instruction by Martin Michlmayr. Mostly worked but the instructions for after installation of Debian to the MMC card was slightly different for mine.

These are the ones that worked for me.

setenv bootargs_console console=ttyS0,115200
setenv bootcmd_mmc 'mmcinit; ext2load mmc 0:1 0x00800000 /uImage; ext2load mmc 0:1 0x01100000 /uInitrd'
setenv bootcmd 'setenv bootargs $(bootargs_console); run bootcmd_mmc; bootm 0x00800000 0x01100000'
saveenv

The main difference is the mmcinit command, on my uboot it was "mmcinit" together, for the instructions that Martin gave was "mmc init" with a space.