human vs. google
Francisco and I were discussing whether or not search-engines had replaced knowledgeable people for certain kinds of questions. Specifically we were interested in the kinds of questions that are more easily answered by people than by google, and what that reflected about the question, the process of answering it, and the person asking the question.
Frisco argued (in my words) that a person’s inability to use a sufficiently capable search engine to answer a question reflects their ignorance of that tool’s featureset, i.e. “Google can answer anything if you know how to ask the question.”
I said that I frequently find that a tight, focused conversation with a trusted human source lasting perhaps only 30 seconds can be more valuable than an hours-long answer-and-question hunting session with google and dizzying thread-tangles of forum-noise.
Following is a dizzying thread-tangle of email about this subject.
Mark Meves Fri, Mar 3, 2006 at 1:42 PM
To: francisco
I might be convinced to share your perpective on this issue, but nonetheless I came accross the conversation with Scott (my brother) in my chat logs and I had a laugh.Session Start (manikmarkus:scotathon): Tue Feb 14 14:44:19 2006
[14:44] scotathon: mark, what is the function that will take a string and execute it as php, in php?
[14:44] manikmarkus: eval()
[14:44] manikmarkus: right?
[14:44] scotathon: yes
[14:44] scotathon: something like that it impossible to google
[14:44] manikmarkus: careful it’s like the most insecure thing in php.
[14:45] manikmarkus: avoid it when possible. what are you tyring to do?
[14:45] manikmarkus: cause you can dynamically generate property names and method names and class names w/o using eval()
[14:45] manikmarkus: $o = new $class_name();
[14:45] manikmarkus: $o->$some_meth(’blah’)
[14:46] manikmarkus: $age = $o->$property_name
[14:46] scotathon: yeah…
[14:46] scotathon: i’m not sure i want to use eval
[14:46] manikmarkus: $age = $o[$property_name] //same i think
[14:46] scotathon: basically i am loading in an .html file into a string
[14:46] scotathon: $html = file_get_contents(’myhtmlfile.htm’);
[14:47] manikmarkus: right
[14:47] scotathon: but now i find myself needing to put a bit of php in that .htm file
[14:47] scotathon: basically i am emulating smarty
[14:47] manikmarkus: woah. i’ll let you have fun w/ that. be careful
[14:47] scotathon: but i don’t need all that hooha
[14:47] scotathon: i just want to do this:
[14:48] scotathon: $html = file_get_contents(’mytemplate.htm’);
[14:48] scotathon: mytemplate.htm contains:
[Ed: html character entities removed because wordpress broke on them — they got converted to the referred to entity. doh!][14:48] manikmarkus: if the mytemplate.htm has php in it, could you require_once() it?
[14:49] manikmarkus: ob_start()
require_once(’file.php’)
$s = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean()
[14:49] manikmarkus: perhaps?
[14:50] scotathon: woah, never used ob before
[14:50] manikmarkus: yeah it’s ugly but nec. sometimes
[14:55] scotathon: you rock
[14:56] manikmarkus: sweet glad i could help
[14:56] scotathon: i have no idea how that works, by the way
[14:56] scotathon: require_once doesn’t execute the code?
[14:56] scotathon: or… i guess it does
[14:56] scotathon: but the file can be almost all html
[14:56] manikmarkus: ob_start() says “anything output to the screen, capture it, don’t put it to the screen but start saving it in a buffer
[14:57] manikmarkus: ob_get_contents() says “ok whatever you saved,
give me a copy
[14:57] scotathon: and require_once… will actually “echo” the file contents?
[14:57] scotathon: if it’s html, i mean
[14:57] manikmarkus: ob_end_clean() means “ok stop buffering
(capturing outputted content).
[14:57] manikmarkus: ob_end_flush() means “stop capturing, and output
it to screen
[14:58] manikmarkus: i don’t have much experience require_once()ing non-php files, but php is a language embedded inside other documents (html) so i guess it should work
[14:59] manikmarkus: in the old days, people used to incude() and require() static content all the time: SSI’s
[14:59] scotathon: crazy
[14:59] scotathon: i’ve never done that before
[14:59] scotathon: good times
[14:59] manikmarkus: rite rite. hope this helps . good luck and don’[t refrain from asking me more questions
[14:59] scotathon: thanks
[14:59] scotathon: i appreciate it, you were way better than google
[14:59] scotathon: i’d still be looking
[15:00] manikmarkus: heh
Session Close (scotathon): Tue Feb 14 15:01:21 2006The first person to make a search interface work like that will be a rich man or woman.
I sent this to frisco, and told him this would be a good conversation for my blog. Frisco responds:
francisco Fri, Mar 3, 2006 at 2:00 PM
To: Mark MevesI see your point. It’s too similar to me asking google how to fix my car’s engine noise. My point is that when i query google for “car engine noise fix” i will get a bunch of pages about how to fix various engine noises. If i do not know much about cars, this will overwhelm me and i will have to read each one carefully and thoroughly, at the end of which i will have a lot more knowledge about cars than when i started, perhaps even enough to actuallly be able to do some good on my car. If (still with limited knowledge) i ask an expert, and the expert says “that noise is due to the 3rd piston needing cleaning” (or something that actually needs fixed on cars, i don’t know enough about them) and i proceed to unscrew everything to get at the pistons, i will end up with a very very broken car.
In your example, do you really feel confident that your brother will write code that works well? [Ed: yes] I feel he would be better off reading through (or at least skimming) the entirety of www.php.net/docs.php and that you just succeeded in giving him the rope to hang himself with.
-f
http://www.blackant.net/p.s. - i don’t know where your blog is, and can’t think how to query google to find it.