Monthly Archives: July 2008

Cuil Search Engine: A Long Way to go

Cuil.com, a Google search competitor, launched today, July 28, 2008 and I’m happy for it.  But, they’ve got a long way to go to unseat Google as the search king.

They claim to rank content rather than popularity (number of incoming links to a web site). Unfortunately, that type of understanding programmed into software is a long way off.

A simple search for “carte orange”, the Paris public transportation pass, returns a lot of weak results on Cuil:

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=carte%20orange&sl=long

Whereas on Google, the majority on spot on for finding good in-depth information on the correct subject:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=carte+orange&btnG=Google+Search

Cuil has some nice features though: pictures in search results, category refinement (search within search results by clicking on a category), and instant search suggestions which are already quite good.

Google has gotten lonely up at the top.  It’s nice that Cuil may give them some competition.

Firefox 3 Question Mark Diamond

On web pages with accented characters, such as on French language websites, Firefox 3 may show a diamond question mark symbol instead of the accented character.

To fix this character set display problem in Firefox 3, change the Character Encoding under the Menu -> View -> Character Encoding from Unicode to Western ISO-8859-1 if you’re reading Western European language based web pages.

Not allowed to connect to this MySQL server

When connecting to a remote mysql server, the login/user must have rights to connect to the mysql server from outside of the local server, i.e. localhost. You need to edit the user record within the mysql.user table or add a new record for this user, giving it access to connect to the mysql server from a host other than localhost.

Login to the mysql server add run the following command:
grant all privileges on *.* to 'user'@'192.168.25.1' identified by 'password' with GRANT OPTION;
Replace “user” and “password” and “192.168.25.1” with your mysql username, password, and the IP address of your computer that you’re connecting (to the mysql server) from.

Remember that your mysql server must also allow connections from remote hosts.

Can’t connect to mysql server on remote server

By default mysql does not allow connects to itself from any host besides localhost, for security reasons.

When you get an error “Can’t connect to mysql server on [remote server]” when trying to connect to the remote SQL server via the mysql command line tool, log into the server running the mysql server and edit the /etc/mysql/my.cnf config file.

In particular, comment out the following line:
bind-address           = 127.0.0.1
This allows for connections from any host.

Next, update the mysql user to allow it access from a host other than ‘localhost’.