Epitome of Simple

Often, a simple answer is the best answer in software engineering. Take for example the quandry of multiple city craigslist searching ( or multi-city search ). Craigslist, being the localized tool that it is, does not allow searching multiple cities, locales, or really even categories.

Many folks have tried to put together websites that perform multiple city searches. One of the best was developed by Steve Atwood of Coding Horror. Like most others, his was shut down by a friendly letter from Craigslist. Others have cobbled together odd-looking multi-frame solutions that seem no better than opening several tabs in Firefox.

Directly utilizing search engine indexes in a very straight-forward manner enables craigfind.com to legally search multiple cities, multiple categories, and even use regular expressions. Pretty much anything you would expect from a Google search is available.

This is an example of a very simple solution to a sticky problem, utilizing existing technology in, frankly, a rather non-innovative way. Amazing thing, this internet.

The Research Part of R&D

Technically, my current title is Research and Development Manager, or R&D Manager. I'm sometimes even referred to as VP of R&D. However it seems like I do a whole lot more D than R. Perhaps my title should be more like D^10+R Manager.

There are so many technologies, libraries, and solutions out there that I would really like to dive into. Unfortunately, my time is very limited because of the heavy need for the "D" part of my job.

Here is a partial list of items I would like to research during 2008. I am shocked that two are from Yahoo.

• Enterprise Services Bus, specifically WSO2 http://wso2.org/projects/esb/java
• Yahoo Pipes - RSS feed aggregator thingy. http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/
  
• Yahoo UI Library - JavaScript, baby. http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/