Doc says today,

One virtue I’ve seen in the programming world is a preference not to re-invent code that’s already doing a fine job.

Doc’s old friend, I mean former long time, not “old” as in decrepit because god knows I have a few years on both those boomer boys, but here’s my point… Doc’s colleague and Cluetrain co-author Chris Locke has been spreading this message himself for quite a while now in his role with Ken Krugler’s and Steve Larsen’s company, the vertical search leader Krugle. SearchInsider says that Krugle claims,

…developers spend 20 to 25 percent of their time looking for code and technical information…. Krugle crawls source code, whether in open repositories or within source code control systems.

Question:

Since Doc is one of the media heavyweights in open source, and open source is about code (source CODE, geddit?), why has he been so silent on the functionality, the utility, the need for a tool like Krugle? I can only find one reference that Doc made to Krugle last month in IT Garage (after an admittedly quick Google search). The product has launched, and during the beta period over 35,000 people, most of them developers, some of them — like me — simple souls in reckless pursuit of knowledge and understanding, have downloaded and used it and provided feedback. Unlike your perpetual beta web-too-oh! ad hockery, this tool was professionally designed, developed and released. It had a four month beta period and now it’s ready for prime time. So what do you think of it, Doc? What do the Linux folks have to say?

A nanowarhol (or nw) = 15 minutes x 10^-9 x (fame) = .000000015 minutes of fame = 9.0 x 10^-7 seconds of fame = 0.0000009 seconds of fame

The first usage of nanowarhol occurred in this post on the Krugle blog in reference to the brief ascendancy of the Krugle website’s popularity in Technorati following the go-live announcement on June 15.

This blogger has a day job. It’s a job with a lot of network administration in it. Today, things were broken and I needed to do some sleuthing to get them fixed. Krugle saved my bacon. I did a quick search for a missing extension, a piece of code that was referenced in a Perl script, and Krugle turned up exactly what I needed simply, easily, intuitively.

Some time ago, a coworker shared with me a cool little Perl program that runs out across the network and checks each drive for free space and reports the results in a spreadsheet or an HTML table. But, in the Information technology world very little is simple, and so this story has a few twists and turns. I’ll save you the torment of trying to follow the whole thing…

Long story short, first there was a program that worked on a laptop that was hooked up to the network. Then the laptop was forced into some kind of Vulcan mind meld with a much faster and better desktop computer. When it was thought (by the people - nobody asked the machines what they thought) that the desktop had sucked up everything that was on the laptop, the laptop was lobotomized and sent to surplus. Think of poor little R2D2 wandering around in a state of permanent memory loss.

Over the next few weeks the desktop performed like a champ, right up until I needed that Perl script. I ran the program. The desktop just burped and looked at me funny. I ran it again. The desktop made that redneck in the beer tent sound and dabbed daintily at its lips. I didn’t run it again, because I was afraid the machine would hurl.

There ensued some analysis, followed by the conclusion that I was missing something called an AdminMisc extension for Win32 Perl. That’s why the machine was burping. Don’t ask how I knew this. I just knew, okay? And that rhymes with GNU and happens to be how the program is licensed by the author, Dave Roth — but I’m getting ahead of my story, which in any event is almost over.

Pretty lengthy set-up for a short and sweet anecdote, don’t you think? The point is, that I knew what I needed to make my computer work, but I didn’t know where to find it. This is where Krugle came in. Some time ago I signed up for the beta test of this programmers’ search engine, but I’m not much of a programmer, so except for a quick look around and a brief search for some WordPress related thing, I hadn’t used it. Today I plugged in the name of the extension I needed, and selected Perl and clicked on “search” and the result that was returned immediately in the tech pages was the result I needed. There were also some snippets of code returned that made me know I was in the ballpark because they looked a lot like the script I was running. Thanks Krugle.