Ben Zajac's Blog

Programming, Flash, IT, and sadly, SEO.

Why jailbreaking/rooting your phone is "wrong"

I was reading this post over at MobileCrunch: http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2010/07/14/droid-x-actually-self-destructs-if-you-try-to-mod-it/


This line from Devin Coldewey got me wondering: "I won’t restate all my reasons for supporting the modding, hacking, jailbreaking, and so on of your legally-owned products here".

I've heard in the past many discussions about this, especially with the iPhone and jailbreaking. People modify the phone software to allow them to do things the software either doesn't do, or prevents for some reason. Now, personally, I believe you should be able to modify this software as much as you want, with a disclaimer that says "Once you do this, bye bye warranty and any type of decent support." I think bricking the phone is completely unacceptable.

But on the devil's advocate side of me, things are different. You bought the hardware. It is your legal property (unless you are leasing it. Read your contracts people). You can modify it, solder it, paint it, whatever you want. That's perfectly fine because you own it. But when you jailbreak something, you are actually modifying the software. This is a different story. You license software. You don't own it. It's not treated as a tangible thing you can own. It's similar to owning a book. You own the paper, the ink, but not the words on the page. With a book you have to respect (respect meaning abide by, not necessarily admire) the copyright, but with software you have to respect license. If you dont like the license terms, then don't use that software. If Motorola's Android flavor has something in it you don't like, roll your own Android flavor and install it over. While that doesn't seem practical, that's the way it works.

Personally, I don't see any harm in modifying the phone operating system software to get it to do what you want, as long as it is for personal use. No harm to others, no foul. Break your own phone, well, that's your problem. But from the standpoint of software is licensed, not purchased, I understand. It's like an author not wanting someone to rewrite the ending to their book.

To sum it all up, if you root/jailbreak your phone or in other ways violate the license/EULA for your personal use, it's "wrong", not wrong.

SEO Lesson for today: Whitespace

So I tend to do a lot of SEO consulting. Mainly from the technical side of things. So I'll share with you a lesson now and again.

Today's lesson: Crawlers don't care about whitespace.

I recently heard from a client that their SEO expert said we need to strip out all unnecessary whitespace from the HTML. Newlines, tabs, all of it. Apparently the whitespace we put into the HTML to make it readable was destroying their PageRank or something like that. I tried to understand how in the world that made sense. Apparently, the people writing all these search engine crawlers and parsers are idiots and were unable to figure out how to make their bots skip over whitespace. The billions of dollars search companies have spent to improve their analyzers of your HTML code, and they overlooked skipping over extra whitespace?!? Sheesh. The ONLY way removing whitespace would help is if you weren't compressing your pages anyway. Then you have bigger problems then whitespace.
Here's a little experiment. I downloaded the clients homepage, which has a hefty amount of HTML and whitespace.
Uncompressed filesize: 106KB. Yeah, that's quite a bit.
Stripping out all \n and \t: 104KB. Not a big difference.
Condense all \s+ into " ": 75KB. Now we see a bigger jump. But wait...
Gzipped 106KB file: 13KB
Gzipped 75KB file: 12KB. Not a significant difference in my mind.

Search engines crawlers and parsers care little about whitespace. How do I know this? Because browsers care little about whitespace. The only thing you will do is shave MAYBE a kilobyte off your filesize, which in the grand scheme of SEO things, is completely minor and insignificant.

My NoSQL Opinion

After reading post after post after post on hacker news about NoSQL solutions being either the second coming or the devil incarnate, I figure I mind as well chime in. Quick and easy, here's how it goes: Right tool for the job. If you have extremely dispersed data that doesn't always follow a tight schema and the hardware to support a NoSQL solution, then use it. If you have data that follows a rigid structure, isn't all that complex, or needs a serious administration language, go with SQL/RDBMS. Comparing NoSQL vs RDBMS in the sense that one is a replacement of the other is a bad path to head down. Both can co-exist.
Choosing which solution to go with should be driven by a few factors. The primary one is application needs. Does your application and data fit better into one or the other, with considerations for speed and connectivity. After that, you need to apply some business needs. What is the cost of one versus the other? Cost can be broken down into numerous things, such as licensing, hardware, bandwidth, and administration costs.

NoSQL and RDBMS are not enemies. They are friends, who want to help you when you are in need. Look at what your application and business needs, then choose. Stop with all the "SQL is now obsolete" or "NoSQL is crap". We need them both.