Google AROUND, network scanning, and pinging with TCP

19.04.2012
We start this week with a real geek out: If you have ever had to weigh the benefits and tradeoffs of as an application (for example, using vs. ("a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network "), then you absolutely have to watch "" (it's NSFW -- bad words). Make sure you watch all of it ... the end is great!

So, this week I have a few tasty techie delights to please your palate.

The first is Google's AROUND. Unless you're a die-hard Microsoftie you probably use Google quite frequently to search the Web (BTW, does anyone still use Yahoo?) and, being the well-informed chap or chapess you are, you likely know about the you can use, such as "-" to exclude specific words or phrases and "OR" to, well, "or" words and phrases.

Q&A:

But here's an operator you might not be aware of: the "AROUND" operator. According to the blog written by , "has been operational for ... oh ... the past 5 or 6 years. Turns out that nobody ever bothered to write much about it."

A good example of how to use AROUND is given in one of the comments to the posting: If you were looking for [Paul "the dude" SMITH] (we're using Google's convention for delimiting search terms with square brackets) but you didn't know his alias you could search [paul AROUND(3) smith].