After all the buzz about Chrome OS being open-sourced as “Chromium OS”, I had to give it a ride.
I could have compiled the source from scratch, but a quick search gave this page from Gdgt providing a VMWare image of a complete install of Chrome OS. So I created a new virtual machine in VMWare Fusion on my MacBook, selected “Other Linux 2.6.x kernel” as OS type and poited it to the .vmdk disk image. See Figure 1 for how that looks. (more…)
Finally, after long delays, Apache Solr version 1.4 is released. The long delay was mainly due to very strict quality standards, which made it necessary to wait until some serious known bugs were dealt with. Also read my previous article on what’s new in this version. Here is the official release statement:
Apache Solr 1.4 has been released and is now available for
public download! http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/lucene/solr/
(more...)
Google runs a web page called AllForGood which helps people find opportunities to volunteer in various organizations in their neighbourhood. In the beginning, the search in the site was updated from Google’s crawlers crawling several volunteer webpages.
However, when designing a tighter integrated, more real-time search, they turned to Apache Solr. On their blog they say
“…our search engine is now powered by SOLR, an incredible open source project that will allow us to provide higher quality and more up-to-date opportunities.”
What a super testimony for Solr’s strenths and maturity!
Some people are perhaps more comfortable learning through a book than through Wiki pages and README files.
For years we’ve had books about Lucene, and now comes the first book about Apache Solr as well, titled Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server.
The book is written by David Smiley and Eric Pugh and is available for pre-order from Amazon. We’ll post a review once we’ve read it. Until then, read more about the book from the authors at Amazon.
Update: Packt Publishing is sending me a copy of the book, and if you order it from this link I’ll even get a share 
The Norwegian IT newspaper Digi.no today writes that CIA invests in Lucid Imagination through the company In-Q-Tel. This is a great confirmation that the Apache Lucene/Solr search engine is high-end software of key value also for intelligence use.
That would come as no surpise to us who have followed Lucene for some time. And perhaps for intelligence in particular, they do not want to be too heavily dependent upon closed source code. In their press release, In-Q-Tel they say that they want to secure advanced access to Lucene/Solr technology, and state that Lucene/Solr is one of the fastest growing search solutions over the last three years.
This is good news for all users of Lucene/Solr search, also in Norway where Cominvent is Lucid Imagination’s partner. It gives even more credibility to open source search, and makes this platform grow even faster. Time for Norwegian intelligence to follow?