Test driving Chrome OS

chrome_logo_may09After 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.

Apache Solr 1.4 finally released

apache_solr_logoFinally, 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/

Solr being used by Google’s allforgood.org

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

CIA to invest in Lucid Imagination

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