If you’re into Lucene and/or Apache techologies and will be in Amsterdam, check out all the Lucene happenings at ApacheCon Europe: Lucene and me at ApacheCon EU in Amsterdam March 23-27

LogoContest – Solr Wiki Wow, there is some decent swag being offered for the Solr Logo Contest.  8 GB iPod Nano, bunch of gift certificates…  So, if you’re the artistic type, or know someone who is, let them know about the contest.  Details are on the link above.

Came across this article on /. (Slashdot | The Stigma of a Tech Support Background) and it got me thinking about the person’s problem and some advice I’ve given a some recent grads that I have worked with.   As I see it, the biggest problem a hiring manager has with someone straight out of college [...]

I.B.M. to Push ‘Cloud Computing,’ Using Data From Afar – New York Times The software that I.B.M. is packaging in its cloud offering is called Hadoop, running on the Linux operating system. Hadoop is based on an open-source search project called Nutch, and an open-source version of Google’s MapReduce software for spreading complex computer tasks [...]

Ask.com Web Search OK, so we keep hearing about all the new things Ask.com is up to (like Ask3D), but, in my opinion, they still are missing the key thing: quality results. I don’t care how pretty the look and feel is if I can’t rely on the results. Try, for instance, a search on [...]

Here’s a Maven tip that has helped me a few times: If things are failing and you can’t figure out why, try deleting your local repository and starting fresh with a new set of downloads. This has saved the day for me during at least 3 different releases that weren’t going through. In one case, [...]