Posted by Ian Holsman
as it seems to screw up MS word and all the other ancient apps
more details here
Update: after following Bruce’s lead I commented out the java 1.3.1 things in /var/db/dyld/update-prebinding-paths.txt and re-ran update_prebinding.
I now have excel working!
Posted by Ian Holsman
In the latest escalation of the spam war, the spammers have switched gears and are using PDF files containing their rubbish.
I’m guessing SpamAssassin will have PDF scanning capabilities within a week if it doesn’t already.
Posted by Ian Holsman
It’s a sad state of affairs when you can start identifying with the PHB from the dilbert cartoons.
Posted by Ian Holsman
So I decided to give the read the book online feature a try from amazon. for people who don’t know what it is, it allows you to pay a bit more and have a electronic version on their site.
It’s a bit pricy imho ($6 to view a $25 book), but I gave it a try.
do you think I can navigate back to the place where I can actually read it?
talk about hopeless. I eventually found the link on the front door. “your media library” hidden under gifts&lists.
absolutely useless UI experience. no way I will ever have realized that my electronic book was in a “media library”.
so.. for some reason when I actually look at the site i get a blank screen instead of a book.
amazon if your listening your “media” site sucks. i’ve spent over 10 minutes trying to figure out how to read a book using it and i’m stumped.
Posted by Ian Holsman
One of the things I’m responsible for at AOL is their use of Solr in their upcoming web developments.
a task that we keep on finding ourselves doing is taking a input feed (be it CSV, XML, or DB table) and transforming that into a Solr Index. (we call it injestion), it’s a boring and thankless task, but it is critical to get it done correctly. Especially when you need to deal with real time and batch updates.
This led me to have a reason to try out Kettle, which is a open source ETL engine to do these kind of things. But out of the box it had no support for Solr :-(
So I created this proof of concept plugin to show how easy it could be to just shove a data stream into solr, and am trying to get a demo going showing how easy it is to take some input data and make it into a Solr search engine (as well as other things at the same time).
It works well enough for me to do a proof of concept with a couple of different feeds and show the channel development teams how easy life could be.
disclaimer: before you go and start using it in production, please be aware that it needs alot more work when it comes to setting options and stability.
So if your interested in this type of thing.. feel free to ping me and I’ll add you to the project. (with the aim that either Solr or Kettle take this and make it part of their standard packages)
Posted by Ian Holsman
I’ve just created a new module for the apache webserver 2.2 which implements one of Brad’s features of perlbal.
The ability to concatenate CSS or javascript files into a single HTTP request.
the request will look like: http://hostname/cdn/??music2.js,mp.js,dir1/dalai_llama.js,ratings_widget.js,widget_config.js,common.js
my initial testing shows a performance gain of about 1 second when I request a file from the other side of the pacific ocean.
you can try it out yourself: with concat / without concat
The multiple host names reflect the original page going to multiple hosts to retrieve the files (which are on multiple CDNs)
firebug shows the following:
from
to
code is hosted on: googlecode
Posted by Ian Holsman
nice clip showing how charities are using “web2.0” to spread their message.
The clip was produced by Stir, and it looks like no advertising dweebs were harmed.