FSFE Happy Valentine # Today I got woken up with a friendly hug and roses waiting for me: I do not really care about presents for sort-of-artificial celebration days like valentines day. However, FSFE had a very nice idea: The proposal was to use valentines day to show your love for free software. The website proposed to e.g. hug a free software developer, to make a gift to a team of free software developers: ...
FOSDEM 2010 - part 3 # Sunday started in Janson with Andrian Bowyer’s talk on RepRap machines, that is devices that can be used as manufacturing devices and are able to replicate themselves. After that I went over to the Mono dev room to listen to Miguel de Icaza on Mono Edge. A great talk on the history of Mono, the way the community interacts with Microsoft, the C# language itself and special features only available in Mono. ...
FOSDEM 2010 - part 2 # The event itself featured 306 talks - so pretty hard to choose what to watch on two days. This time, not only the main tracks were awesome, but also several dev rooms featured very interesting talks by well known FOSS developers. Saturday started with a FOSDEM birthday dance done by all attendees. The first keynote speaker Brooks Davis explained his experiences promoting open source methods at a large company. ...
FOSDEM 2010 - part 1 # Four years ago I was working in Saarbrücken. From there it is a very short ride over to FOSDEM (little more than 300km). So I decided - hey, why not stay there for a weekend. I found a very nice Brussels bed and breakfast hotel called Rovignon - featuring not only comfortable rooms at reasonable prizes but also cats in the house. Back then, I barely knew anyone at the conference. ...
FOSDEM 2010 - 10 years FOSDEM # The final schedule of FOSDEM 2010 is up: Looks like bad news - 306 interesting talks within just one weekend. Lots of interesting talks in the main track including Greg Kroah-Hartman on “Write and Submit your first Linux kernel Patch”, David Recordon from Facebook on “Scaling Facebook with OpenSource tools”, Bernard Li on “Ganglia: 10 years of monitoring clusters and grids”, Andrew Tanenbaum with his “MINIX 3: a Modular, Self-Healing POSIX-compatible Operating System” talk, Benoît Chesneau on “CouchDB! ...
The 7 deadly sins of (Java) software developers # On Lucid Imaginations Blog Jay Hill published a great article on The seven deadly sins of solr. Basically it is a collection of his experiences “analyzing and evaluating a great many instances of Solr implementations, running in some of the largest Fortune 500 companies”. It is a collection of common mistakes, mis-configurations and pitfalls in Solr installations in production use. ...
Though the official schedule is not yet online: I will be giving an introductory talk about Apache Hadoop at next
year’s FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Developer European Meeting) in Brussles. This will be the 10th birthday of the
event - looking forward to a fun event, meeting other free and open source software developers from all over
Europe.
Sesat - moving from FAST to Solr # The article was first published on Sesat Weblog. As the whole site went down several days ago, I retrieved the content from the Google cache and posted it here for perservation. Update: Original site is up again.
Moving from Fast to Solr # Sesat has published a nice in-depth report on why to move from Fast to Solr. The article also includes a description of the steps taken to move over as well as several statistics: http://sesat.no/moving-from-fast-to-solr-review.html On a related topic, the following article details, where Apple is using Lucene/Solr to power it’s search. Spoiler: Look at Spotlight, their desktop search, as well as on the iTunes search with about 800 QPS. ...
Fellow now # After two years volunteering as booth staff for the FSFE at the Chemnitzer Linuxtage explaining the advantages of becoming a FSFE fellow I am a fellow myself for two days ;) I first got in contact with the FSFE through Fernanda Weiden during my time in Zürich in 2006. In the meantime I have learned more and more about the political activities of FSFE: Mostly during the local Berlin meetups in newthinking store and as a booth member in Chemnitz. ...