Grant's Grunts: Lucene Edition » Java

Next Meeting: Triangle HUG

grant_ingersoll — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 12:58:44 +0000

The next TriHUG meeting has been announced: Sept. 14. There will be two speakers:

Wei Wei on Practical Hadoop Security and Me on Hadoop and Lucene and Solr.

For more info and to RSVP, see Triangle Hadoop Users Group.

Apache Mahout’s got a brand new look

grant_ingersoll — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 12:53:37 +0000

Thanks to committer Robin Anil for putting together Mahout’s shiny new website: Apache Mahout:: Scalable machine-learning and data-mining library.

Guardian Case Study: Amazon Web Services

grant_ingersoll — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 10:03:33 +0000

Amazon has a nice Guardian Case Study: Amazon Web Services up on their website about how the Guardian is using EC2 for scaling their Open Platform API. If you’ve been following along, the little boxes in the picture (the blue and gold ones) are actually Apache Solr. If you want to read more about the Solr part of it, check out the Lucid Imagination press release, which will lead you to more details on it.

Join the Lucene Revolution in Boston October 2010 | www.lucenerevolution.org

grant_ingersoll — Mon, 17 May 2010 12:45:38 +0000

Join the Lucene Revolution in Boston October 2010 | www.lucenerevolution.org.

Hope to see you in Boston!

RedMonk Podcasts: Search as a database – Grant Ingersoll on Solr & Lucene

grant_ingersoll — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 12:53:19 +0000

Really enjoyed my conversation with Michael Coté earlier in the week on NoSQL, Lucene/Solr as a persistence engine and a variety of other topics. You can hear the conversation at: RedMonk Podcasts.

Apache Mahout talk at Triangle Java User’s Group

grant_ingersoll — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:16:13 +0000

For those who live in the Triangle, I’ll be giving an intro talk on Mahout next Monday. See Welcome to the Triangle Java Users Group for more details. Due note the location is no longer in RTP, but at the Red Hat campus at NCSU.

Hope to see you there!

Lucene Boot Camp Training at ApacheCon

grant_ingersoll — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 13:13:41 +0000

I will once again be offering my Lucene Boot Camp training session at ApacheCon US this year. ApacheCon is in Oakland this year and is celebrating 10 years of the ASF. In addition to my training, there are a number of Lucene/Solr/Mahout/Tika/etc. talks scheduled during the conference as well as a Lucene meetup (free). For more details on my training, see the ApacheCon page where you can also register to attend.

11 Apache Technologies that Have Changed Computing in the Last 10 Years

grant_ingersoll — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 21:46:16 +0000

11 Apache Technologies that Have Changed Computing in the Last 10 Years.

Number 3 (not that it implies ordering) on the list: Apache Lucene. Couldn’t agree more!

SF Bay Area Lucene/Solr Meetup

grant_ingersoll — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 17:49:35 +0000

Just wanted to follow up on last night’s Lucene/Solr Meetup in San Francisco.

First off, special thanks to all the speakers (Jason Rutherglen, Michael Busch, Erik Hatcher and all the lightning talks.) We had a lot of excellent talks ranging from low level Lucene details on payloads and real time search to high level discussions on new feature in Solr and best practices for working on stopwords and relevance. Also had intros to Mahout, Tika and the new Open Relevance project at Lucene. I’ll post the slides on the Meetup site when they are available (I am still waiting to get them from the speakers.)

Second, I really enjoyed engaging with so many people about what they are working on in Lucene/Solr. It is always fun to hear all the different ways people are (ab)using Lucene/Solr to do cool things, etc. It was especially good to meet some fellow Mahout committers (Ted Dunning and Jeff Eastman) for the first time, as well as one of Mahout’s Google Summer of Code student David Hall, who is working on adding Latent Dirichlet Allocation.

Finally, I look forward to doing more of these. Right now, I’m looking for interest in Raleigh, NC, but I know we’ll likely have another one in the Bay Area again soon.

Mahout Update

grant_ingersoll — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 14:42:25 +0000

It’s been a while since I reported anything on Mahout (here’s why), but thought I would give an update. I know it’s been promised before, but the committers have been diligently working on a 0.1 release, which should be out very soon. I think I have all the Maven release stuff in place and am now testing and verifying the release candidate. Once that’s done, I’ll post an RC for vote and then we should be able to release.

Going forward, there should be several new algorithms going in post 0.1, as Isabel Drost has added some code for Winnow and Perceptron implementations and I believe Karl Wettin has some work on hierarchical clustering in place. I also believe Ted Dunning and Jeff Eastman are working on Dirichlet clustering. Finally, Sean Owen is always rocking on Taste’s collaborative filtering capabilities, so there will no doubt be more goodness in that regard. As for me, I’m working on integrating clustering (Carrot2 and Mahout) into Solr and will be writing a chapter on doing text clustering in Taming Text.