How fun is this! I had an hour free this afternoon so I read over the docs on installing the AIM transport for jabber. It took me about 3 hours, but I finally got the AIM transport compiled AND completely functioning. If you’re interested in seeing how jabber works, download exodus and then register @ jabber.mindseye.com. You can then IM with other jabber users, but more importantly, you can IM other AIM users… *someday* we’ll all be using jabber powered IM. jabber me @ ajohnson@jabber.mindseye.com
jabber client tutorial
If you’re interested in Jabber from a “how do I use Jabber as a client” standpoint, this is a great tutorial. It turns out that you can talk to MSN and AIM gateways using a Jabber client *as long as* the Jabber server you’re using has the AIM or MSN transport installed.
print screen
Found on evolt today, I’ve always used PrtScn to get a screen capture and then I bring it into Fireworks to cut out the superfluous stuff.. turns out that if you use Alt –> PrtScn you get the active window, which means you don’t have to cut out the other stuff. Nice.
interview questions
Quite possibly the best read on interviewing I’ve ever seen.
mod rewrite
Old news for Apache/Linux folks, but I’ve spent way more time with IIS than Apache. Mod_rewrite is very cool. So a combination of search engine friendly urls, wget, and Lucene could allow for full text search of a dynamic site without spidering. Nice.
lucene search up and running
Inspired by Sam Ruby, I got Lucene to search this site.. My search sample size is pretty small, but 10 milliseconds for a search on any site is pretty fast. How?
First, download the Lucene binaries.
Second, throw lucene-1.2.jar & lucene-demos-1.2.jar into your classpath or into your $siteroot/WEB-INF/lib folder.
Run a quick index of the html files you want indexed:
# java -classpath #InsertPathToAboveMentionedJars org.apache.lucene.demo.IndexHTML -create #InsertPathToFilesYouWantIndexed
And then you can run a query using the sample jsp provided w/ the Lucene download by changing the path to the index you created. Pretty simple!
Maybe someday I’ll polish up the scripts and add it to Moveable Type’s External Resources page.
parsing java
say it ain’t so!
Has Mountain Dew changed the recipe?
hosting news
Found on Doc’s site, the latest Netcraft survey is out showing a close to 6% gain in share for Apache and a corresponding 6%+ loss for IIS. Interesting reading about the have’s and the have not’s in the hosting industry at the bottom of that survey.
full text search w/ lucene
Last week at work was slow.. I installed Jabber, put the finishing touches on footjoy.com, and worked on the linux desktop I have all day on Friday because I had to FTP about 3GB’s of data via a VPN connection, which completely tied up my Windows desktop machine. So Friday I installed and began working with Lucene, an open source full text searching api written entirely in Java. By sheer coincidence, Lucene was written by the same guy who wrote the V-Twin search capability in the Mac, which I mentioned yesterday (and found out about by reading Interface Culture, weird!). By the end of this coming week I hope to have a functional search for this site using Lucene. But for now.. links:
Javaworld Article on using Lucene
Finding Out About: A Cognitive Perspective on Search Engine Technology and the WWW (With CD-ROM)