Archive for June, 2009

Riding with the iPhone

I’m on a motorcycle trip this week, and left all technology behind… Except the iPhone. It gives me the chance to get away without having to lug along a laptop and plan my trip around wifi hotspots. Before leaving, I subscribed to the Rogers data roaming plan. It’s still unreasonable, but it’s better that the [...]

Posted on June 21, 2009 at 3:01 pm by Ord · Permalink · 10 Comments
In: Uncategorized · Tagged with: , , , ,

Local Solr

For searching at our Open Business Information Directory project we have been using a Solr server.  Based on the Apache Lucene library, it consistenly works well for the type of searches we need to do.  Since a lot of the applications for business data will be local searches, we looked at ways to implement distance [...]

Posted on June 12, 2009 at 11:15 am by Ord · Permalink · 3 Comments
In: OBID · Tagged with: , , , , ,

What’s right, now?

I recently heard that a study has shown that wikipedia was more accurate that Britanica as an encyclopedia. I don’t know the details of the study, but to me the important question is how do we define “right” when it comes to facts. Not so long ago it was a fact that the earth was [...]

Posted on June 9, 2009 at 9:12 am by Ord · Permalink · Comments Closed
In: Uncategorized · Tagged with: , ,

Life without laptop

I am on the road at a conference as I write this. Normally, I don’t leave home without a laptop – but since I was travelling by motorcycle and space is at a premium I left the notebook at home. This meant putting a lot of faith in my iPhone, and so far it has [...]

Posted on June 8, 2009 at 2:51 pm by Ord · Permalink · 3 Comments
In: Uncategorized · Tagged with: , , ,