Official blog of Shalin Shekhar Mangar
I learned important life lessons in the last year. Many of these are inter-related: Work intentionally - It is too easy to live life on auto-pilot. Be thoughtful about your relationships, work, and learning. Train the monkey before building the pedestal - We focus our attention on the easy parts, the things we know how to do. Work on hard problems first. In other words, be ambitious and optimize…
Bangalore just got a new search meetup group started by folks from eBay. This one is a bit more general than our existing Bangalore Solr/Lucene Meetup group which by the way is close to 600 members and running strong! Today was the first meetup and I presented a session on the upcoming release of Solr 6 which has some juicy new features! It is called “ What’s cooking in Solr 6″ . Hope you find it…
Someone asked me how to ensure that Solr is exposed exclusively on a server’s internal IP address so I thought this bit of information would be useful more generally. On Linux , edit the solr.in.sh file, find the property called SOLR_HOST (it is commented out by default) and set its value to the IP address or the host name that you want Solr to listen for requests. The procedure is similar…
So yeah, I wrote a blog post after a long time and no, it’s not this one but a mammoth post over at the Lucidworks blog called “ Call me maybe: SolrCloud, Jepsen and flaky networks ”. Some interesting excerpts: TL;DR; We tested SolrCloud against bridge, random transitive, and fixed transitive network partitions using Jepsen and found no data loss issues for both compare-and-set…
Shalin Says… turned 4 today! I received this notification from tumblr today and I figured that it was an appropriate occasion to check in to this oft neglected blog. There are many things to say but too little time to say them. The biggest item that I am working on right now is SOLR-5308 which allows users to split all documents with a particular route key into their own collection. So if you have…
The First Bangalore Lucene/Solr meetup was organized on Saturday, 8th June 2013 courtesy of the initiatives of Anshum Gupta and Varun Thacker . Although I joined in as a co-organizer but honestly I did nothing except tweet about it and show up with some slides. I must say that I was pleasantly surprised at the rate at which the group went from zero to a hundred members (it stands at a 132 members…
I realize that it’s been a long time since I posted something here. About three years ago, I started working on projects at AOL, which did not have anything to do with Apache Solr . Increasingly I found myself having nothing to say publicly about my work. Though I did get back to working with Apache Solr for the AOL WebMail team, I didn’t resume blogging due to sheer laziness, I guess.…
Apache Lucene 3.1.0 and Apache Solr 3.1.0 : This is the first release bringing Lucene and Solr release versions in sync. There are numerous bug fixes, optimizations and new features. Download from here
I had been holding out on buying a more internet friendly phone for some time now, waiting for 3G service to start in India. After my iPad experience , it was clear to me that I couldn’t be happy with an iPhone but it was also obvious that none of the available Android phones were good enough. Enter the new Samsung Galaxy S with Android 2.1, awesome 4" display, light weight and a good…
Solr 1.4.1 Released : From the mailing list announcement: Apache Solr 1.4.1 has been released and is now available for public download! http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/lucene/solr/ Solr 1.4.1 is a bug fix release. See the change log for more details.
Now that I have had the chance to play with the Apple iPad, I thought I’d put down some observations and opinions about the device. I know that I’m late to the party but hey, they don’t sell these devices here in India. First of all, I love that I do not have to sit before a desk to use this. There is a real need in the world for a device like this and even though many have tried…
Apache Mahout 0.3 has been released. Apache Mahout is a project which attempts to make machine learning both scalable and accessible. It is a sub-project of the excellent Apache Lucene project which provides open source search software. From the project website: The Apache Lucene project is pleased to announce the release of Apache Mahout 0.3. Highlights include: New: math and collections modules…
A couple of weeks back, Apache Lucene Committer and PMC member, Michael McCandless started a discussion on factoring out a shared, standalone Analysis package for Lucene, Solr and Nutch . During the discussions, Yonik Seeley, Solr Creator, proposed merging the development of Lucene and Solr . After intense discussions and multiple rounds of voting , the following changes are being put into effect:…
Congratulations to the Apache Lucene team on releasing Lucene Java 3.0.1 and 2.9.2. Both of these are bug fix releases and are backwards compatible with Lucene Java 3.0.0 and 2.9.1 respectively. From the official announcement : Hello Lucene users, On behalf of the Lucene development community I would like to announce the release of Lucene Java versions 3.0.1 and 2.9.2: Both releases fix bugs in…
According to a blog post from Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and CTO, FAST Bjørn Olstad, the 2010 products will be the last to have a search core that runs on Linux and UNIX. Being involved in Apache Solr and the newly formed Lucene Connectors Framework (LCF) project, I’m very interested in the implications. Undoubtedly, at least some FAST customers will not be happy with this decision and…
Saw a Kurkure advertisement on a website titled “No plastic in Kurkure”. ROTFL!
Well, the cat is out of the bag. I’ve been working with Otis on Solr In Action . We’re looking for a couple of contributors to write case studies for the book describing how they have used Solr. Otis just posted this to his blog and to the Solr mailing list as well. So, if you are are using Apache Solr in some clever, interesting or unusual way, or deal with large indexes or large…
The Total Growth of Open Source : Amit Deshpande and Dirk Riehle from SAP Labs have conducted and published a research on the growth of open source software. The data has been culled from Ohloh.net and is based on the stats and activity of around 5000 open source projects written in 30 different languages and 103 open source licenses. Some interesting quotes from the publication: Successful…
Erik has written about Solr’s usage in libraries on the Lucid Imagination Blog . Solr has found its way into many libraries and quite rightly so. However, one of the main things that Erik talks about in that blog post is the performance of DataImportHandler vs SolrMarc (the indexing library used by both VUFind and Blacklight ). Quoting from Erik’s email to the solrmarc-tech google…
Exploding mobile web usage in India : Opera published a study titled State of the Mobile Web, November 2009 which I found through TechCrunch . I can’t help but notice the tremendous growth in web usage through mobile phones in India. Page views have grown by 228.5% Y/Y and unique users have grown by 208.4% but if you look at metrics like page views per user or the amount of data transferred per…