Lots of great content, especially in the Lucene, Solr, and Hadoop areas.

I gave a solr-ruby presentation at rubyconf this past weekend. My timing was off, didn't cover as much as I would have liked, and one of my demos flubbed and I punted on it (turns out all I did was forget to pass a command-line argument to the script *sigh*).

Here are the slides.

ObLibTopic: I'll be demonstrating and discussing Collex and Blacklight!

This self-marketing thing is hard. Thus far I've been blessed with word-of-mouth success for the reputation from the various open source communities in which I've participated. But it does take a little advertising so folks know what you're up to. With little fanfare, some friends of mine have put together an impressive lineup of courses and speakers, and a great venue, on several open source topics. I thought it was a good idea to have a longer course on Solr and Lucene, so I agreed to give it a shot.

NINES, has announced its formal release. Collex is the technology driving NINES, developed with Bethany Nowviskie's leadership and elegant sense of design. Thanks to the others on our team that made this happen: Jerome McGann for believing in and funding our vision, Jamie Orchard-Hays for rapid Rails magic, and Duane Gran for keeping the machinery running.

Collex is the basis, idea-wise, of Solr Flare, a generalized faceted browser.

Taking a cue from dchud the #code4lib irc channel is now being logged. To view the logs you *must* be logged in to code4lib.org. You can prefix any message you want with: ! and your message *will not* be logged. Try it out. I think this is a reasonable compromise that works well in other online communities with an irc component.

The logging is done by bartleby who is a patched and modified (the ! functionality) version of LogBot. This is a work in progress as always, and a community effort so please share your ideas thoughts about this....and take a look at the shiny XHTML source for your favorite xml parser to chew on.

If you are a dspace user/admin/fan there is a new irc channel on freenode #dspace for discussing all things dspace.