my unix

After only a few weeks into the new year we have seen that 2008 is going to be an exciting year for better or for worse.

The biggest shock of all is the ASX’s continuing downward spiral (11 days and counting).

Sun Microsystems rocked the open source world announcing it’s purchase of MySQL for 1 Billion USD!

Jeremie Miller and Jimmy Wales launched the alpha of Wikia Search, a search engine based entirely upon open source software being developed and controlled out in the open. The search technology is based upon Apache Lucene (Nutch, Hadoop et al), a full-text search engine which run’s atop of the Java platform which itself was recently open sourced by Sun. Of note is that within the application they have deployed is a social networking function not too dissimilar from MySpace or Facebook. This is used to guage the “trust” that is placed in a person partipating in the Wikia community. I gather that based upon this trust their feedback regarding search results, mini articles etc. will receive a higher “weight” than someone doing the same without any connections within the social network. Considering that search engines find it much harder to discern between ‘fruit apples’ and ‘computer apples’ than humans this last polishing of the search results is critical and how well Wikia can utilise this human feedback will be the measure of it’s success.

In the Democrats efforts to select a candidate to run for POTUS; Barack Obama continues to perform well, even though he came in behind Hillary Clinton in the Nevada popular vote he still emerged with 1 more delegate than Hillary placing him two delegates ahead in the total count - not much when you consider that you need in excess of 2025 of the possible 4049 possible delegates to achieve the parties nomination.

And with the second alpha of Indiana scheduled for release some time in the next few weeks what more can I ask for?

asx recession opensolaris indiana mysql sun java lucene hadoop nutch obama clinton wikia myspace facebook social_networking