Technical

Choosing an Open Source Desktop Search Tool: Part 2

February 23, 2010

This is a continuation of my work to sort out the most useful desktop search tool. You can read about the background and motivation in Part 1. In this post, I’ll detail my test plans and work through setting up the tools themselves. My test platform is minimal and simple: Ubuntu 9.10 JEOS. I’ve updated it as of Feb 22, 2010, and added on a handful of packages: sshd, smb, some dev tools, sqlite, etc. What I don’t have is any kind of a desktop — everything I’m doing, I’ll be doing from scripts and command line. That’s because my [...]

Read more →

Choosing an Open Source Desktop Search Tool: Part 1

February 20, 2010

I have a few projects cooking that rely on full-content search.  There’s been a lot of work that’s gone into a number of tools, and the range of options has reached the point where there’s no clear-cut leader.  A number of people have done some work to compare a few of them, but I haven’t found anything both comprehensive and recent.  This is the first of 4 parts detailing my investigation of what seem to me to be the leading tools out there. Search is a pretty huge universe, and I’m really focused on a small part of it — [...]

Read more →

Homemade Electronics

February 15, 2010

I’ve been interested in microcontrollers for a long time. They’re small and cheap, they’re extremely customizable, and if you want to make a piece of electronics do something, they give you a balance between complete efficiency and flexibility. There are a lot of places where it’s likely possible to solve a problem using only passive components, but a microcontroller essentially lets you solve it by explaining what you want (i.e. programming it). Sounds just about perfect to me. I have a handful of projects I’m kicking around. Some are more curiosities, some have a little more substance to them. The [...]

Read more →

Next Entries →