The World According to Marc

I've been working with Lucene.NET and a project called Seekafile based on it for the last few days.

Seekafile runs as a windows service that builds a Lucene index in the background. You can then use it to build Windows and Web clients that search that index.

Using a few lines of code I was able to quickly build an index of our intranet (including text, html, Word documents, etc) and a simple web site to search it.

This all started after I tried to use the Microsoft Index Service. I was able to get it up and running quick enough but the search capabilities were pretty limiting. What I wanted was "Google" style searching and the Index Service doesn't seem capable of doing it (at least not without more of a development effort invested into it).

There were a few issues with Seekafile, namely that the management UI is somewhat limited (adding index directories is tedious for example) and you cannot exclude directories or filter what is added to the index. But other than that it does exactly what I needed - add a simple searchable index to our intranet.

Overall I though it worked really well and it has running without incident for 24 hours.

I while back I notices that there was going to be an August release of the VS2005 SDK. There was a a nice blurb on the Microsoft website about it

The August 2006 v3 RTM is the next milestone in the VS 2005 SDK. This RTM release contains updated VS Integration sample and documentation content, including updates to the Team System SDK bits to make them more usable ( including whitepapers in the Doc-set, exploding all the sample zips so the files are all installed ), the IronPython end-end integration sample with Web Projects support for both web site and web application projects, updated wizards ( using the new Editor reference code from v2 ) new and Powertoys including the Extensibility Explorer in-memory hierarchy sample that browses installed Packages, Services, ToolWindows, Editors, and Project Systems..

But so far the link for this version has remained dead. I'm not sure if this is an oversight or not.

Thanks to Gabriel Lozano-Morán however I was able to download it anyway. Turns out that while the link isn't working, the file is. You get get instructions on download it from here.

My PC at work was exhibiting some odd behavior; namely it was turning of abruptly. Occasionally when this happened it exhibited a secondary symptom - it emulated the sound of a Boeing 747 at take off.

Turns out that it was caused by "swollen capacitors". I'd never heard of such a thing. Neither had the head of IT who thought the Dell support tech must be drinking on the job when he suggest it. Turns out this is a great description, the tops of several capacitors on the motherboard were noticeably "swollen".

I found a page that talks about this problem at Trend IT.

Who'da thunk.

It seems I'm one of those "lame bloggers who doesn’t say much". Truth be told, I've just never had much of interest to say. But maybe that will change now.

This month I accepted a job with Parlance Corporation. Their flagship product is called nameConnector. It is a managed appliance that - among a number other things - integrates with a company's phone system allowing you to reach people by simply stating a person's name or a location ("Conference Room One" or "John Smith").

I'll be working with some exciting technology including speech recognition and VoiceXML. And I'll be building a number of internal and customer-facing tools using C#, Windows Forms, ASP.NET, and Python (including Iron Python). It has been awhile since I was this excited about writing software. I've missed this feeling.

So who knows, maybe now I'll have some more interesting things to talk about.

Maybe.

Don't hold your breath though... :)

If you're a fan of web comics you should take a gander at Chemistry Set Comics. One of the artists, Dan Warner, turned me on to it last week (he draws 1 Way Ticket).

Yes, I'm sharing a mushy story about my kids. But hey, it has technical content. Think of it as a study in youth UI design...

My wife and I often chat during the day using IM. Whenever my daughter asks what my wife is doing, she typically replies "talking to your father". Sometimes she even tells my wife to relay a message to me.

Well today my wife walked into the home office and found my daughter saying "are you there daddy". When my wife asked what she was doing she responded with a huff, "trying to talk to daddy on the computer".

That made my day. There, I shared.

We just purchased HelpSpot and are getting it up and running today. If you're looking for a customer support solution, especially for small to mid-sized ISVs, I would highly recommend checking them out.

Red Gate Software has purchased SQL Prompt. It is an add-in that adds SQL Intellisense to SQL 2005, VS 2005, SQL 2000 and VS 2003.

While they are working on a new version they have made the older version free, so grab it while you can. The free version goes away in September.

http://www.red-gate.com/products/SQL_Prompt/index.htm