Latest news from Design-Ireland.net

Clearing a Solr search index

2012-04-26T11:21:01+01:00

When developing a search project using Apache Solr, you often need to clear out the search index and start again. A typical example of this is when you make a schema change. Luckily, there is an easy way to do this via the Solr REST API.

According to the official Solr FAQ, you can clear out a Solr index by issuing the following query:

<delete><query>*:*</query></delete>

To run this query, you can issue it via the REST API using curl:

curl http://localhost:8080/solr/update -H "Content-type: text/xml" \
--data-binary '<delete><query>*:*</query></delete>'

Note that you will also need to tell Solr to commit this change:

curl http://localhost:8080/solr/update -H "Content-type: text/xml" \
--data-binary '<commit />'

...and it is also a good idea to tell Solr to optimize it's index at this point:

curl http://localhost:8080/solr/update -H "Content-type: text/xml" \
--data-binary '<optimize />'

To confirm that your index is now empty, load up the Solr admin web interface in your browser, and click on the statistics link. You should now see that the number of documents listed in your index is now zero.

Note that the final optimize command is passed to Solr to tell it to physically remove the deleted documents, which will not only free up disc space, but will also increase search performance. Following the above procedure of delete/commit/optimize will ensure that you start off with a clean slate each time.

Apache 2.4 Released

2012-02-21T16:29:03+00:00

A new version of the venerable Apache HTTP server has been released:

The Apache Software Foundation Celebrates the 17th Anniversary of the Apache HTTP Server with the release of v2.4

A full list of the new features is available here:

Overview of new features in Apache HTTP Server 2.4

I have been using Apache HTTP for many years now (although not quite as long as 17 years!), so I am very happy to see the Apache Software Foundation bringing out this new version and look forward to performing some benchmarks of my own before upgrading.

The beauty of flight

2012-02-18T17:31:01+00:00

It's amazing how we take flight for granted. This video reminds me of just how spectacular it really is (and makes me want to get a pilots license!).

European Founders at Work

2012-02-16T11:50:05+00:00

I am a big fan of the original Founders at Work book (I reviewed it here previously), and now it seems that a European variant has been published:

European Founders at Work

I am really looking forward to reading this one, as there are some interesting companies listing in the table of contents from the Amazon page:

       1. MessageLabs
       2. Shazam
       3. XING
       4. Business Objects
       5. TweetDeck
       6. Balsamiq
       7. Dailymotion
       8. Moo.com
       9. amiando
      10. Prezi
      11. Video Island (LOVEFiLM)
      12. The Next Web
      13. Seedcamp
      14. Yandex
      15. Last.fm
      16. Startupbootcamp
      17. Fon
      18. lastminute.com
      19. Seesmic and LeWeb
      20. SoundCloud

Kyle Bragger interview on Founders Talk

2012-02-16T09:49:19+00:00

I just listened to an interview podcast of Kyle Bragger, the founder of Forrst, by Adam Stacoviak on his Founders Talk show which is available here:

Founders Talk #31: Kyle Bragger / Forrst

I love this show in general as it really captures the entrepreneurial ethos in these interviews (Adam does a great job of teasing out the details), but I enjoyed this one the most so far as it focuses on the challenges of building and nurturing an online community, something that Kyle has a lot of experience with.

Micro frameworks in PHP

2012-01-15T21:42:04+00:00

I began a new project recently that will replace an existing web application written using a heavy-weight Model View Controller (MVC) framework with a much lighter solution, which will be built around a light-weight "micro" framework.

The only mandated requirements I had for choosing this framework is that it be simple to use and robust, and be implemented in PHP. As you may already know, I am the developer of the Alpha Framework which is a heavy-weight full-stack PHP MVC framework, so the micro framework approach is something of a new departure for me.

I must admit to being very impressed with the work that is being carried out in this area by many talented PHP developers. If anything, the difficulty I had in choosing a suitable micro framework for our needs is that there are too many options.

In the end, I have chosen Silex due to the following reasons:

It is being actively developed by the same people who produced the excellent Symfony framework, and comes with a bridge into that framework in case we need more functionality than Silex on it's own can provide.
It has a dependency injection interface, which is useful for us as we plan to inject in non-Silex services for caching, logging, and data persistence.
It has a nice, clean API for routing controllers, although frankly the same could be said for each of the other micro PHP frameworks we looked at.

While I am still a big fan of the full-stack approach of frameworks like Alpha, I also believe that for some projects a micro framework like Silex has a lot to offer, and I look forward to using this framework on our new project in the months ahead.

Alpha Framework 1.1 Released

2011-12-21T13:51:02+00:00

Last week I released version 1.1 of the Alpha Framework for PHP, which you can download from here:

Alpha Framework - Download

Overall I am very pleased with this release, as it de-couples Alpha from the MySQLi API in PHP, and in doing so introduces a new DAO (Data Access Object) interface that enables you to implement business object storage in other databases or key/value stores apart from MySQL. You can see a detailed list of all of the changes in the change log here:

Alpha Framework Change log

I intend to write a lot more about the new features in Alpha in the new year, as well as working on the 1.2 release to add support for other databases and a REST API for accessing business objects.

Some new features coming with PHP 5.4

2011-12-21T13:39:53+00:00

Jill Burrows has a detailed look at some of the new features coming with the imminent release of PHP 5.4:

What to Look for in PHP 5.4.0

In particular I find the concept of a build-in server for development very interesting, as it makes the barrier to entry into PHP development even lower (you don't even need to set up Apache or nginx to get going).

Bucket Explorer for S3

2011-12-20T09:46:53+00:00

Recently I had to download a large number of files from an Amazon S3 bucket, and found that I could not carry out a bulk download operation via the AWS Management Console web application, which was a little disappointing to say the least.

Luckily, someone has developed a 3rd party application for carrying out operations like this on S3 called Bucket Explorer. I have used this to download over seventeen thousand files from my S3 bucket in a few hours, so I am very happy with it.

One word of warning though: it gobbles up a lot of memory. On my work station with 8GB of RAM, it used up 2.5GB of RAM (in a JVM session) while downloading my files for a few hours, so you probably should be using a powerful machine to run this program.

You can download a 30-day trail of Bucket Explorer from their website here:

Bucket Explorer for S3

Fedora 16 released

2011-11-08T15:20:07+00:00

Fedora 16 has been released today, you can find the release notes here:

Release Notes for Fedora 16

You can download Fedora from their home page here:

Get Fedora

It has been a while since I done a Fedora upgrade, so I have not used Gnome 3 yet (3.2 with this release), so I am looking forward to trying out this release and the new version of Gnome. I also really like the new Jules Verne inspired desktop them, some screenshots of which are here:

Some Fedora 16 Verne screenshots

Ten years old today

2011-10-15T20:25:45+01:00

This website turns ten years old today. I am pretty happy with that figure, considering that this site was launched back in October 2001 as a personal project for me to learn about web design and web application development techniques.

When I am asked to describe what this website it about, I tell people is a kind of technical blog, but in reality when I launched the site the word blog (or web log to give it it's full title), was not in common use, at least not that I was aware of. Actually, this website was originally intended to be a home site for a web design firm here in Ireland that never happened (hence the name "Design-Ireland.net"), but somehow I decided to stick with this domain even though it no longer makes sense.

To see what this site looked like in the past, we can use the Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive project:

Wayback Machine - Design-Ireland.net

There are no captures in there from 2001, but you can see what the site looked like from the summer of 2002 onwards. Actually it seems pretty broken on the Wayback Machine up until 2006, with lots of missing images and scripts (I was doing some pretty funky DHTML back then). But I still find it fun to look at.

To put things into perspective, let's look at the lineage of some well-known websites:

In 2006, Jack Dorsey launched Twitter.com.
In 2004, Mark Zuckerburg launched "thefackbook.com", which went to become simply "facebook.com". His website became slightly more popular than this one ;-)
Engadget.com also starts to appear in the Wayback Machine in 2004.
Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.
The W3C website goes all the way back to 1998 (at least according to the Wayback Machine, so it may actually be older).
The first entry for PHP.net I can find is from July 1998. The notice on that snapshot of the homepage about the year 2000 compliance of PHP is quite funny, remember the Millennium Bug?
Google launched back in 1998, although back then they were under the google.standford.edu sub-domain. You can find the earliest snapshot of them on the Wayback Machine here.
The oldest entry I can find on the Wayback Machine so far for Palm.com is also from 1996 (which works best on Netscape Navigator 1.1 or higher apparently).
Bloomberg.com also goes back as far as 1996.
...so does BBC.co.uk (although only just, with two samples captured inside December 1996).
RTE.ie, the website of Ireland's national broadcaster, beats the BBC by one month only with this entry from November 1996.

So while there are many sites out there that are older than ten years old, there are much more that are less so. Looking back briefly at the pre-millennium Internet now, it just looks weird to me. It reminds me of using dial-up modems to access the Internet to do some research from a public library in Dublin, because I did not have a computer of my own back then (well, except for an Amiga 600).

Here's to the next ten years of Design-Ireland.net.

Restler

2011-09-20T09:38:22+01:00

Restler for PHP looks really neat and elegant. It is an open source library that easily exposes your business objects as REST end-points, enabling you to focus on your core business model and allow Restler to take care of your REST API for you, which is exactly the approach that I intend to take when I add REST support to the Alpha Framework. It also reminds me heavily of the Jersey framework for Java, which I have used in the past and found it easy to use for building good quality REST APIs easily and quickly.

Restler supports XML, JSON, and YAML as well as some other formats that I have not played with yet, you can find all of the details on the Restler homepage here:

Luracast Restler: Simple and effective multi-protocol REST API Server

Packing for Mars

2011-09-19T21:00:13+01:00

I recently finished reading Packing for Mars by Mary Roach, which is a fascinating and humorous account of the affects of space-flight on the human body. You can read my full review here.

An MVC web framework for Bash

2011-07-19T16:50:10+01:00

It was only a matter of time...

Bash on Balls: an MVC web framework for Bash

A first look at Metasploit

2011-07-14T12:54:05+01:00

Metasploit is the leading open source security penetration testing system in use today. It was originally created by HD Moore during 2003 in Perl, but has since been ported to Ruby and now stands as one of the biggest Ruby-based systems around.

The framework is available for download from their homepage here:

Metasploit Project

To give you a flavour of what Metasploit can do, here is an example video where the attacker (using a Mac) uses a known exploit in Adobe Reader under Windows XP to install a keylogger and screen capture spyware on the victim's machine, all carried out remotely:

The tutorial detailing the steps carried out in the above video can be found here:

The Metasploit Framework: An Introduction to Meterpreter

If you wish to learn more, there is an excellent and very detailed guide to the Metasploit framework available online for free here:

Metasploit Unleashed

Finally, here is a recent interview with the creator of Metasploit, HD Moore:

HD Moore Reveals His Process for Security Research

Google Plus

2011-06-29T14:11:05+01:00

The Internet is all alight today with news of Google's latest effort to crack the social network market, Google+. Of all of the articles covering the launch, the following article from Ars Technica provides the most depth:

Inside Google+: how the search giant plans to go social

In that article, the following quote from Google's Joseph Smarr reminds me once again why I don't use Gmail:

"We've got this whole system already in place that hasn't been used that much where we keep track of every time you email someone or chat to them or things like that," says Smarr. "Then we compute affinity scores. So we're able to do suggestions not only about who you should add to a circle, or even what circles you could create out of whole cloth."

Nice! Google's recent attempts at social networks Buzz and Wave have been unsuccessfuly, so it will be interesting to see how this one turns out.

Vaadin

2011-06-14T19:15:31+01:00

Vaadin (Finnish for doe, a female reindeer) is a Java framework for building web applications. Unlike many other frameworks out there, in Vaadin you develop your front-end from the server side out, or more specifically, you use a server-side Java API to build the front-end layout (using Swing-like layout managers) and behaviour of your application. The demo video on the Vaadin website will make this more clear:

Introduction to Vaadin Development

In my opinion it is an approach that will really appeal to core Java engineers, as they only have to learn the Vaadin Java API and leave the front-end mark-up and JavaScript widgets for Vaadin to generate. For a great example of a back-end Java engineer getting excited about Vaadin, have a read of this blog entry by Christopher Schanck:

For the Love of Vaadin: RIAs Done Right

You can learn more about the framework from the on-line book hosted at the Vaadin website:

Book of Vaadin

HP TouchPad arriving in Ireland in July

2011-06-09T19:42:14+01:00

HP have announced that the HP TouchPad, the first tablet device to run webOS which was originally developed by Palm, will be available here in Ireland in the first week of July. More details via Silicon Republic:

HP TouchPad will launch in Ireland during first week of July

I have been using webOS on a first generation Palm Pre for some two years now and love it, so I am very excited that it is finally being scaled up to a 1024x768 screen. I will wait for the 3G version however rather than the Wi-Fi only version being released in early July, as I want something that is truly mobile.

If you have not tried a webOS device yet, I would highly recommend it. It really has the best multi-tasking and overall usability of any mobile platform I have used, and I say that as someone who has used multiple RIM, Android and iOS devices.

You can find the official HP TouchPad product page here:

HP TouchPad

RSA Security Tokens Cracked

2011-06-07T14:12:25+01:00

RSA has finally admitted that their SecurID key ring fobs, widely used for generating secure tokens for two-factor authentication, have been compromised and will need to be replaced or their continued usage closely monitored. The news follows a number of high-profile cracks of systems belonging to US military contractors, like Lockheed Martin.

Considering how widely used these token generators are in large enterprises for VPN (Virtual Private Network) access and other authentication procedures, this crack has wide-reaching implications. More details via the Wall Street Journal:

Security 'Tokens' Take Hit

Never Eat Alone

2011-05-07T13:03:55+01:00

Recently I have finished reading "Never Eat Alone" by Keith Ferrazzi, which is full of advice and techniques on improving your lot in life by building out your real-world social network. While I enjoyed reading this book and certainly learnt lots from the experience, I did struggle to finish it due to the writing tone of the author, which I found at times too familiar and a little self-promotional.

None-the-less I recommend it because it does contain some very solid advice and techniques you can apply yourself with a little bit of courage. You can read my full review here.