Webhamer Weblog: Search & ICT-related blogging

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

Based on my research, Google has been plugging away at metadata and making progress. Organizations faced with revivifying their dying metadata systems may want to learn from their errors and their consultants’ silly promises about certain automated systems. Maybe Google will make its metadata systems available someday? Maybe one of the graduates of the drill instructor programs that teach taxonomy will discover a silver bullet that is easy, cheap, and fast?

The 2.3 release has just been uploaded. We’re now releasing both a demo app, for people who are just getting started or doing a fresh installation, and a plugin, for people who want to update an existing installation or plug blacklight search and discovery into another rails app. Be sure to also read the updated installation instructions and rdocs.

Solr powers library, government, and enterprise search systems in thousands of applications. This talk will showcase the various technologies and techniques used to build effective user search, browse, and find interfaces on top of Solr. Several of the full featured open-source library Solr front-ends will be shown, including Blacklight and VuFind. We’ll also demonstrate several front-end frameworks including:

* SolrJS - a JavaScript widget library
* Solr Flare - a Ruby on Rails plugin featuring Simile Timeline integration, Ajax suggest, and more
* Solritas - a built-in lightweight UI templating framework

Windows 7 is a relatively modest improvement over Windows Vista in terms of performance, features and security. But, with an aging XP unable to take advantage of the latest hardware and networking technologies, the time is coming for most enterprises to consider a Windows client upgrade. eWEEK Labs put Windows 7 RTM through its paces and found some compelling usability improvements, features that will work best (or only) with Windows Server 2008 R2 and some mixed security messages.

Since Windows 7 ISO size is around 2.24 GB so its obvious that you will need to burn windows 7 iso on DVD and another issue is you can’t start windows 7 installation by mounting ISO file on windows XP as Windows XP upgrade to windows 7 is not allowed. In such situation installing windows 7 from USB pen drive is feasible solution.

Here is small guide on how to install windows 7 from USB flash drive or USB pen Drive for Windows XP users.