Copy of a posting made on solr-user list just in case it’s handy for anyone out there.

I’ve been trying to prepare a project using localsolr for the impending (I hope) arrival of solr 1.4 and Lucene 2.9.1.. Here are some notes in case anyone else is suffering similarly. Obviously everything here may change by next week.

First problem has been the lack of any stable maven based lucene and solr artifacts to wire into my poms. Because of that, and as an interim only measure, I’ve built the latest branches of the lucene 2.9.1 and solr 1.4 trees and made them into a *temporary* maven repository at http://developer.k-int.com/m2snapshots/. in there you can find all the jar artifacts tagged as xxx-ki-rc1 (For solr) and xxx-ki-rc3 (For lucene) and finally, a localsolr.localsolr build tagged as 1.5.2-rc1. Sorry for the naming, but I don’t want these artifacts to clash with the real ones when they come along. This is really just for my own use, but I’ve seen messages and spoken to people who are really struggling to get their maven deps right, if this helps anyone, please feel free to use these until the real apache artifacts appear. I can’t take any responsibility for their quality. All the poms have been altered to look for the correct dependent artifacts in the same repository, adding the stanza

k-int-m2-snapshots
K-int M2 Snapshots
http://developer.k-int.com/m2snapshots

true

to your pom will let you use these deps temporarily until we see an official build. If you’re a maven developer and I’ve gone way around the houses with this, please tell me of an easier solution This repo *will* go away when the real builds turn up.

The localsolr in this repo also contains the patches I’ve submitted (A good while ago) to the localsolr project to make it build with the lucene 2.9.1 rc3 as the downloadable dist is currently built against an older 2.9 release that had a different API (IE won’t work with the new lucene and solr)

All this means that there is a working localsolr build.

Second up, I’ve also seen emails (And seen the exception myself) around asking about the following when trying to get all these revisions working together.

java.lang.NumberFormatException: Invalid shift value in prefixCoded string
(is encoded value really a LONG?)

There are some threads out there telling you that the Lucene indexes are not binary compatible between versions, but if you’re using localsolr, what you really need to know is:

1) Make sure that your schema.xml contains at least the following fieldType defs

2) Convert your old solr sdouble fields to tdoubles:

Pretty sure you would need to rebuild your indexes.

Ok, with those changes I managed to get a working spatial search.

My only problem now is that the radius param on the command line seems to need to be way bigger than it needs to be in order to find anything. Specifically, if I search with a radius of 220 I get a record back which marks it’s geo_distance as “83.76888211666025″. Shuffling the radius around ends up that a radius of 205 returns that doc, 204 and it’s filtered. I’m going to dig into this now, but if anyone knows about this I’d really appreciate any help.

Cheers all, hope this is of use to someone out there, if anyone has corrections/comments I’d really appreciate any info.

Best,
Ian.

A quick note and huge grats to roundabout on the go-live of their new website. Roundabout is sheffield based charity working with young people in the city, and were the second clients of the increasingly popular bashmash events. These events are being coordinated by @jagusti and other @sheffieldgeeks to bring the power of social media and action to local charities and deserving organisations through a weekends intensive voluntary effort. Previous events set up the Cathederal Archer Project who are already starting to see a benefit on their funding and other activities in the city. Next bashmash event is due this month!

After a really interesting evening with the sheffield swap shop crew on tuesday of this week (In the excellent CoOp on london road, make an effort to visit) @richardrixham and I retired to the red house for a beer and a chat. I’ve been meaning to post some ideas on possible #shacknet projects that tie in hardware hacking with maybe some code-oriented geekery from #geeekup… heres some starters for 10…

1. An idea Aaron and I have mucked about with in the past – The arduino weather station. The idea here is to put together instructions for building an internet connected weather station capable of reporting wind speed and direction, direct sunlight (strengh), and possibly rainfall, maybe pressure etc. Thats sorta the #shacknet half of the project. The #geekup half would involve setting up some aggregator software capable of pulling data from all installed stations and presenting it in some meaningful manner.. like a real time weather network for sheffield.

I think there are a few practical applications for this.. my personal fave is as a tool for finding the best locations for wind turbines / solar power installations. I know @richardrixham has spoken with teachers about the problelms of getting this funded as an electronics project in schools, but I wonder if there is a way to just get it as a “Self assembly weather station” and do the electronics thing by stealth… anyone really interested could get the info and build one at home. I don’t doubt that if we had a quick brainstorm we could come up with oodles of add-on sensors and other instrumentation…. any thoughts?

2. Project 2 seems like a fun hardware/software/network mash-up too… inspired by the LETS scheme in sheffield. Richard and I were wondering if we could build a hardware terminal and some software to act as an epos device for the stones (The LETS unit of currency) used by all the current LETS schemes… basically a cash card for stones. We’d need to design and build a terminal with some security, and do the same job on the “Bank” server…. My exposure to LETS is only minimal at the moment, but I’m hoping to get more involved and am currently signing up… seems like an internet service for your LETS account would be quite a cool thing to have?

Just a brief update…. Any thoughts?

Been playing with the google java API’s for youtube as a part of the Sheffield virtual classroom project. I was shocked to find there weren’t any maven artifacts for the jars. Here’s the commands to take the distributed jars and cram them into your local maven2 repo. (Updated for latest versions as at 22/08/2009).

Download the zip package from googlecode at http://code.google.com/p/gdata-java-client/downloads/list

then cd to the lib directory and run

mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=base -Dversion=1.0 -Dfile=gdata-base-1.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=blogger -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-blogger-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=blogger-meta -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-blogger-meta-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=books -Dversion=1.0 -Dfile=gdata-books-1.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=books-meta -Dversion=1.0 -Dfile=gdata-books-meta-1.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=calendar -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-calendar-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=calendar-meta -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-calendar-meta-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=client -Dversion=1.0 -Dfile=gdata-client-1.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=client-meta -Dversion=1.0 -Dfile=gdata-client-meta-1.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=codesearch -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-codesearch-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=codesearch-meta -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-codesearch-meta-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=contacts -Dversion=3.0 -Dfile=gdata-contacts-3.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=contacts-meta -Dversion=3.0 -Dfile=gdata-contacts-meta-3.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=core -Dversion=1.0 -Dfile=gdata-core-1.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=docs -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-docs-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=docs-meta -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-docs-meta-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=finance -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-finance-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=finance-meta -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-finance-meta-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=health -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-health-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=health-meta -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-health-meta-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=media -Dversion=1.0 -Dfile=gdata-media-1.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=photos -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-photos-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=photos-meta -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-photos-meta-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=spreadsheet -Dversion=3.0 -Dfile=gdata-spreadsheet-3.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=spreadsheet-meta -Dversion=3.0 -Dfile=gdata-spreadsheet-meta-3.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=youtube -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-youtube-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true
mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=youtube-meta -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-youtube-meta-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true

Edit - With the latest downloads you will also need to download the collections extensions at http://code.google.com/p/google-collections/ and install using

mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=gdata -DartifactId=youtube-meta -Dversion=2.0 -Dfile=gdata-youtube-meta-2.0.jar  -Dpackaging=jar -DgeneratePom=true

Dear all…..

The twestival sheffield organisers have met today and we’ve expressed a pretty unanimous concern that the event might not reach all our expectations. Due to many different reasons we’ve decided that rather put on a half-assed event and risk undoing the many months of hard work we’ve put into organising great community events in and around sheffield, we would be better to take a step back and look to next year.

So it’s with huge sadness that we have to say goodbye to our efforts to make twestival sheffield happen this year. If anyone else has the burning desire to pick up the mantle then we can happily transfer whatever knowledge and contacts we have. At this stage, the event simply wasn’t coming together as we had hoped.

Apologies for the huge dissapointment, but on the upside many of our friends and neighbors in the north are hosting their own twestival events and have made kind offers to welcome all. Please see the twestival site for details.

Please also bear in mind that there is a huge calendar of community tech/geek events coming up in sheffield over the next year. For details come along to the monthly sheffield geekup or follow @sheffieldgeeks on twitter.

With a little sadness, some relief, and enthusiasm for a year full of events,
Ian.

My notes from the #mashbash meeting 1 with the sheffield archer project.

Cathederal Archer Project Ltd

Meeting between Archer Project and Barcamp Sheffield #bashmash organisers, 21st Jan 2009

Present:
Jag Gill
Ian Ibbotson
Chris Murray
Tim Renshaw
Tracey Viner

The Archer Project (CAP, or more formally the “Cathederal Archer Project Ltd”, see http://www.sheffield-cathedral.co.uk/links.asp?articleID=50) is a not for profit project based out of sheffield cathederal who offer food and a base for the homless in sheffield as we attempt to break the cycle of deprivation.

Barcamp sheffield is an annual event hosted by the sheffield geek community -headed up jag- looking to apply local talent and technical knowledge to short focussed projects that will benefit the city and it’s people. These projects are being run under the #bashmash tag.

On Wed 21st jan CAP and #bashmash had an initial get-together to discuss what form a #bashmash project based around a new online CAP presence might take. The following are notes.

An initial concern was described that although the archer project is fundamentally supported by the cathederal, some people may be put off by the closeness of the CAP branding to the cathederal branding. The team brainstormed some initial requirements
Website design, inkeeping with the cathederal branding, yet noticably different
Hosting
Some form of Viral Marketing to promote the site
SEO to get the CAP site up rankings
Interactivity
We discussed the options for embedded twitter feeds to add a dynamic quality, EG, # of meals served today, daily weather reports, interim statistics such as # of homless at last count.
Discussed the need for walled garden interactivity, so user contributed materials do not negatively impact on the “Brochure site” aspect.
Use of photo-blogging

Some of the primary requirements of the web-site we came up with
Support CAP in funding applications, essentially have a component which is a stylish and professional brochure site describing the work of CAP
Provide a place for the CAP team to show evidence of their work (Again supporting funding applications)
Provide information to help link up with other support agencies / support other agencies / demostrate how CAP can help.
Provide a place for the homless in sheffield to meet the world essentially putting a human face on the issues facing the city.
Provide a place to electronically publish the CAP news letter. Resources for the paper based news-letter are sparse, the site based news may not be bound by these constraints, although the need for content is primary.
Provide a place to announce and promote CAP campaigns. Specifically
Big Sleep Out
Harvest Festival
Christmas Appeal
Sheffield Sharks appeal
Provide a link to “Just Giving” / have space for e-commerce / e-giving applications

Some random thoughts which came up
What happened to the old SIF sheffield information forum. Is there any way to start to tie together #bashmash projects into a wider information network
Contact with the crisis marketing manager
We need early access to logs for key supporters
It would be great to have a Facebook app
Could we link up with Weatherwatch to have a dynamic alert
Could we get kids to build arduino based thermometers in #geekupsheff-kids to raise awareness?
How can we contribute to the wider sheffield community
Links to sheffield First Step Trust? Sheffield Advice Link? Other projects?
Links with silentsheffield.org
Links with homeless assessment service
Homeless Link Network
Links with Drug Action Teams
Links with Tunring Point
Links with Sheffield Theatres
An information resource for homelessness – articles?
We could mash up thinks like the #meals statistics using google forms, RSS and yahoo pipes to form a feed to the webapp.
Could we use some microformats for opening times etc to share data with other sheffield orgs? Semantic geeky project thoughts here.
GPS tracking units to see where people go/how often they get moved along?

The project has volunteers who could be recruited in to update stats / tweet information / write articles and postings.

We discussed technology choices, and unless requirements change, are happy that we could implement the following infrastructure
Wordpress as a primary hosting environment
Hosting provided for a minimum of n years provided by #bashmash
Google Analytics and statpress for stats
The #bashmash project will focus around usability and graphical design
There will be space for other contributed projects such as twitter feeds and facebook applications, this should provide opportinities for all who are interested to get involved, around the core design and implementation team.

Initial thoughts about the day
It would be nice to see mock-ups (HTML, Graphics) as early as possible in the day.
Tracy will act as on-site customer to give feedback on designs and usability
Should we use a design methodology / process on the day?
Handover and sign/off / go live

Closing thoughts
The #bashmash day needs to have a sustainability plan as an output
We need to give some thoughts to Critical Success Factors
Publishing Measurements is both good and bad as it supports funding, provided the stats look good and are maintained.

(My) Overall feelings, the primary customers (The CAP team) need to a site to support their funding applications, and their service users. These two groups have different, but equally important requirements. There is a desire to stay within the broad theme of the cathederal, yet be distinct.

Outstanding
Sort a venue
Get volunteers – Jag is handling this
Sort out the process

Extra information

Possible sections
Home
Who We Are / What We Do
Donation (Link to just giving)
Volunteering
New/Newsletter – upload press cuttings, newsletter PDF’s
Events
Supporters
CAP Health
CAP Catering
CAP Gardening
CAP Education
CAP Activities
Contact Us
Links to useful sites – HomlessLink, Crisis, Shelter, etc
CAP Staff/Board
Examples of clients / work in progress
Questions – show church support without it taking over

Themes for the site (We would like the design to reflect these feelings)
Trust
Warm
Open
Friendly
Respected
Opportunity
City Centre
Community
Caring

Other – Mailshot, newsletters, social networking… Other? Got some sample pages
Will scan the sample pages and my notes pages / diagrams and attach asap.

Here’s a calendar I’m maintaining with various geeky events. Please feel free to send stuff to me on any of the usual channels, or get in touch to get permission to add events yourself.

Here’s a quick very specific workflow for anyone wanting to get data out of a garmin GPS60 and into JOSM for editing, it’s actually pretty trivial, but I had to dig around a bit. The commands will probably work for other USB garmin units…

1) Look at openstreetmap and find a spot on the map where you know there are missing features

Here’s loxley valley, I know that there’s a footpath going from the upper half of Myers Grove Lane, down past the Robin Hood Pub, over the river loxley and up the other side of the valley, and it’s not on openstreetmap.com. Sweet!

2) Turn on your GPS and go walking, taking waypoint notes along the way

The best bit

3) Go home and boot up your fave distro and install gpsbabel (apt-get install gpsbabel for me)

4) Download your trace data (Where you walked, I had to do this as root for dev permissions)

root@bhor:~# gpsbabel -t -i garmin -f usb: -o gpx -F my_track.gpx

5) Download your waypoint data (Your, um, waypoints, I had to do this as root for dev permissions)

root@bhor:~# gpsbabel -i garmin -f usb: -o gpx -F my_waypoints.gpx

6) Load into JOSM and edit / save / upload

When you’re done, you can see your trace and waypoint data.

7) Click “File” -> “Download from OSM” to pull down all the openstreetmap data for the area you’ve walked over

Add features corresponding to your trace and waypoints. In my case, a new footpath, a couple of new postboxes, a bridge, 2 schools and a community ctr (and a slight fix to the path of the river loxley so it actually flows under what I know to be a bridge. (I hope thats the right thing to do :S)). Upload your changes to openstreetmap.com

9) Enjoy your work on openstreetmap.com

- Will add the photo just as soon as the OSM render is complete

10) Don’t forget to upload your postcode coordinates to freethepostcode.org!

Read this today and it resonated with me for some reason, worth a read.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”
Theodore Roosevelt

Been a while since I posted, alas blogging not uber high on my GTD list, so often gets pushed back… However, I thought it might be fun to share some of the work we’re doing in the lexaurus vocabulary editor in relation to SKOS vocabularies. Rob Tice has sent me some screenshots of lexaurus ingesting the SKOS vocabulary for agriculture, here’s the results

Here in image one there’s the post ingest status report saying that 28954 terms have been imported in 269 seconds. As a part of the SKOS import we have to do a fair few cross references and referential lookups, so the performance isn’t quite as blistering as the ZThes import, still pretty good tho.

Here’s some more screenies showing the label nodes and editing pages in different languages. The data is held in the lexaurus canonical schema, so it can go out as ZThes or SKOK or whatever else we need.

More to follow, but I thought these interesting to put up now, just to stimulate discussion.