Sharpes In Serbia

My brother Tim and his family left on Monday for Serbia. They arrived safe and sound after the three-legged flight, and amazingly all of their checked luggage arrived as well. And there was a lot of checked luggage. I think the total count was 14 crates right at the weight limit of 50 pounds each, plus their four carry-ons, a stroller, and a carseat.

Why all the luggage? Well, they'll be staying in Cacak, Serbia for two years as Christian workers. They're not settled in yet (they're staying with another missionary family until they can get their own housing), but once they do you'll be able to follow along at their first blog, Sharpes in Serbia.

Say a prayer for them as Tim, Jennifer, Caleb, and Samantha settle in to a completely different lifestyle. Send them an email of encouragement.

We look forward to seeing them on Skype once they've got a Net connection.

Labels: family

Posted by Chris on 10/27/2006 09:56:00 AM :: Permalink   

A Mini Box from Google

After a long and tiresome internal order process where I was faced with challenges such as needing an invoice to get a check cut and needing a check to get an invoice, a box from Google finally arrived on my desk at work.

This was momentous for two reasons:

1) It took thirteen weeks to get the order approved and payment made internally. It took two days to get here after payment. Receipt is reason enough for rejoicing.

2) As far as I know, we're the first ones in our group and our facility to have Google hardware. Google isn't the be-all-end-all of the web, but they do a lot of things right in their products and development environment. So it was cool to be the first to try this out.

So I unpacked the box and there's the $9000 Google Mini. It's the little brother of the larger Google Search Appliance (which has more features, redundancy, and starts at $30,000). But we're intending to use this for one single purpose (and it ain't indexing geocaching and PEZ sites on the internet), so this should be fine for our needs.

Late that night, it was in the rack, on the network, and crawling our data.

We're still developing our solution (using it for full text searching of product tracking data), but thus far we're happy with it. We're writing custom extraction tools for our data and writing it to disk then using Google's index and search technology to provide fast search results across the entire dataset. Since we know exactly what changes, when it changes, and how it is formatted, we have complete control over how fresh the index is, and what results look like. This will be a vast improvement in functionality and speed over our current system.

Though the Mini doesn't provide anywhere near the feature set of the Search Appliance, it does provide a good amount of flexibility and configuration. If you couple that with your own coding, you can create some interesting solutions.

No word yet on who gets to keep the single Google T-shirt that was included in the box.

But it's in my office right now. Posted by Chris on 10/05/2006 12:20:00 PM :: Permalink   

Useless Signage

Did this really need to be stated on a fast food restaurant's front door?
Posted by Chris on 10/03/2006 01:43:00 PM :: Permalink   
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