Blogs – TNR Global

Amazon Web Services: My EBS is stuck!

Many of us were affected by the Amazon EBS issues at the end of October 2012. If you had EC2 instances in us-east-1, you were likely affected by the issues.

Many of us were affected by the Amazon EBS issues at the end of October 2012. If you had EC2 instances in us-east-1, you were likely affected by the issues. EBS volumes appeared “stuck”, snapshots would not complete, etc.

While the issues have been resolved (although we required some Amazon Support intervention for a few volumes), we have recently noticed what appear to be some vestigial issues related to the EBS outage.

The symptoms are, simply, that EC2 instances appear to be extremely slow. I/O is almost non-existent. Luckily, the fix is simple: perform a stop/start on the instance (not a restart). Your instance will be provisioned to new hardware, and you’ll have to ensure you account for a different IP address, but other than that, you’ll be back in business.

Of course- for next time- make sure that your instances are in multiple Availability Zones and Regions.

Until next time….

Of course- for next time- make sure that your instances are in multiple Availability Zones and Regions.

-Michael Klatsky, VP of Systems Administration

Enterprise Search Summit Fall 2012

schedule some time to talk with us one on one with a search problem you might be having, at #ESS12

We are pleased to announce that we will be attending the Enterprise Search Summit in Washington, DC on October 17-19, 2012. The conference will be held at the Renaissance Washington, DC Hotel. The theme for the conference is “Strategies to Hit Your Moving Targets” and discusses ‘ issues of findability, open source, cloud search, best practices, and other topics of concern to search practitioners.’ From TNR, Michael McIntosh, VP of Search Technology will be attending, along with Director of Business Development Karen Lynn.

Additionally, we will be attending the inaugural DC Search Meetup Group on Wednesday, Oct 17 from 6:30-8. The topic for the Meetup is “What’s Your Search Story.” We’re looking forward to meeting new friends and colleagues during both events.

If you’d like to schedule some time to talk with us one on one with a search problem you might be having, simple email us at Karen@tnrglobal.com or DM us via Twitter @TNRGlobal . We’ll also be tweeting live from the conference using hashtag #ESS12.

Introduce yourself if you happen to make the conference, we’re happy to meet you!

Western Mass Business Expo 2012

TNR Global will be attending the Western Mass Service Provider Meetup at the Western Mass Business Expo at the Mass Mutual Center in Springfield, MA on Thursday, Oct 11th, 2012

WMASS bizexpologo

A representative from TNR Global will be attending the Western Mass Service Provider Meetup at the Western Mass Business Expo at the Mass Mutual Center in Springfield, MA on Thursday, Oct 11th, 2012. Please contact us if you’d like to set up a time to chat with us about your search/query, web development or cloud computing needs for your business. We are available after the Meetup at 12PM until that afternoon. We will also have literature available at the Meetup.

We’re looking forward to discussing how the right search solution can save your company money and make your website more responsive to users.

TNR Global Software Engineer Completes LucidWorks Solr Training

A Hands-On Workshop for Building Killer Search Apps–best practices to develop scalable, high availability and high performance search applications.

TNR Global announces the completion of LucidWorks “Solr Unleashed– A Hands-On Workshop for Building Killer Search Apps” training course. The course was attended by senior software engineer Chaim “Jeff” Peck.

From LucidWorks: A Hands-On Workshop for Building Killer Search Apps “This three-day class is designed to offer students in-depth information to implement Solr search engine technologies. Through a combination of lectures, hands-on lab exercises and tutorials, students will learn to apply best practices to develop scalable, high availability and high performance search applications. At the end of the course, students will understand how to set up and use Solr to index and search, how to analyze and solve common problems, and how to use optional Solr modules.”

“Jeff completed the course this summer with flying colors, and his attendance there rounds out our search team’s Solr skills wonderfully,” said Karen Lynn, Director of Business Development. “Our search team has been working with Solr for a couple of years now but Jeff’s focus was committed to a commercial search product that we also work with. We like our team to be well balanced and cross trained in several search applications, so Jeff completing this course was really the final piece of the puzzle in our Solr background.”

TNR Global is an authorized integration partner for LucidWorks Enterprise search products.

TNR Global to Attend Strangeloop Conference in St. Louis September 23-35

Strange Loop is a multi-disciplinary conference that aims to bring together the developers and thinkers building tomorrow’s technology

TNR Global developers will be in attendance at the Strangeloop Conference held at the Peabody Opera House in St. Louis, MO September 23 through 25th, 2012.

Strangeloop is a relatively new conference and was born in 2009. From their website:

Strange Loop is a multi-disciplinary conference that aims to bring together the developers and thinkers building tomorrow’s technology in fields such as emerging languages, alternative databases, concurrency, distributed systems, mobile development, and the web.

The conference has a heavy focus on tech and not process. The conference is so popular it has sold out.

Topics include ZeroMQ for large-scale distributed architecture design, a tour of relational programming in miniKanren, a logic programming language, Java SE 8 which will include major enhancements to the Java Programming Language and its core libraries, AngularJS lets you extend HTML vocabulary for your application, the state of JavaScript, and many others.

To follow the official Twitter stream from Strangeloop, you can do so at @strangeloop_stl

TNR Global to Attend Enterprise Search Summit Fall 2012 in Washington, DC

We always find these conference are a great way to network with other search professionals facing the same challenges.

Hadley, MA August 15, 2012 TNR Global announced today that they plan to attend the Enterprise Search Summit this fall in Washington, DC. The conference is being held at the Marriott Renaissance Washington, DC Downtown Hotel October 17-19th, 2012.

At the conference representatives from TNR are looking forward to networking with peers and learning the latest trends in the realm of Enterprise Search and big data. The conference’s theme “Strategies to hit your moving targets” will feature talks on findability, open source, cloud search, best practices, and other topics. Attending the conference will be Michael McIntosh, VP of Search Technology and Karen E. Lynn, Director of Business Development.

“We always find these conference are a great way to network with other search professionals facing the same challenges. It’s a great way to exchange valuable information and build relationships with peers and potential clients.” said Lynn. We’re especially interested in learning how the market is evolving in terms of emerging technologies and current solutions. We are currently focused on migration from commercial to open source search, managing large data sets or “big data,” as well as learning more about what users need in their search solution.”

Renaissance Washington, DC Downtown Hotel

999 Ninth Street NW

Washington, District Of Columbia 20001

Mountain Lion Roars….and Leaves Some Blood

One issue I ran into when installing Virtualbox revolved around Apple’s software installation security in Mountain Lion

Feeling adventurous yesterday, I decided to upgrade my Mac AIR to Mountain Lion. Other than a fairly long download time, which is to be expected on the release day, the upgrade went fairly smoothly.

Until…

I opened iTerm. I use virtualenv & virtualenvwrapper to manage multiple Amazon accounts and python environments. The following error was thrown:

ImportError: No module named virtualenvwrapper.hook_loader

Luckily, this was easy. To fix, just do the following:

sudo easy_install pip

sudo pip install virtualenv virtualenvwrapper

Once done, open another iTerm window. You may see several directories created, such as “virtualenvwrapper.user_scripts creating /Users/mklatsky/.virtualenvs/premkproject”.

So far so good.

But- where is java?

“java -version” throws the error:

No Java runtime present, requesting install.

Again- easy. Just the act of issuing the “java -version” command launches a dialog box asking if I’d like to install or upgrade java. Five minutes later and I am back in business.

And then…

I use Virtualbox (actually Vagrant and Veewee). Attempting to launch one of my boxes resulted in a kernel panic, which rebooted my computer. Really? A kernel panic? At any rate- a little Googling, and an install of the latest Virtualbox (4.1.18) and I was all set.

One issue I ran into when installing Virtualbox revolved around Apple’s software installation security in Mountain Lion. There are now 3 levels of security for installable software: Mac App Store, Mac App Store and identified Developers and Anywhere.

Unfortunately, Oracle is not an “identified Developer”, so installation is impossible under the default settings. You’ll need to go to System Preferences->Security & Privacy ->General to change this. Then you can install Virtualbox. I’d recommend changing this setting back to the default after you are done.

I’ll conclude by stating that so far, Mountain Lion seems to be performing nicely, with few issues other than the above noted.

For further reading, check out the articles below:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/os-x-10-8/

http://www.jongales.com/blog/2012/07/25/fixing-virtualenv-after-installing-mountain-lion/

https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/10267

Our VP of Systems Administration Michael Klatsky discusses the latest OS upgrade from Apple–Mountain Lion. The following is a repost from his blog which can be viewed here along with other articles.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Feeling adventurous yesterday, I decided to upgrade my Mac AIR to Mountain Lion. Other than a fairly long download time, which is to be expected on the release day, the upgrade went fairly smoothly.

Until…

I opened iTerm. I use virtualenv & virtualenvwrapper to manage multiple Amazon accounts and python environments. The following error was thrown:

ImportError: No module named virtualenvwrapper.hook_loader

Luckily, this was easy. To fix, just do the following:

sudo easy_install pip

sudo pip install virtualenv virtualenvwrapper

Once done, open another iTerm window. You may see several directories created, such as “virtualenvwrapper.user_scripts creating /Users/mklatsky/.virtualenvs/premkproject”.

So far so good.

But- where is java?

“java -version” throws the error:

No Java runtime present, requesting install.

Again- easy. Just the act of issuing the “java -version” command launches a dialog box asking if I’d like to install or upgrade java. Five minutes later and I am back in business.

And then…

I use Virtualbox (actually Vagrant and Veewee). Attempting to launch one of my boxes resulted in a kernel panic, which rebooted my computer. Really? A kernel panic? At any rate- a little Googling, and an install of the latest Virtualbox (4.1.18) and I was all set.

One issue I ran into when installing Virtualbox revolved around Apple’s software installation security in Mountain Lion. There are now 3 levels of security for installable software: Mac App Store, Mac App Store and identified Developers and Anywhere.

Unfortunately, Oracle is not an “identified Developer”, so installation is impossible under the default settings. You’ll need to go to System Preferences->Security & Privacy ->General to change this. Then you can install Virtualbox. I’d recommend changing this setting back to the default after you are done.

I’ll conclude by stating that so far, Mountain Lion seems to be performing nicely, with few issues other than the above noted.

For further reading, check out the articles below:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/os-x-10-8/

http://www.jongales.com/blog/2012/07/25/fixing-virtualenv-after-installing-mountain-lion/

https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/10267

TNR Global Launches Search Application for Museum Collections

We use open source search technology that works with most museum software systems and databases including the popular museum software product PastPerfect.

TNR Global Launches Search Application for Museum Collections

TNR Global is launching the alpha version of a search application designed specifically for museum collections. Museum Collections Search is any application for digitally searching a museum’s collection. This can be made available to the public or used by only the internal staff for curation, and can be made available to a selected professional or research audience. Our White Paper explains the application in more detail.

Collections Search adds tremendous value to the research community and is often in line with the educational mission of many museums. A search feature is a resource for students and researchers, and can expand the overall audience by reaching people separated by distance or with limited physical mobility. When the public finds items in your collection like historic letters, photographs of items, and other catalog items through you search function, it can increase interest and traffic to the museum’s site and physical collection.

While the ability to search a museum collection for is a way to bring immense value to the museum and the community that supports it, intellectual property is an ongoing concern for curators within the museum community. TNR Global recognizes this and has technologies to address access to material. When setting up a search, ease of use or understanding and responsiveness are addressed, also issues of ownership or privacy all combine to determine the search technology chosen and how it is applied. The search realm and results can be tailored based on the user. By defining the audience (or audiences) for the collection and the search, we can structure the presentation of the results. The public view can be a more restricted display, while protected view and can be more expansive and detailed.

We use open source search technology that works with most museum software systems and databases including the popular museum software product PastPerfect. We customize our search solution specifically for your collection and optimize search results for the most relevant results to queries.

TNR Global has a long history with the museum community. Our CEO is Principal of the organization We Love Museums and is a member of dozens of museums worldwide. He is involved with a number of archival and curatorial indexing projects. He has merged his lifelong career in database and web technology with his passion for art, education, and history with creating a search solution to benefit museums and their patrons. To get started, contact us for an evaluation of your Museum Collection Search Project today!

The Future of Search Doesn’t Come in a Box: The Google Mini Says Goodbye

The future of search doesn’t come in a box.

Last week while many were on vacation, Google abandoned the smallest member of its’ Search Appliance family, the Google Mini. The small blue piece of external hardware was used for smaller data sets with a stable, some might say stagnant, data with slow and steady query rates. If you were a smaller business with search demands that weren’t, well–too demanding, then this piece of hardware could help you for a reasonable price tag.

Search evolves like all technologies do. Developers incorporate emerging technologies into their skill sets, and open source technologies like Lucene Solr have matured into a competitive option for companies of all sizes. IT managers are finally ready to move away from the confines of a Search Appliance in a box and move to a more agile solution that can offer room for growth, a lightweight application, and a healthy and growing community. Without the hefty annual licensing fees of a commercial product, Solr can save small to mid sized companies and startups valuable cash resources to invest in other areas of their respective businesses.

Open source technologies aside, many are speculating if Google will retire some of its other pieces of hardware like the well know GSA (Google Search Appliance). Although Google has a newly released version 6.14 with an updated website to easily explain features. Google continues evolving its enterprise search offerings to include a hosted search solution for e-tailers called Google Commerce Search, along with their standard Google Site Search. Neither of these products come in a physical blue or yellow box, and I wouldn’t expect Google’s next innovation to either.

There’s plenty lively discussion about this in the Enterprise Search Professionals discussion board on LinkedIn.

Bishop: Makes Your Web Service Shiny

The idea is to provide a relatively small library that will make your life easier and hopefully more pleasant by making it straightforward to provide a consistent web service API that obeys HTTP semantics.

Christopher Miles, one of our Senior Software Developers here at TNR, wrote this post on Bishop. It all started when he was asked the question:

“What happens if I send it something that’s not JSON?”…….“I don’t know, but I bet it logs a really big stack trace!”

The question begged an answer, and Chris give an extremely thorough answer in his own blog. Here’s a small except that gives a taste of his analysis:

After taking a closer look at HTTP and it’s specification, it was clear that it could do a lot more than I had thought. Looking back on past projects, it’s painfully obvious that I’ve been taking what is really an application protocol and ignoring all of the interesting bits, instead using it as little more than a pipe to push documents through. I’ve been using either the requested URL or parameters or maybe even neither and simply examined the body content, thus eliminating any of the real advantages of using HTTP in the first place.

And there are advantages. The protocol is already thinking about caching your data where it makes the most sense. There’s already an algorithm for taking the list of content types that the client wants and the content types the server provides and picking the best match. It can manage safe updating of resources as well as notifying the client of conflicts. And so on, by ignoring what the HTTP protocol has to offer I was making more work for myself.

So he decided to take matters into his own hands by creating a library. More from Chris’ blog:

The idea is to provide a relatively small library that will make your life easier and hopefully more pleasant by making it straightforward to provide a consistent web service API that obeys HTTP semantics. It will make the lives of those around you easier as well, clients can expect your service to respond to the common HTTP request methods with reasonable responses. Placing caches around your service will also be much simpler and you’ll have some level of control over how your service’s data is cached.

Since creating this library, other developers have responded positively and are watching the project. If you would like to take a look at how our approach to solving this problem, take a look for yourself here.

If you’d like to talk to us on how we can solve some of your enterprise search, cloud, or scalability issues, contact us.