One of the common tasks of a LablZ server administrator is to re-index resources. Till now it was possible to submit this operation online running
a url /text/index/resources?... in browser and waiting for a result. But allowing to start indexing tasks outside of scheduler control can potentially create a havoc.
To amend this it is now required to prefix the url with "/job" , for indexing it will become /job/text/index/resources?.... . Effect  of this would be replacement of a direct immediate indexing task invocation for a user job submission controlled by the scheduler.  Any attempt to invoke indexing using old url will be rejected.

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Lablz continues with its strategic direction of making Search a center of user experience in any Lablz App. Many changes were pushed to current 3.4 build, others will show up in 4.0.New Search featuresWe have added spell checking (language independent), word stemming (English only for now), autocomplete in Mobile mode (soon will show up in desktop mode as well), and word pairs for autocomplete (shingles in Lucene-speak). A day ago we enhanced each autocomplete word with icons of related classes. We continue to optimize the Search (just shaved 200ms by reader caching) and improving the presentation layer. We are also fine tuning Filter after Search so that novice users have a way to drill down after a simple text search. 

At least this is whatJohn Herlihy of Google Europe says . See an interesting article on a platform shift to Mobiles by former startup evangelist at Microsoft and now Google's Developer Advocate Don Dodge.Things are heating up in Mobile space. Google recently announced the change in strategy called Mobile first . Google will now release new products first for the smartphones and only later for desktops.

Sometimes papinet message was not generated because of some errors in Order (for example transshipment point should have been Verbrugge, but instead it is something that was not recognized as Verbrugge). When Order is fixed papinet message should be generated anew in order to sent it to the client.

In order to do that:

1. Login to Verbrugge host
2. execute the following URL:
   [verbruggeHostUrl]/export/edi/import/[newpl]/fileName?name=PapinetContainerTransport&target=papinet
   

I am evaluating Ubuntu as the Linux distro of choice for the next release of Lablz Cloud server to replace the aging Fedora 6 AMIs. Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distribution for desktop, sports a solid server and recently mounted a successful netbook offensive . Distrowatch looks at the top 10 distros and tries to understand what made this late comer to a Linux distro scene so popular so fast?

Since Lablz inception we have preferred Fedora over other Linux distros. It was also a logical choice when Amazon opened EC2 - official AMI images were built on Fedora. Fedora served us really well but we are getting tired of its short support cycle. As each Fedora version is reaching its end of life very quickly we are finding ourselves running around like crazy to find alternative repositories to install extra packages. This is insane and I am sure our customers will be even more conservative than we are in upgrading to new Linux versions. I have been reading up on the subject and the choice boils down to Centos and Ubuntu LTS releases . Before making a move on EC2 I have decided to switch my work completely to Ubuntu and see how it pans out.

I communicate with a lot of people. It is important for me to be properly notified. Had I not found the solutions below I might not have moved from Windows to Ubuntu as my main working environment. I hope the day will come when all communications will happen over the Web. Site Specific Browser (SSB) is the concept that shows the most promise to get us there. Before finding solutions below I reviewed a set of SSB products and attempted to use some of them for a week or so. Unfortunately for all of us in the Web Apps business - the current SSB crop is still way off the mark.

I went to the Microsoft campus (geek central) this week to learn about how they are cumulating their cloud.  The event was sponsored by Rackspace, a hosting company, who offer cloud services through their division called Mosso.  Also on stage were cloud consultants, VCs and some development companies.

This is the application we submitted today to Palm for early access to webOS Mojo SDK.

This article is a stub. More can be said on the subject of how Lablz enables developers to practice Agile Development.

Less than a year ago Lablz has switched from CVS to SVN. A total disaster it was. The productivity loss had been enormous. We have used CVS for years with almost no problems. Whatever problems existed had quick workarounds. All the hype surrounding SVN was total nonsense. SVN in Eclipse does not preserve version history when source is moved or renamed. SVN atomic commit sounds nice, but when SVN itself is barely reliable - it is of little consequence. You have to use command line tool to move/rename in order to preserve old revisions. But wait - you can't. Command line SVN tool changes .svn metadata so that Eclipse SVN client can't read it anymore and vise verse. SVN does not live up to its promise and will probably take several more years to mature - may be more, if ever. But as all our code history is now in SVN - we try to cope with it - for now. What a lock in! Unfortunately we found out when it was too late that migration from CVS to SVN did not go well either - older history for many sources was cut off at an arbitrary date a couple of years back or at an arbitrary number of revisions (some sources had hundreds of revisions). Good thing we have older CVS server and an older Lablz server working directory which we consult about once a month.

Naked Objects pattern is a very ambitious idea. It aims to redefine software development process. It aims to bridge the divide between the business person and the IT geeks. It aims to drastically reduce software complexity and standardize the components. It sounds like an industrial revolution in software. We all heard that promise too many times. But I guarantee you that by the end of this article not only you will be convinced that it was possible, you will have practical ways to verify that it was already done the right way.

I have started publishing Lablz status updates on Twitter - go there and click follow! I also publish the same message as my Pidgin status. Still did not find a way to do it automatically in both places. I am starting the same on my Facebook page .

VentureBeat spotted an interesting trend - independent bloggers migrate to blog networks with higher traffic to get more ad dollars.

The other type of aggregation which we saw in the past was when new Media companies evolved from individual successful blogs, like Techcrunch which grew into group blogs by inviting guest bloggers and adding new permanent bloggers.

Why all of this is mostly bypassing Old Media is beyond me. A week ago I watched a State of Play movie with Russell Crowe recently that portraits a dying investigatory journalism in a failing Newspaper. Sad.

My friend asked me for a netbook advice the other day. I got Dell Mini 9 in December 2008 and it was interesting to see how netbook market evolved since then. Checking many available products took quite some time so I post here hoping that some of the readers will benefit from it. For those impatient - my verdict is WAIT till fall.

Legit browser requests were classified as robots (false positive) and thus some functions, like tracking views were disabled for requests from this IP. This happened because we had an aggressive early-robot-detection rule:

If some IP address was detected as robot at some point then any other request with the same User-Agent header is considered a robot too.

This rule allowed us to detect googlebot and other frequently visiting robots much quicker when they arrived from a new IP address. But it was too aggressive as some unscrupulous robots apparently used a legit Browser's User-Agent pretending to be a Firefox. So, we had to roll up the sleeves and tune up the rules:

1. Defined a regexp pattern for known robots. Only those User-Agent strings of those confirmed robots will be used for early robot detection.
   
2. Added a property to manually confirm a robot even if it does not patch the User-Agent pattern for known robots.
   
3. Added a timestamp when robot was last seen. This will allow us to lift the IP blocking curtain after a set time. Without this rule we will ban some IP addresses forever. We will also need to add request rate metering into the time delay formula.
   

I am happy to announce that CAPTCHA is fully deplyed at a family of Lablz sites. It is not your run-off-the-mill CAPTCHA though. Some Lablz sites auto-login users as Anonymous to allow a much wider array of actions than Guest would be normally allowed. Guests are limited to viewing public-access resources and submitting comments. Period. Anonymous users can actually try a full blown application with a wide set of rights normally reserved only to registered users (of course rights are configurable by the admin of the site). Yet this opened the gates to spammers - and we had our full share of spam on a set of Lablz sites. As we normally prefer meditation to spam cleanup - we came up with a set ideas based on CAPCTHA theme - things we have not seen implemented elsewhere (if we missed it - please excuse our ignorance - comment on this post). Here are the highlights of Lablz CAPTCHA:CAPTCHA is shown for both guests and Anonymous (autologin userless) users. Admin can configure any Contact to be auto-logged in based on incoming IP address.

I have been pushing through with the task of VNC via SSL, which I posted on before. I believe that for future Lablz developers this is a critical component. And it is not just the obvious crossing-the-firewall benefit of VNC over SSL. Our target audience are somewhat less technical people who have a locked up precious domain knowledge and our offer to them is to unlock and monetize that knowledge. It could be a stumbling stone for them to set up VNC over SSH to communicate to their Lablz server on EC2 machine. Before they fall in love with Lablz, and I know they will - we want things for them to be 1-2-3. And it does not hurt to provide the one-click VNC access to all others :-)

Gone are the days of the CDs - we are used to buying mp3s online, we watch youtube on the regular basis and are already tasting the streaming of Feature Films. But books have resisted the move online. Primarily because reading is still streneous on the screen. But looks like the eBooks are marching on , at least in a smaller computer books market. And now O'Reilly has piloted an eBook as an iPhone App and says it has 20 more in the pipeline.