It is a great moment. After many months of work, my book is finally published and is available from multiple sources. It is called Instant Apache Solr for Indexing Data How-to and it has been published by the Packt Publishing.

There is a number of books published on Solr, but I feel that mine is different. Most of the books try to cover as much of Solr as possible and have a reference-style approach to explaining what different Solr components do. This is useful but - because Solr is so large - it is easy to get over-saturated with all the information and still have no idea of how to put a good Solr setup together.

I knew I was neglecting my blog in 2012, but I did not realize just how much until I received WordPress’ year in review for 2012 (Feel free to take a peek at it). The line that stopped me dead was “In 2012, there was 1 new post”. Sure enough - one post it was.

Well, this blog might be comatose, but I am not dead. In fact, quite the opposite, so busy that there is very little time for crafting articles.

I have recently started working with Kentico Content Management System(version 6). As they advertise, it supports unlimited website possibilities. Which means, that it is most definitely not an Apple-style interface and it has a lot of options and multiple ways to edit something like a page template. As a result, it is sometimes hard to understand the site organization and one has to click on a lot of dialogs to figure the relationships out.

After nearly a week of wasting my time with Virgin Mobile Canada, I am giving it my best last try using hard-learned customer support skills: ….Follow up to the phone call on Thursday and lack of returned call. I am unable to activate my new HTC Wildfire S phone on a pre-paid plan. I enter SIM card and IMEA number, confirm the phone model and the next screen says “Oh no”.

I moved from USA to Canada with my iPad (among other things). I have a bunch of iPad apps and I keep buying new ones. Not any more. Since I updated my banking details, my iTunes account stopped working. I cannot pay for apps with my USA iTunes account, since the address for the Credit Card is in Canada I cannot change the account’s country, because I have left over funds I cannot spend left-over funds because they are too small and too uneven to buy anything or to create gift certificates I cannot pad left-over funds as I would need a Credit Card for that (see point 1) I could somehow buy USA iTunes gift card and add that money to my account, but it is not a sustainable practice and feels like being a hostage.