News You Can Bruise for 2002 January 31

Got the last of my cavities filled today. Tomorrow is the big one; the removal of the impacted wisdom teeth. Aiee!

I'm communicating with Andy semi-regularly nowadays. It's great!

Yesterday was a bit of a red-letter day for Michael Stack and myself. That was when we flipped the switch on the search system used in SourceCast. We used to use a horrible system based on Swish-E which could only index and search HTML content. The new system is of our own design, uses Lucene, and can index and search just about anything (it uses plug-ins) and integrate the results based on user permissions.

It's certainly one of the coolest pieces of software I've ever written, though I'm not sure how to quantify that. It can't be the coolest piece of software I've ever written, because it's a strict subset of the SourceCast component integration architecture, which is also very cool. It may be that it's the coolest software design I've ever come up with. I'm probably deluding myself into thinking that I could write a paper on its design and actually have something new to add to the field of computer science, but it's that sort of feeling.