Amazon releases CloudSearch

Amazon has really impressed me with their efficient and simple cloud solutions. Last week they announced a hosted search solution in their cloud, named CloudSearch. The idea is the same as for all the other cloud services, namely that they take care of all the hosting, provisioning and scaling (CloudSearch can auto-scale) while you concentrate on indexing and searching.

FAST to abandon Linux and Unix

In a recent blog post by CTO Bjørn Olstad, referenced by CNet, Beyond Search and Norwegian digi.no today, FAST announces that ESP 5.3 is the last version of their Enterprise Search Platform to run on Linux or Unix.

As a part of that planning process, we have decided that in order to deliver more innovation per release in the future, the 2010 products will be the last to include a search core that runs on Linux and UNIX.

Test driving Chrome OS

chrome_logo_may09After all the buzz about Chrome OS being open-sourced as “Chromium OS”, I had to give it a ride.

I could have compiled the source from scratch, but a quick search gave this page from Gdgt providing a VMWare image of a complete install of Chrome OS. So I created a new virtual machine in VMWare Fusion on my MacBook, selected “Other Linux 2.6.x kernel” as OS type and poited it to the .vmdk disk image. See Figure 1 for how that looks.