Oops: there goes the blog in 2012

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.

For my work, I have been moving from Java to C# and .Net over the last two years, so I have been learning technologies such as C# and LINQ.

As my only post of 2012 indicates, I have been doing some serious work with Kentico, a .Net Web Content Management system. I like it, though it tries to be all things to all people so hard that it takes a little while to figure out which options to use and which not too. But that’s better than not having any options at all. As my only post of 2012 shows, I have been doing some Kentico troubleshooting, so I have applied that LINQ knowledge already. I have more Kentico troubleshooting articles in a pipeline, though I am not sure if they will show up on this blog or in a Kentico cookbook (I promised to contribute some).

I have also been working with Apache Solr search engine, which is based on Apache Lucene search library. I have looked at Solr many times over the years, but in 2012 I finally got a chance to really dig into it and for more than one project too. So, I was and am spending a serious amount of time on the solr-user mailing list. And I am obviously considered enough of an expert now to be asked to write a mini-book on one part of Solr. No more details for now, but the work is seriously under way and my biggest concern right now is on how to cut the material I have down to size, rather  than how to pad it up. Again, great thanks go to the solr-user mailing list for support and for providing in-depth details on some of the more recent and/or obscure topics.

This year, I am hoping to do a lot more work with Solr, but also with Ruby on Rails. I have played with RoR a bit in a past, but I have at least one project where I can actually buckle down and learn it thoroughly. And I think having RoR on top of my existing Java, C#, Lotus Notes and some other skills would be good. Of course, that means that I am leaving Node.js for 2014. 🙂

Oh, and my PhD is dead. I am sure those who actually read the Computational Linguistics entries figured it out, but I could never bring myself out to say it. I wish I had time and space to finish my PhD, but it was getting too complicated. Doing a PhD part-time by distance with a corpus that was a bit beyond the current state of the art was not worth the further sacrifices required. Still, I produced a corpus and a paper that was received very positively in the research community. To date, it has been cited 14 times and I am very excited every time I get an automated new citation alert from Google. I have a couple more ideas related to that subject and material, but - as with everything else - they are in a pipeline to be a bit polished.

Finally, I have continued to generate business ideas, the vast majority of which I am not in a position to ever make happen. So, I have been releasing the core concepts of them in various forums. If somebody ever finds any of them interesting, I would be happy to provide the rest of the notes.

So, that’s it for 2012. I hope I will get to write a bit more in 2013.