Just one last status update before I rush off to buy the last Christmas presents. Toke just converted Summa’s internal Lucene document builder to use the new XMLStreamReader found in Java 6, instead of using some XPath/DOM magic we had been using hitherto when indexing in Summa (yeah, we know DOM parsing is silly here, but it had proven stable and “OK” for a very long time).
This provided an overal indexing speedup of a factor 8. I think that is Toke’s way of saying “merry Christmas everybody” 
Ever needed to copy a file from one host to another, but being forced to go over an intermediate host because you don’t have the rights to access the machine with the file directly?
Let me put an end to your dispair then! Here’s a small script called scp-via that can do this for you! Just run
scp-via $VIA_HOST $FROM_TARGET $TO_TARGET
- with the same syntax for FROM_TARGET and TO_TARGET as you use for regular scp.
Basically it performs a little scp, netcat, ssh magic under the hood, but hopefully you need not worry about that.
I believe I need not say that scp-via comes with absolutely no warranty or guarantees about not desctroying your hard drives. Run it at your own risk.
Following tradition, we have a fair amount of Christmas decorations here at the office. The new pride of our collection, however, must be the Stein Bagger tribute.
I just committed a pretty hefty optimization of our generic database backend. The optimization is in the area where we put records into the system – in Summa land known as “Ingest”.
1 hour of profiling, 200 lines of test code, and re-shuffling 10 lines of code in our database layer improved our ingest rate with a factor 20. Admitedly the ingest rate was a bit on the slow side before I started, but it feels good nonetheless
I had the pleasure to visit Helsinki this Tuesday doing a presentation about Summa. The audience was a good mix of librarians, technical people, and decision makers so I tried to strike a middle balance in the technical level of the presentation.
It was a two-hour thing so I was a bit nervous about whether the timing would match up in the end. Luckily it did that very well.
It was in relation to the Finnish National Digital Library project and I was number two (of three) presentations that day. You can find more information about the program here (sorry, Finnish only, but there is a picture of me me me!). I found this english article about the Finnish National Digital Library.
You can download an annotated PDF version of my slides on the Summa wiki. The PDF export messed up with the gradients a bit, but it is readable I will have the ODP sources and PNGs up when we have a proper place to host such things. If you want them feel free to email me.
I believe that a resounding “w00t” is in order now that Summa 1.1 has hit the block. Another small open source project tried to steal our thunder by releasing the day before SUmma 1.1, but I don’t think they got away with it 
The development phase leading up to 1.1 was really nice. We had everything estimated and written down before we started and our estimates held right up to the last day.
I can’t help but feel that it was kind of like playing chicken with time itself. Personally I had some tricky stuff to write and a lot of stuff to consolidate before 1.1 and there where moments where I had my doubts that I would be able to make it. But even though the roadmap was pretty packed I could see that we had consistently been meeting our deadlines so i just repeated to my self “Trust the plan… Trust the plan” and stuck to the to my designated tasks. – And you know what? Yes you do, we did make it on time
So here’s to the team!
We are very close to wrapping up Summa 1.1, our list of tasks for 1.1 is almost fully ticked off. In fact one item remains…
“Being able to cope with boring work” – I wonder why this issue is the last one to be addressed
Really – I am a happy camper, Summa 1.1 was on a tight schedule packed with new features and rewrites of core components and it looks like we’ll ship on time. Here’s for hoping that no last-minute problems crop up. I can’t wait to write the release notes – they’re going to be pretty packed 
