Rocket Science

So it's been a while since I last blogged, but I figured there was something noteworthy to talk about today, so here I am.

I found out yesterday that I was elevated to IEEE Senior Membership, something that I had applied for a few months ago after having felt that I was ready and had demonstrated the qualities they are looking for (pasted here for your convenience, see here for full list):

• a candidate shall be an engineer, scientist, educator, technical executive or originator in IEEE-designated fields.
• candidates shall have been in professional practice for at least ten years.
• candidates shall have shown significant performance over a period of at least five of those years.

However, anyone that knows me knows that I don't take anything for granted, nor do I feel it's "in the bag" on anything like this -- I constantly worry until I find out one way or another. So, it was to my utter surprise yesterday that I found out, I made it! I was made an IEEE Senior Member!. Wow.

Check out these sweet benefits:

• Recognition: The professional recognition of your peers for technical and professional excellence.
• Senior Member Plaque: Since January 1999, all newly elevated senior members have received an engraved Senior Member plaque to be proudly displayed for colleagues, clients and employers to see. The plaque, an attractive fine wood with bronze engraving, is sent within six to eight weeks after elevation.
• US$25 Coupon: IEEE will recognize all newly elevated senior members with a coupon worth up to US$25. This coupon can be used to join one new IEEE society. The coupon expires on 31 December of the year in which it is received.
• Letter of Commendation: A letter of commendation will be sent to your employer on the achievement of senior member grade (upon the request of the newly elected senior member).
• Announcements: Announcement of elevation can be made in section/society and/or local newsletters, newspapers and notices.
• Leadership Eligibility: Senior members are eligible to hold executive IEEE volunteer positions.
• Ability to Refer Other Candidates: Senior members can serve as a reference for other applicants for senior membership.
• Review Panel: Senior members are invited to be on the panel to review senior member applications.

Thanks much to Dr.Barry Boehm, Dr. Ellis Horowitz, and Dr. Ian Gorton for agreeing to be my recommendations for the nomination!

Also, I just wanted to throw a shout out to Dr. James Marshall, who was also elevated yesterday. Great job, Jim!

I just cut the Apache Tika 0.7 release.

You can go grab it from one of the Apache download mirrors.

Of note, per the recent discussions on the mailing list, Tika is now going to be an Apache Top-Level Project (TLP), so this will be our last Apache Lucene based release. Thanks for the support, Lucene community!

Enjoy!

Wow. So, I received an email the other day asking me if I accepted membership within the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). For a long time, I've been a participant, as a committer, as someone who was the progenitor of one of Apache's projects (Tika), as a PMC member (within Apache Lucene), but I honestly was taken aback that I had been nominated and accepted into the ASF as a member.

I sincerely appreciate the goodwill, Apache members, and will do my best to live up to the great precedent by the other ASF members. Of note: it seems I'm the first member from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the first member to represent the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Check out Apache Tika 0.6. It's hot off the presses and contains even more goodies for mime type detection and content analysis than before. And it's got 30% more Apache goodness than the leading competitors. Feel free to head over here and pick it up!

It's official. NASA has its first sorta official Apache project!

At this stage, Apache's official policy is to not do official PR announcing the project (we are kind of at step 2 in the process, out of 3). So what could be less official than my crappy blog that no one reads! I should be able to lord on here for ages about it then and still be within the policy! ;)

Anyhoo we have a ways to go before graduation, having just had a formal vote and been accepted into the Incubator, but it couldn't hurt for me to dream, right?

So, lately, I've been pretty involved in Spatial SOLR. I'm just scratching the surface of trying to understand this stuff. There was an interesting plugin though posted recently by Mat Brown that looks really clean and easy to understand. I'm going to give it a go and see how it churns out on my oceans dataset.

I announced a while back that Tika 0.5 is available for downloading. Get it while it's hot. Notable changes include moving to a source only release this time, improved RDF and OWL parsing and detection and other speedups.

24-13, over Boston College. They weren't super impressive, but USC got it done. We'll take the win and hopefully ride it into some BCS-level success next year. Fight on guys!

Look, even Damain Williams is being nice to Barkley. Maybe I should adopt a change of heart? Only time will tell..

I'm not sure why I'm even bothering posting.

Have fun in the Emerald Bowl, USC.

Sigh.

• Stanford, you are classless.
  
• Harbaugh, you are classless.
  
• USC defense, you suck.
  
• USC offense (yes, you Barkley), you suck.
  
• Joe McKnight, you rule.
  
• If Stafon Johnson was around, it might be a different tune.
  
• Carroll you suck (WTF happened to Mitch Mustain, you loser?)