Sorting by date with SOLR

Just went through a few hours of pounding my head.  I couldn’t, for the life of me, get SOLR to return results sorted by a new date field added to our schema.  My query was simply:

pr_score:[3 TO *] sort pr_lastUpdated desc

No matter what, the results came back sorted by ANYWHICHFRICKINWAY.

Scouring the mailing lists and google search results yielded exactly squat.  Then I found it.  By pure chance I was looking at a developerworks article on IBM and in a table at the bottom the showed this crazy syntax:

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What would you do with a timemachine?

This might go down as the funniest thing I’ve read all week:

http://www.27bslash6.com/p2p.html

If I did have a working time machine, the first thing I would do is go back four days and tell myself to read the warning on the hair removal cream packaging where it recommends not using on sensitive areas. I would then travel several months back to warn myself against agreeing to do copious amounts of design work for an old man wielding the business plan equivalent of a retarded child poking itself in the eye with a spoon, before finally traveling back to 1982 and explaining to myself the long term photographic repercussions of going to the hairdresser and asking for a haircut exactly like Simon LeBon’s the day before a large family gathering.

Regards, David.

David Thorne

Parameterized REST URLs with Spring MVC

I’ve been using Spring now for quite some time.  Since the 1.0 days.  With the rise of REST, one of the things that bugs me with Spring MVC is how to map REST standard URLS.

Thanks to Carbon Five, we can:

Carbon Five Community: Parameterized REST URLs with Spring MVC.

Mapping your URLS to controllers is straighforward and powerful. URLs look like:

/view/noparameters
/view/(bar:foo)
/view/(*.html:html)
/view/(**/*:view).view
/view/c/(*:controller)/(*:id)

What ever is after the : is the name of the variable that gets stored in your http parameter map. Your controller doesn’t have to know anything about the URL coming in. Much better, huh?

I’ve been using this in both of my commercial products for quite some time.  Until Spring 3 makes its way to a stable state, I’ll continue to use it.  Very handy.

Maybe it’s just this one store?

After reading something like this post:

http://www.slashgear.com/apple-is-no-longer-the-nordstrom-of-tech-theyre-the-new-nordstrom-1963901/

on how great the Apple Store retail experience is, I wonder if it is just this one store that is causing me all my grief?

They dealt with things ranging from MacBook keyboard problems, iPod failures and customer service during the purchases of back to school systems. In each case Apple did not please these customers, Apple delighted them.

I do wonder now.  My experiences are nothing like that.  I long for Best Buy when I’m at the Sommerset Apple store.  Hmm…

The Worst Retail Experience

I just participated in a customer satisfaction survey that Apple sent out. It was prompted by my purchase of a new 3GS for my wifey. They sure did open a can of worms.

The Apple Store continues to be the worst retail experience I go through. I dread going there. I have a MacBook Pro 17″ fully loaded, a Mac Pro before that. I’ve had every iPhone. The products are the best. I positively DREAD going to the Apple Store to buy them.

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Automatic Weapon Fire? It’s just Detroit.

Also known as, Red Dawn 2: The birth of incentives

Back in October they were filming parts of Red Dawn 2 in Detroit.  It was funny because I was down there visiting a client and had troubles getting into the parking garage.  When I turned off of Jefferson onto Griswold, I looked up and saw a strange sight.  I hadn’t remembered that my client was so close to the police station.  Additionally, I was surprised that the police department was throwing a gala event… at 3 in the afternoon??

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Number 2

Welcome to our family, Alexander Earl Wille. Call him Alec.

He was born on Oct 26th at 9:28 PM. Mom and Alec are doing great.