HBase-Writer version 0.90.4 has been released and is available for download now.  This version of HBase-Writer continues to have support for both Heritrix2 & Heritrix3 but has had two major bug fixes.  Connections and resources were not being pooled, as they were unknowingly removed in teh last update.  And connections were not being closed properly, thus creating a potentioal for the application to hang on an Out Of Memory Exception.  It is highly recommended that you switch to this new version if you are using an older version of the plugin.  These issues have been properly addressed by a patch submitted by Greg Lu once again.  Thank you to Greg for giving back to the open source community.  Next on the TODO List is to add unit tests to check for connection and resource pooling.  In the meantime, for future releases, I will add JMX support to my testing instance and will use JConsole to monitor the object creation count over the course of a few crawls.  This should help ensure pooling is being used.  Thanks for checking it out and Enjoy! :)

HBase-Writer version 0.90.3 has been released and is available for download now.  This version of HBase-Writer continues to have support for both Heritrix2 & Heritrix3.  HBase-Writer is now using the WARCWriterPool from Heritrix I/O instead of its own implementation.   The README file changed slightly, mainly to be compatible with Spring 3.x since the last version of Heritrix was using Spring 2.x.  Be sure to check the README file for the rest of the details.  Much thanks to Karthik MV for submitting the initial compatibility patch.  Anyone is free to create Issues if you want to see support added for something or if you have a bug to report.  Thanks for checking it out and Enjoy! :)

ApacheCon 2008 - New Orleans
November 3, 2008 - November 7, 2008
Sheraton Hotel on Canal Street

What a great conference to attend:  Informative and entertaining.  Not many "geek" conferences are considered fun, but ApacheCon 2008 in New Orleans was a blast!  Mainly becasue on Nov. 6th at 7:30pm, HotWax Media and Brainfood.com put together a New Orleans Style funeral with marching brass band and marched down Canal Street with police escort. This funeral was to celerbate the death of commercial proprietary closed-source software.  A few people carried a fake casket behind a 8 member brass band leading about 200 conference attendees and some resturant/bar patrons to the Howling Wolf bar to watch the Rebirth Brass Band do their thing.  They're an amazing band, they coved many songs and I recommend checking them out if you get the chance.  It was a great experience; definately one I will never forget. 

The speakers at the conference were great.  All were prepared, no one was fumbling through their slides or notes; there were no audio/video troubles.  I was able to audio record some of the sessions and many of the presenters provided their presentation materials.  I am already looking forward to the ApacheCon2009 in Oakland, CA   Thanks to Charel Morris for the personal help in getting my conference pass.