The first Flag and Bell for 2007 was a great success last night.

The pubs proved to be a good venue for the all new and regular FAB attendees to network and exchange ideas and various industry thoughts.

The quiz was a tricky one, ending in a three way tie breaker. The most challenging question was:
'What name did the Firefox project first use for their browser, which was publicly available for testing in September 2002'?

Stuck...the answer is phoenix.

Details for next month's can be found here.

Nigel has been invited to speak at the EUSIDIC conference in March.

EUSIDIC is an acronym for The European Association of Information Services.

The conference which is to be held in Roskilde, Denmark, aims to group together leaders in the information industry.

The title of the conference is: " What will be the impact of Web 2.0 and Lib 2.0 applications on user services in library and information services management developments.

We are looking forward to it.

Just before Christmas I attended the BBC Backstage Christmas Party.

It was great to catch up with members from the flag-and-bell.com and london.pm.org.

While I was there I was interviewed about Trexy.

We're working hard to prepare the cluster so we can have a nice calm holiday.

One of our monitoring tools shows flashing green lights if all is going well and red lights if a node is in trouble. We just had a wave of machines turn red! As the monitoring tool flashed green and red we couldn't help but notice it looked a bit like a Christmas tree!!

I thought I'd been a good boy this year, "Santa can I have a calm cluster for Christmas please?" ;-)

As it’s everyone’s last day in the office for the year, we decided to do a bit of a folder clean up. Putting the conference folders away has brought back a lot of memories.

What a year it has been! Take a look at the Trexy Search Roadshow 2006 - we've compiled all our blog entries of the conferences here:

• 27 February - 2 March, Search Engine Strategies Conference, New York
• 30 - 31 March, Search Engine Strategies Conference, Munich
• 10 - 12 April, ECIR Conference, London
• 9 - 11 May, Internet World Conference, London
• 23 - 26 May, 12th WWW Conference, Edinburgh
• 31 May - 2 June, Search Engine Strategies Conference, London
• 7 - 10 August, Search Engine Strategies Conference, San Jose
• 10 - 12 September, ASIDIC, New Port Beach
• 27 - 28 September, AdTech, London
• 10 October, CILIP London Evening Meeting, London
• 16 - 17 October, Internet Librarian, London
• 25 - 26 October, Linux World, London
• 15 – 16 November, Yellow Pages Today Conference, Vienna
• 28 - 30 November, Online Information, London

It’s been a great year for Trexy and we look forward to 2007.

We had a great time yesterday celebrating Christmas onboard the Bateaux London.

It was a beautiful day to cruise the River Thames while enjoying the festivities.

It was a great way to see the year out.

Merry Christmas.

It’s only 2 weeks until Christmas and the Trexy office finally has a tree.

















We have also finalised our first ever Trexy Christmas cards.

The card shows Trexy blazing trails in the remotest of places.

AJAX is a not-so-new-really way of updating a web page with Javascript - our sister search engine, Turbo10 used Javascript extensively on the client-side for topic clustering, results buffering and fast presentation - and all this in the pre-AJAXian dark ages - circa 2003!

AJAX is useful for things like google maps but I have rarely seen it used well in other places. So, "shock horror" there will be no AJAX in the next release of Trexy!

I hope this means we qualify as definitely NOT "Web 2.0" - Phew! ;-)

Most of the key ideas behind Trexy come from 1945 not 2005.

Last night The British Computer Society named Trexy the 2006 winner of the Services Category in the prestigious BCS IT Professional Awards.

The three main criteria used for judging the Technology Awards were:
* the element of originality of the system
* the level of exploitability
* the level of usage to date

We were up against some pretty tough competition including: - Royal Bank of Scotland,
Cosmic , Aliiance and Leicester.

Nige and I are thrilled to win this award. It is a great way to end a very busy and rewarding year.

I was also thrilled to hear some other news that Nigel announced last night - but I'll let him tell you about it.