Tube Dusseldorf 2002

Regards from Dusseldorf. Generally speaking the show was success even if the economical situation in Europe and practically all over the world has not been the best. Both - exhibitors and visitors - made new records. The statistics below:

Monday was slow as it was expected. Tuesday was showing some improvements but it were Wednesday and Thursday that really attracted visitors. Friday was slower already which is the case always.

From exhibitors figure we cannot draw too many conclusions since booth has to be reserved long time before the actual show takes place. The economy was doing good during that time so that figure doesn't reflect to the present situation.

How about number of visitors? Could we draw some conclusions from that? I think we can. We could find some correlation with the high number of visitors and the growing optimism within Tube Industry. This might be a good sign for the coming Fabtech Cleveland show.

New Search Engine for TubeNet

TubeNet has now a new, powerful Search Engine - Htdig.

For few years the Search Engine at TubeNet has been "Atomz". It did the job but now when the number of individual page at TubeNet has grown near to one thousand, Atomz was not flexible enough. It was time to install HTDIG.

Htdig was developed at San Diego State University under GNU GPL license and now is running also at TubeNet. The biggest advantages besides it's speed and fuzzy searching algorithms is the easy re-indexing of the database. While with Atomz it was made once a year basis, with Htdig it can be made every week. Feel free to try out.

Cheers!
Juha Haapala