peknet is Peter E Karman
musing on 
syndicate this site
Sudo laugh
If you don't know what sudo is, this'll be less funny.
File under general/ Thu Dec 21 16:59:43 CT 2006
How I Implemented Printer-Friendly Pages Across Multiple Websites
This article and this article were very helpful. And so was the fact that we use Template Toolkit and a shared template directory for all sites.File under projects/ Thu Dec 21 12:23:33 CT 2006
Welcome Malcolm!
A new boy joined our family this week. We are all happy, tired and returning to what resembles normal here at our house.
File under general/ Sun Dec 3 16:25:39 CT 2006
Template Toolkit, WebDev and Separation of Concerns
Separation of Concerns is Andy Wardley's phrase for a certain kind of web development. I share his belief, though I came to it on my own while doing documentation development at my old job.I also use Andy's Template Toolkit with my Perl web apps.
File under general/ Thu Nov 16 10:43:53 CT 2006
Nedit Manager Interview
An older piece from slashdot that I found interesting for a lot of reasons.And on another note, the cure for my lesstif/openmotif woes on FC6 was to download the statically built nedit binary from nedit.org. It has openmotif linked in for me. Got that tip from the interview above.
File under general/ Thu Nov 16 09:57:00 CT 2006
Fedora Core 6
I upgraded my work machine from Fedora Core 4 to the new 6 release, mostly to try and get some added functionality from the Evolution email client. What a drag. Evolution segfaults on me now, in version 2.8. And my other main app, the Nedit text editor, failed to work till I tracked down the problem: OpenMotif was dropped from Fedora Core due to some licensing issues, and needs to be replaced with LessTif. However, the Fedora upgrade process failed to un-install the openmotif rpm from my machine, leaving me with an nedit that was trying to use 2 libraries at once. Not good. Segfault on start. Uninstalling openmotif did the trick. At least for Nedit. Still can't get Evolution to work.Update: I did get it to work. Despite repeatedly removing all the . files in my home dir related to Evolution, it persisted in remembering my info. I finally tracked the offending pref file to /tmp. Removing that and restarting Evolution did the trick, though it did mean having to reset all my account info.
File under general/ Thu Nov 2 15:07:15 CT 2006
Firefox tips
Friend Bob forwards Firefox tips. Thanks Bob!File under general/ Wed Oct 25 22:11:20 CT 2006
luna lopez dot net
My friend Sa-ul has a new poem podcast up at lunalopez.net.File under general/ Sun Oct 15 15:09:25 CT 2006
They've got my number
Those crazy random spam generators appear to have found my number: random sentence fragments about politics and technology seem to fool SpamAssassin and end up in my inbox. Here's a good one:
My first thought was, its a video web portal, how different can it be? Rick
Santorum, left, and Pennsylvania State Treasurer Bob Casey.
Foley's online conversations with teenage male pages, but have largely hunkered
down as Republicans beat up each other amid accusations of a less-than-agressive
initial response. But in this battle, the only thing left to see is boxing
gloves. , figuring out just how bad the collateral damage is going to be for the
GOP is akin to trying to guess if the roof is going to blow off of a house in
the midst of a storm. Thank you to our event sponsors Backbone Media and
BusinessWire. I knew this would be fun!
It is a bit too early to say if it is a great service or not, but I have great
hopes that it will work out for me.
File under spam hall of shame/ Mon Oct 9 13:04:10 CT 2006
CPAN modules updated
Just uploaded SWISH-Prog 0.03 and Search-Tools 0.02 to the CPAN. They join SWISH-API-More, SWISH-API-Stat and SWISH-API-Object on the CPAN this week.Whew.
File under projects/swish Fri Oct 6 19:48:52 CT 2006
Bindings
One of the things I like most about using other IR libraries as backends is that many of them offer language bindings in multiple other languages. So PHP, Ruby, Python, etc., users can be happy right away with search ability.Of course, if the indexing program is Perl instead of C, there is that added requirement. But hopefully, if the indexing API is well documented, there's nothing to stop implementations in other scripting languages besides Perl.
Take Xapian for example. They have bindings available in nearly every major scripting language. So if you don't like the way Swish-e implements the indexing scheme, there's nothing to stop you from writing your own in your favorite language. At which point, you're not really using Swish-e any more. But you could mix/match depending on your needs. Use Swish-e's spider and SWISH::Filter, but your own parser and indexer, for example.
File under projects/swish Wed Oct 4 14:17:18 CT 2006
SWISH::Prog
The general idea right now is to get the core C libraries functional, at least for SwishParser and SwishConfig. Then start working on the "swish-e" command line program replacement. I intend to write the replacement in Perl, since that will be much easier to write and performance should only see a small hit from startup costs. I'll use SWISH::Prog to handle the basic spider/fs stuff, as well as config parsing.Funny: I don't think I had that in mind when I originally started SWISH::Prog but it now seems like a totally obvious fit.
SWISH::Prog::Config just underwent some major surgery. It can now parse version2 config files using the excellent Config::General, and can convert to the current SwishConfig XML format.
I'll probably start with a Xapian backend since that's fairly stable (though UTF-8 support is still not official till 1.0). Need to write SWISH::Index and SWISH::Search APIs (though the latter will likely look just like SWISH::API).
Everything in due time.
File under projects/swish Wed Oct 4 10:53:24 CT 2006
10 Guidelines for Swish-e 3.0 Development
Thoughts on the Swish-e project (http://swish-e.org/).Understand why folks like Swish-e 2 Fast. Easy to configure. Flexible. Keep it that way.
Understand why folks crave Swish-e 3 Folks like Fast, Easy and Flexible. They want to bring those qualities to bear on more difficult challenges.
* I18n demands multi-byte charset support. UTF-8 is the accepted standard. Swish-e 2 is stuck with single-byte charsets.
* Data sets are huge these days. Swish-e 2 doesn't scale well past a few million documents.
* Huge data sets means lots of time spent indexing. Stable incremental index support (add, update, delete) is a must. Swish-e 2 has incremental support but it is buggy and the code is opaque.
* It's a polylingual world. Swish-e lacks modern script language bindings beyond Perl.
C == Fast but C == Slow C (or other compiled languages) provide the best speed. The core code base for Swish-e is all in C. C is the *lingua franca* of the open source world.
But C is harder to write than most scripting languages, and takes much longer to develop and debug (and thus maintain). So projects that involve C attract fewer developers from the community. Fewer developers means (on the whole) that development time is slower. A couple good C developers can turn out good code quickly, but as with all OSS, maintenance and legacy become big issues -- community (people) issues that become software issues. See the maintenance issue below.
Modular == cool. Monolithic != cool. Swish-e 2 revolves around the swish-e command line tool, a monolithic tool that parses, indexes and searches. A good step has been taken with libswish-e for splitting out search into its own library. Let's continue that direction by splitting up the parser, indexer and searcher into separate, modular components (libraries). That increases Flexibility (while probably impacting Fast).
Maintainable code is a feature What happens when you get hit by a bus? Or get bored? Or move on? Or change careers and take up that basket weaving profession you've always secretly craved? Who will maintain your code? Did you document what you wrote? Did you check in your latest changes? Are your comments clear? Don't fall into the trap that the code is the documentation. Swish-e is more than the development team *de jour*; folks will keep using it after you're gone. OSS projects all suffer from this problem: check out the orphaned projects on sf.net.
Community is a feature Getting folks involved is one of the joys (and struggles) of OSS projects. Making it easy for folks to get involved, whether contributing documentation, tests, patches or good beer, is a good way to keep the fun in your own involvement.
Since writing C is a skill that fewer people have, encourage folks to write tests (using the TAP format), documentation, and how-tos.
And consider how much code needs to actually be written in C. Much of the strong parts of Swish-e are actually Perl scripts that support and supplement the core C program.
Don't reinvent the wheel There are lots of search tools out there. Information retrieval is a hot subject right now. Swish-e 2 has some cool features. It's Fast, Easy and Flexible. But it doesn't do everything folks want it to.
However, other projects are strong where Swish-e is weak. There is quality open source IR code out there that does UTF-8, incremental indexing and good scaling. Good programmers are lazy. Let's use other folks' code to get the features we want.
Play to your strengths Those other IR projects might be weak where Swish-e 2 is strong. They might be Slow, Hard or Inflexible in key areas. Let's figure out what makes Swish-e Fast, Easy and Flexible and concentrate on making those parts of the code easy to integrate with the quality pieces from those other IR projects. Remember: modular is cool.
This is supposed to be Fun Remember?
File under projects/swish Fri Sep 29 22:16:07 CT 2006
Swish3 Proposal
Thoughts on Swish-e version 3.Assumptions * In order to keep Swish-e fast and portable, some key parts need to be written in a compiled language like C.
* C developers are increasingly harder to recruit to OSS projects like Swish-e.
* C is slower to develop and more difficult to maintain than non-compiled languages like Python or Perl.
* To encourage more code contributors to the project and make the project more useful to more people, make the core C parts library modules with well-defined and documented APIs. This makes the code more maintainable and flexible, and allows integration of other IR libraries like Xapian.
Core C Libraries *NOTE The following list is no longer accurate. libswish3 combines all these into one library.*
SwishUtils (libswishu) Common shared functions for things like IO, string handling, times, errors, memory and hashing.
I've started this one.
SwishConfig (libswishc) Parse config files into in-memory data structures, and read/write index config headers.
I've started this one.
SwishParser (libswishp) Parse documents into properties and wordlist.
I've started this one.
SwishIndex (libswishi) Store properties and wordlists.
TODO.
SwishSearch (libswishs) Parse queries and fetch results from an index.
Could be re-working of existing libswish-e to expect UTF-8 (which SwishUtils supports).
File under projects/swish Fri Sep 29 22:15:53 CT 2006
Envelopes
Bought a box of envelopes at the store this evening, in order to mail an overdue bill. I realized it had been over 8 years since I last bought envelopes. That's a sign of the times: most bills come with a self-addressed envelope, and all my other correspondence happens electronically.File under general/ Thu Aug 31 20:17:21 CT 2006
MnDOT traffic cameras
Just discovered this link today for MN Dept of Trans traffic cams.File under general/ Wed Jul 19 09:41:33 CT 2006
!101! degrees
Right now in St Paul. That's above zero, not below.File under general/ Sat Jul 15 15:08:53 CT 2006
Mailing Lists
Sometimes the mailing lists I'm on offer poetic spam too:
see the garage, too: a long gray intestine, its doors wide open. The trucks
"Very well, Fletcher. Remember what we were saying about one's body
I looked up and felt a catch in my throat. I couldn't utter a sound. I
precision flying is a step toward expressing our real nature.Everything
File under spam hall of shame/ Fri Jul 14 08:09:30 CT 2006
Through what we ...
sins? Maybe they had gotten Buzzard? That bastard, he'd drown his own
pulled out of his dive from seven thousand feet, a long gray streak firing
"It's not the 'Borscht,' it's pronounced 'Borshch.' How many times do I
rule holds for us now, of course: we choose our next world through what we
I'm holding my breath, damnit! "through what we...." what?!
File under spam hall of shame/ Thu Jul 13 16:06:12 CT 2006
MyLibrary Article
Thought I had linked this here before, but I wrote an article on search indexers for the MyLibrary project last summer.File under projects/ Wed Jul 12 16:53:34 CT 2006
Aristotelean Sacrament
A nice entry in the SHoS this morning from 'aristotelean sacrament":
Hey
Thanks to a private nomination, you are now in a position to take advantage of our discreet encounter matching system.
Our job is to get you laid over and over again.
Confirm your encounter here: [omitted for privacy] - -- cancel link below: We had gone on so far in a mixture of as still remained there to be sent to Dover my desire was to apply myself to some of a wish that he should well educated well dressed and with Ah amiable indeedand also of thegood Babara was very glad to see me days in London Here she left off had Box Seat written against the entry [omitted for privacy]
Thanks to a private nomination, you are now in a position to take advantage of our discreet encounter matching system.
Our job is to get you laid over and over again.
Confirm your encounter here: [omitted for privacy] - -- cancel link below: We had gone on so far in a mixture of as still remained there to be sent to Dover my desire was to apply myself to some of a wish that he should well educated well dressed and with Ah amiable indeedand also of thegood Babara was very glad to see me days in London Here she left off had Box Seat written against the entry [omitted for privacy]
It's reassuring to know there are so many people out there who care about how often I get laid.
File under spam hall of shame/ Mon Jul 10 07:56:02 CT 2006
More Spam Poetry
Like refrigerator poetry before it, the random, heuristic-beating spam poetry of today seems a little precious and contrived. Yet today's offering takes a political turn:watery opens prevents carried purse pocket. abrasion harsh Full mercy One NASAs Discovery SINGULAR TPM adding bookmark often. ideas contact database bowl schema pilar beethoven karetka genealogy atlantica canarias truth leaving warplanes Gaza liquid soothes soccer Landmark Speed v..IBM
File under spam hall of shame/ Fri Jun 30 07:51:19 CT 2006
Butwhen theFather Saviour.
From: sinnerAnother entry in the SHoS. Amidst one of the thousand or so ads for some gold company in China, this little fundy gem:
Insurance MapInfo haunted Katharine verifies copied intact. mounted minethis anciently inAthens committhe handling blow trumpet. Jeter outline loath CMSi five guards supplying inmates Israel. thehouse mutinies andhis sister Miriam advocates payback value. Insurance MapInfo ASP Envinsa services various output theirwell excluding aneasy not: hathto achanging scales. deserving Andas esteeming
File under spam hall of shame/ Thu Jun 29 08:07:27 CT 2006
Characters script
Inspired by Simon Cozens' secret software idea, here's a script in my ~/bin dir that I use often. It prints all the glyphs and decimal equivalents for ASCII and any other UTF8 range you specify. I find it especially useful for writing XML/HTML when I want to specify a numerical entity value.
#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# Copyright 2005 perl@peknet.com
# Released under the Free Beer License
#
#
# print chart of chars and matching nums
# just latin1 by default
# otherwise, specify start/stop numerals at cmd line
#
# NOTE the ANSI color stuff is unused
use strict; use warnings; use Term::ANSIColor; binmode STDOUT, ':utf8'; print ' '; my $on = color('bold'); my $off = color('reset'); my $c = 0; my $start = shift @ARGV || 161; my $stop = shift @ARGV || 255; for (33 .. 126, $start .. $stop) { my $n = $_; if ($_ < 100) { $n = " $n"; } print("$n ", chr($_), ' '); if (++$c == 6) { print "\n "; $c = 0; } } print "\n";
use strict; use warnings; use Term::ANSIColor; binmode STDOUT, ':utf8'; print ' '; my $on = color('bold'); my $off = color('reset'); my $c = 0; my $start = shift @ARGV || 161; my $stop = shift @ARGV || 255; for (33 .. 126, $start .. $stop) { my $n = $_; if ($_ < 100) { $n = " $n"; } print("$n ", chr($_), ' '); if (++$c == 6) { print "\n "; $c = 0; } } print "\n";
File under projects/ Sun Jun 11 22:35:57 CT 2006
The iPod of Babel
Couldn't help but think of the story of the Tower of Babel this morning reading this NYT article about the world's digital library. Makes me want to resist it, just on principle. But then, that wasn't my first impulse. My first impulse was: how could I search it? So I'll have to resist myself as well.File under general/ Mon May 15 08:13:52 CT 2006
Unicode
I learned a lot about character encodings last year while working on libswish3. Here's a site I should have known about then: Richard Ishida's homepage.By way of this good article on web browsers and encodings.
Thanks, Sam.
File under projects/ Thu May 11 23:15:37 CT 2006
Perl = Postmodern
Back before I was a computer geek I was a historian. A historian of ideas: literature, philosophy, religion. That kind of thing.Then I discovered Perl. Which Made Sense to me, after a little while of hacking at it.
Larry Wall, who invented Perl, explains why that might be.
File under projects/ Wed May 10 09:36:34 CT 2006
DDear in Christ
These spam are legion and unoriginal. But I love the pathos.
DDear in christ
Greetings in the name of God,Pls let this not sound strange to you for my only surviving lawyer who would have done this died early this year.i prayed and got you email id from your countrys chambers of commerce which i have been with my late husband and liked to visit once more if God will in his infinite mercies.
I am Mrs Williams Uche,I am 51 years old,i am deaf and suffering from a long time cancer of the breast which also affected my brain,from all indication my conditions is really deteriorating and it is quite obvious that, according to my doctors they have advised me that i may not live for the next two months,this is because the cancer stage has gotten to a very bad stage.
I was brought up from a motherless babies home, was married to my late husband for twenty years without a child.My husband died in a fatal motor accident.Before his death we were true Christians. Since his death I decided not to re-marry,I sold all my inherited belongings and deposited all the sum of $18.5million dollars with a Security Company.
Presently, this money is still with them and the management just wrote me as the true owner to come forward to receive the money for keeping it so long or rather issue a letter of authorization to somebody to receive it on my behalf since I can not come over because of my illness or they get it confisticated.
Presently, I'm with my laptop in a hospital where I have been undergoing treatment for cancer of the lungs. I have since lost my ability to talk and my doctors have told me that I have only a few months to live. It is my last wish to see that this money is invested to any organisation of your choice and distributed each year among the charity organization,the poor and the motherless babies home where i come from.I want you God fearing, to also use this money to fund churches, orphanages and widows.
I took this decision, before i rest in peace because my time will soon be up. As soon as I receiveyour reply I shall give you the contact of the Security Company.I will also issue you a letter of authority that will prove you as the new beneficiary of my fund. Please assure me that you will actaccordingly as I stated herein. Hoping to hearing from you soon. Waiting for your reply here or at (williams1958@o2.pl). Yours in Christ, Mrs Williams Uche
Greetings in the name of God,Pls let this not sound strange to you for my only surviving lawyer who would have done this died early this year.i prayed and got you email id from your countrys chambers of commerce which i have been with my late husband and liked to visit once more if God will in his infinite mercies.
I am Mrs Williams Uche,I am 51 years old,i am deaf and suffering from a long time cancer of the breast which also affected my brain,from all indication my conditions is really deteriorating and it is quite obvious that, according to my doctors they have advised me that i may not live for the next two months,this is because the cancer stage has gotten to a very bad stage.
I was brought up from a motherless babies home, was married to my late husband for twenty years without a child.My husband died in a fatal motor accident.Before his death we were true Christians. Since his death I decided not to re-marry,I sold all my inherited belongings and deposited all the sum of $18.5million dollars with a Security Company.
Presently, this money is still with them and the management just wrote me as the true owner to come forward to receive the money for keeping it so long or rather issue a letter of authorization to somebody to receive it on my behalf since I can not come over because of my illness or they get it confisticated.
Presently, I'm with my laptop in a hospital where I have been undergoing treatment for cancer of the lungs. I have since lost my ability to talk and my doctors have told me that I have only a few months to live. It is my last wish to see that this money is invested to any organisation of your choice and distributed each year among the charity organization,the poor and the motherless babies home where i come from.I want you God fearing, to also use this money to fund churches, orphanages and widows.
I took this decision, before i rest in peace because my time will soon be up. As soon as I receiveyour reply I shall give you the contact of the Security Company.I will also issue you a letter of authority that will prove you as the new beneficiary of my fund. Please assure me that you will actaccordingly as I stated herein. Hoping to hearing from you soon. Waiting for your reply here or at (williams1958@o2.pl). Yours in Christ, Mrs Williams Uche
File under spam hall of shame/ Thu May 4 12:24:25 CT 2006
Profiling Perl
An older article, but which I've used before, and just re-found tonight. Help optimize your Perl code by finding where the bottlenecks are.File under projects/ Thu Apr 27 20:09:16 CT 2006
Catalyst
Catalyst is a MVC framework for Perl web application development. It's similar in concept to Ruby on Rails (for Ruby) and Apache Struts (for Java). It's been on my TODO list for nearly a year. I've started using it this week and am very impressed.Here's a good introductory article on what Catalyst is and an example application (using Ajax! so sexy!).
Other useful Catalyst links:
- homepage
- Advent calendar (those wacky herlpackers!)
- documentation
- flowchart
- example projects
- mailing list
- mail list archive
- londom pm tutorial
File under projects/ Thu Apr 27 20:00:14 CT 2006
Google Code
Fridays I try and surf a little to see what I've been missing the rest of the week. Seems I've been missing Google's project page for more than a week...File under general/ Fri Apr 14 09:37:24 CT 2006
Eugene McCarthy
Today is Eugene McCarthy's 90th birthday. It's also my 34th birthday. MPR broadcast a retrospective on McCarthy's life today on my midday commute to my accountant's office. Death, taxes, birthdays, politics, and two men named Eugene (that's what the E in pek stands for). I found the stories about the Vietnam vets' interactions with McCarthy to be especially moving.File under general/ Wed Mar 29 13:08:06 CT 2006
Berners-Lee
Interesting interview with Tim Berners-Lee (eh-hem, Sir Berners-Lee) marking the 15th anniversary of the invention of the www.File under general/ Sun Mar 26 21:22:26 CT 2006
Things I want to do
Ever feel like you've got a mental to-do list that's stretching your memory capacity? Here's my list of things I want to do: [originally posted 7/15/05, updated 3/25/06]- improve my Java
- learn Python
- learn PHP
- understand encryption theory a little better
- re-do the Whole Farm Coop website to use MySQL and mod_perl
- re-write Swish-e to support UTF8 In progress
- rationalize why I need Swish-e to support UTF8 other than because it's cool
- re-read What's the Matter with Kansas
- learn Hebrew
- read more Girard
- exercise more
- write a short story
- brew more beer
File under general/ Sat Mar 25 10:35:02 CT 2006
Soc101
My friend Jon has a blog. He's a smart guy. If you read it, you'll get smarter too.File under general/ Thu Mar 23 08:25:42 CT 2006
Overheard via NPR
Cheney was in Ohio stumping for the GOP this week. The NPR interviewer asked one lady who was there about her experience:
I don't even know what he said. I was just so happy to have him here. It made
me feel like a real American.
Good to know that folks like this vote with their [faux] patriotic juju emotions, rather than actually paying attention to what is said. Not that what Cheney says has any connection to reality anyway.
File under general/ Wed Mar 22 21:04:15 CT 2006
Baby Fat
Not that I have any. I just liked the juxtaposition of Poland, Sweden and weight loss scams:
Heya
Just a quick question for ya? U still contemplating on getting rid of those extra spare tire. I am for sure. the invaders out of Poland and in 1665; the Sweden’s signed a peace agreement with Pola.
I used [url removed]. I know that sometimes we all go through these times, but this place is the real deal. nd. A Turkish invasion threatened Europe and Poland entered into an alliance with the
wrecked my life. I agree with you that had my mother chose to let me live under her love and c. off the coast. Churchill didn’t hesitate to solve this problem, and he then delivered his famous order, “We must.
You can thank me later, jehi
Just a quick question for ya? U still contemplating on getting rid of those extra spare tire. I am for sure. the invaders out of Poland and in 1665; the Sweden’s signed a peace agreement with Pola.
I used [url removed]. I know that sometimes we all go through these times, but this place is the real deal. nd. A Turkish invasion threatened Europe and Poland entered into an alliance with the
wrecked my life. I agree with you that had my mother chose to let me live under her love and c. off the coast. Churchill didn’t hesitate to solve this problem, and he then delivered his famous order, “We must.
You can thank me later, jehi
File under spam hall of shame/ Wed Mar 22 20:55:50 CT 2006
Blizzard
This time yesterday it was 50 degrees F and there was no snow.
This is what my backyard looks like as of 5 minutes ago.
File under general/ Mon Mar 13 09:31:51 CT 2006
Librarian book list
The MLA put out a list of must-read books. I was pleased to see the Pullman books on the list as I really enjoyed those. I've only read about half of the list...File under general/ Mon Mar 6 08:17:38 CT 2006
Lyceum
Another entry into the blog software space. Lyceum from the good folks over at ibiblio.org. Via my friend Bob. Thanks, Bob.File under general/ Thu Mar 2 20:08:54 CT 2006
Community Blog Software
I have a few web sites I design that are in need of a good community blog software framework. Here's some research on the topic for my own memory-weak use:Scoop powers DailyKos, and I like the look/feel of that site.
SlashCode powers a lot of newsy sites. A little too linear for what I'm after. I want more of a user account/diary kind of site. Where people can set up their own home pages and blogs.
PodCMS is a POD-based blog built with Catalyst. As I'm a recent convert to the Ways of Catalyst, I might switch this site to PodCMS. I'm going to test it out tonight.
WordPress is a heavyweight. Need to consider if it's just the right fit or not.
GeekLog is certainly pretty and seems actively developed.
In the end, I am leaning toward Scoop. It's Perl, which is obviously good for me since that's my go-to language. And it's explicitly community discussion oriented. That's a good fit for what I have in mind for oealums.org in particular.
File under general/ Tue Feb 28 21:51:00 CT 2006
Car for sale
Selling my 1999 Saturn. Great car. Good condition. Ad here.Update 2/28/06: Car is sold.
File under general/ Tue Feb 28 15:04:47 CT 2006
The State of Search
Always searching for the latest in search engine development.Some interesting work lately on CPAN.
I had not seen KinoSearch before; a very interesting "loose port" of Lucene written in C and Perl. I need to try it out.
Search::QueryParser also looks promising. I was just thinking that such a thing would be helpful for SWISH::HiLiter and/or HTML::HiLiter ... or maybe even Swish-e itself.
Search::ContextGraph is older, one of Maciej Ceglowski's projects from back before he became a fulltime painter and world traveller.
Search::Estraier is Dobrica Pavlinusic's pure Perl implementation of the Hyper Estraier Perl API. I know Dobrica's a big fan of Hyper Estraier, even over Swish-e and Xapian.
Search::FreeText appears to be abandoned, or at least not actively maintained. Last updated in 2003. Too bad; the documentation makes it look interesting anyway. Although it does use DB_File, which I know from experience with Perlfect, does not scale well above 20K+ documents.
Search::Xapian has recently been updated. There's lots of activity on the Xapian project. It's at or near the top of candidates for the Swish3 backends.
Search::InvertedIndex is one I had not seen before, but it looks very interesting. I have been thinking about a SwishQL - a SQL backend for Swish3, and Search::InvertedIndex offers a mysql backend. Benjamin Franz wrote it; he also wrote CGI::Minimal, which I used for a while with CrayDoc (contributed a patch too, iirc). I'll have to come back to this one.
Search::Indexer. Another one I'd not heard of, but which bears investigation. Author Laurent Dami is a familiar name to me, as he also wrote Search::QueryParser (above) and a handy FormBuilder TT patch I've been using.
File under projects/ Mon Feb 27 21:26:06 CT 2006
Switching IMAP server from UW to Dovecot
Having some trouble with poor performance with UW IMAP server finally pushed me over the edge today, so I migrated to Dovecot. A good move. Took me a while to figure out that I needed to turn OFF the namespace setting in my mail client (Mozilla, Thunderbird) in "Server Settings -> Advanced". I also had to make the default mail dir ~/.maildir/.This great Perl script eased the conversion of old mbox format to new maildir format.
File under general/ Wed Feb 15 14:02:37 CT 2006
Yahoo releases libraries as open source
A big day yesterday for web developers. Yahoo released its design and UI libraries to the open source world.File under general/ Wed Feb 15 07:57:23 CT 2006
Google Net
Can't really blame them. Net access is the most expensive thing about technology these days and it really shouldn't be.File under general/ Wed Feb 8 10:50:43 CT 2006
Fedora Core 4 Upgrade, Day Two
First thing this morning the load average on louvin was up over 6. Bad news. As I watched it steadily dropped back down to 0.05ish. Which is normal. The only thing I could see running was about a dozen index.cgi processes under httpd, so perhaps someone was banging pretty hard on the web server at that particular moment. I seriously need to consider moving my site over to a mod_perl or PHP based site, to help performance.Continue reading "Fedora Core 4 Upgrade, Day Two" ...
File under general/ Sun Feb 5 12:53:54 CT 2006
Upgrade to Fedora Core 4
Or, how I spent one weekend in February when it was 10 degrees F outside.Background
Since 2000 I have been running my own Linux server (hostname: louvin) to host peknet.com (and over time, several other domains). It's been a terrific way to learn about Linux, hosting and system administration. I know what the big boys feel like when it comes to system failures, backup requirements, power and network outages, crashed drives and corrupted filesystems. Even though it's on a small scale (1 server on a home LAN of 3-4 machines), I've run the same gauntlet that any other web hosting company has. The only difference being, I've never charged anyone for hosting.Continue reading "Upgrade to Fedora Core 4" ...
File under general/ Sun Feb 5 12:52:19 CT 2006
Warmest January on record
The critters across the street like the warm weather too. Living here in the park as I do, I can attest that the animals are out and about a lot more in this tepid winter.File under general/ Fri Feb 3 14:23:29 CT 2006
Famous
I'm famous. City Pages mentioned me. I'm basking in my 15 minutes.File under general/ Fri Feb 3 07:48:10 CT 2006
re: bean
I know that these random email spams are just fishing to get past the bayesian spam filter algorithms, but such poetry:
pistol he was in the habit of complaining of pains in his head - he had childhood, that shut up like a bite. Compressing her lips, in
cello characters; the most despotic characters I have ever known; who Can you defend your conduct if you do, sir? said Mr. Spenlow,
File under spam hall of shame/ Thu Feb 2 12:02:11 CT 2006
China + Google = Censorship
Google's decision to enter the Chinese marketplace does not come without a moral cost. Even the US Congress is worried about what the human rights issues involved.It's a pretty slippery slope. Haven't we been down it before?
File under general/ Sun Jan 29 20:25:52 CT 2006
KDE on OS X
I had been wanting to get a better terminal for OS X since ... well, since starting with OS X several years ago. I prefer the Linux terminals: gnome-terminal or konsole. Much more elegant.I had also tried, without much diligence, to install GNOME and/or KDE on my Mac using Fink and DarwinPorts. Neither with success.
Finally had some success today, as I decided not to take errors for an ultimate answer. Spent a lot of [fruitless] time on Google with lots of conflicting advice from newsgroups, faqs, etc.
Here's what worked for me, for posterity:
Running OS 10.3.9 with Apple's X11 server.
Had to uninstall the X11 placeholders in Fink using:
Then a simple:
Had to uninstall the X11 placeholders in Fink using:
% sudo dpkg -r --force-all system-xfree86 \ system-xfree86-42 system-xfree86-43 % sudo fink selfupdate % sudo fink indexThen re-install Apple's X11 and X11 SDK. The latter is on the XCode CD; the former on CD 3 of the OS X installer set.
Then a simple:
% sudo fink install bundle-kdejust worked.
And voila!
Update:
Alas, I can't seem to copy/paste between Konsole and my native OS X apps. Something about the paste buffer that Konsole uses. Specifically, I can copy from Konsole, but not paste into it.
Bummer.
File under general/ Fri Jan 27 17:07:55 CT 2006
OSS and Nonprofits
Red Hat Magazine has an article this month about open source software and nonprofit organizations.I'd been doing similar things for years, as have other OSS types I know. Nice to see it getting more high-level exposure.
File under general/ Thu Jan 26 09:24:39 CT 2006
Maven
My nomination for the most overused word on the web today.File under general/ Wed Jan 25 14:52:02 CT 2006
Google Books
Google's book indexing project has been in the news a lot in the last year. Here's a Congressional Research report on the subject. Only 6 pages!File under general/ Fri Jan 13 10:34:49 CT 2006
Ambient Findability
There has been a significant media blitz lately for Peter Morville's latest book, Ambient Findability. There's an interview here. Slashdot did a review. I think I saw one more lately but can't find it now.I haven't read it yet. But it's definitely on my list.
File under books/ Fri Jan 13 10:29:04 CT 2006
Potholes
It's the time of winter when the roads become absolutely chocked and ruined, like they've been gone over with a giant cheese grater. Don't know why, but it's as if the roads are in need of a haircut or a shave.File under general/ Tue Jan 10 22:13:41 CT 2006
Rowling
A nice interview with J.K. Rowling. This gem:
Like Graham Greene, my faith is sometimes about if my faith will return. It's important to me.
caught me a little off guard and made me smile.
File under general/ Tue Jan 10 22:12:01 CT 2006
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