Older blog entries for Trakker (starting at number 30)

Had to bring in my own soundcard just so that I could stream DI properly. We seriously need some upgrades here.

Read up on the new algorithm for searching compressed text files quickly. It uses a basic 2 byte pair -> 1 byte compression scheme. Makes it easy to encode the search string and search the compressed format directly. It uses a unique method of calculating non-overlapping pairs so that a word cannot have more than one encoding. The file size seems to be compressed 30% on average, but this is on essay and dictionary type documents. A filesystem tree will have many more duplicate pairs so the compression should be quite good. The fronal encoding algorithm currently used compresses about 85%. Have only read the paper, just need to implement and test it.

Mom and cousin are coming down for the weekend todo some Christmas shopping in the 'Big City' . Should be fun, havn't seem them in a while.

liw: lodju is just what I needed! And I hadn't even started to look for something similar yet.

LOTR: Started book 5, being the third part. Shelob, Samwise the tall elf warrior and such. Only 7 days left!

Rare minor database corruption bug. Not too bad, it just inserts characters onto paths which shouldn't be there. Been almost 4 years since I wrote it, maybe the encoding part needs an overhaul. I found "A Text Compression Scheme That Allows Fast Searching Directly in the Compressed File" by Udi Manber. Maybe I should give it a test. See how it compares to the incremental encoding (frontal compression) algorithm currently used. This would allow me to move on to v3.0 Anyone know of any other algorithms that might be usable?

One of those phases. I think its over now though. This is mainly in regards to keep my Debian packages up to date and getting around to releasing v2.7 of Secure Locate.

I've fixed and uploaded libapache-mod-pythong and python-pgsql, and I'm just about done opennap 0.44. WIll get to that today or tonight.

Secure Locate is almost done, just have some debugging and patches to apply. Should be able to get that out by the end of the week.

Freenet

A friend decided he wants to build a lan with dry copper pair and sdls modems. Each node needs to be about 6km apart max to work. We think we have enough people spread out here in Vancouver to give it a try. If we ever get around to actually doing it. Cool idea though.

Here is a link for more info on how it works: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20010823.html.

Diagrams continued...

The diagram I reported on Dec 7 below that looked like a flying seal, well I got a snap shot of it. Some say it looks more like a bunny rabbit. Maybe they are right.

Yet another fairly successful camping trip out in the great outdoors. I say fairly as my -15C sleeping bag didn't perform as well as I had expected. But maybe it was just my ground sheet. Need an upgrade maybe.

On the successful side we built a very cool igloo. It had 2 rooms and could sleep 5. So 4 of us piled in to experience how the eskimo way of life. It took 5 of us 3 hours to build. The surrounding snow was just of a foot deep and was just about perfect in stickiness. We cut out blocks and slowly built it up.

Picture: Igloo outside
Picture: Igloo inside

Camping in it of course! After work today I will leave for a the second winter camping trip this year. 6 of use are scheduled to depart, assuming no one else bails. We originally had 8 people. We have choosen Manning Provincial Park which is located in south western british columbia.

Last week went tried to camp just north of Vancouver near Whistler. Being the adventerous types, we plainly ignored the "heavy snow fall warning" that was issued the night before. Needless to say it was an interesting trip. The road was closed multiple times, with a 25 car pile-up to start off the day.

We left early enough to get to our destination, but spent most of the day waiting in lines. Just an hour or so before dark, we decided to turn around and go back to a spot which we saw on the way up. There just wasn't any way to tell how long it would take to get to our original destination.

We ended up staying overnight just inside Black Tusk/Garibaldi Provincial park. It was fun, but we will be better prepared this week. This time we will remember to bring the beer.

A co-worker drew some technical diagrams on his whiteboard. But from a distance they meshed into what looked like a flying seal. I wonder what this is trying to tell me? Tried taking a picture but the batteries died on the cam.

Got an email from the higher ups today, seems that I may be doing some kernel hacking in the near future. Should be interesting as I havn't had a chance to physically swim in this pond yet. Fortunately I've been reading quite a few docs on kernel hacking and taking a peek or two at the source. But we will see how far we get.

I'm back! Finally remembered my password after about a year and a half. I think I still remember it, I was just typing variations of what I though it might be.

Well a year and a half is a long time. Briefly, Stormix has fallen off the map, I wrote a online dating service in python (http://www.venusmeetsmars.com) and I am now working for ServGate.

I'm just excited I found the password to this account, and hope to make more additions to my diary from now on.

aaahhhh... brain cells swapping... need more ram!!!

Doviende showed me to a place called the Sugar Refinery on saturday. Good stuff. Had the Colourifics (Yes a canadian band, I think. Assuming they put the 'u' in their name...) playing. Also had great beer! Mainly because it was made by the Storm Brewery!!!

Well it seems that the great Perl Journey with Larry Wall and friends left the vancouver harbour today. You could tell they were in town. We actually saw chalk markings on the sidewalks that said stuff such as "rm -rf python"... If your curious, they left on a cruise ship from this port. Unfortunately we saw them leave since the view you see here, is only a few floors up from our office. :-/ Lucky bastards!

Adding lots of miscellaneous methods for many widgets. Stuff like get info from this widget. Also started to add line wrapping for labels today. Its coming along alright, just a little bit more todo. CTK is almost working with SAT now, I hope to have it working by the end of Friday.

Not much else happening except work at the moment. I hope really soon I can post more here than just CTK news. (c:

Well, back from Japan, it was alot of fun. I really want to go back there again. I picked up quite a few Japanese phrases and vocab. I had just started to learn Japanese, but I have learned more in the 4 days that I was there, than in the last couple of weeks before, in which I have been studing this "learning japanese" course I had bought at the local book store.

Its good to back though, there is alot of work to be done back at the office.

I slept in today, got up around 3pm. Not too unsual, except that I went to bed around 11:30pm. Got 15.5 hours of sleep. My body is still on Japan time. So gonna stay up tonight all night and go to bed early tomorrow to try and fix it.

Adding a bunch of stuff to CTK, mostly methods, but also fixed a couple of bugs. So far I have added, borders to container widgets, made scrollbars disappear when they are not needed, fixed a couple clist bugs, added widget->sensitive, and added the methods ctk_editable_get_chars, ctk_entry_get_text, ctk_entry_set_max_length, ctk_clist_prepend, ctk_clist_insert, ctk_clist_select_row, ctk_clist_unselect_row, ctk_clist_remove, ctk_scale_set_digits, ctk_scale_set_draw_value... so far. :)

Day 2 of the show is here... Quite a few Debian-jp guys are hanging out at the booth talking to our Japanese team. They really liked CTK! :) Seems a little more busy today, and it seems they found the air conditioning switch. Yesterday was extremely hot. Feels much better today.

Last night we went to the main land, into downtown Tokyo. We walked around Shinbashi. Makes Times Square feel small. Tokyo is HUGE! Definetly felt the Blade Runner feel there. They had main streets but most of the stuff was happening in the ally's. Lots of people!

Tonight is our last night so we should be having a good time. For now, back to manning the booth. :)