It's good to see that Advogato is back up. Although I'd stopped checking to see if it was still up and I only found out because Google sent me a web-alert after re-indexing my diary here.

So what have I been up to since the last time? Well I switched employers, met mwh at this year's UK Python conference and I'm doing a lot less travelling.

In relation to things open source: I never did finish that OsCache guide. On the bright side I've made significant progress on Harvester: an RSS aggregator. Of course everybody and their dog has an aggregator nowadays but mine is different because it's based on storing everything (for offline reading, later searching, analysis, etc) in a MySql database and using scoring to order feeds.

Like everybody else I tried using an approach based on Bayes' Theorem but swiftly ran into a problem where to be able to rank all entries by their classification (how interesting are they based on your previously expressed preferences?) you need to classify every entry. What's more every time the user expresses an interest we need to re-classify every entry. Unfortunately I'm testing my aggregator with about 853 feeds containing 55,570 entries for the last 2 months. The need to re-classify because I'm showing the relationship between all these entries rather than a binary spam/ham distinction pretty much rules out anything similar to Classifier4J. Pity really as it's a nice little library.

In other news I've rejoined the church of emacs. Even if it's only for looking at logfiles.