Older blog entries for fxn (starting at number 31)

MyAdvogato modifies also recentlog.html .

As I explained some days ago, I thought this could be useful because once one has certified most of the regulars s/he doesn't need to go to personal pages so often and recentlog.html might be more suitable to read diary entries. Or, simpler, the user may prefer that page anyway.

The additional information regarding the user is displayed in a similar fashion. Screenshots here (Mozilla), and here (links), the last one with the new flag plain active.

Malx: Are you looking for Shaffing and Winnowing: Confidentiality without Encryption ?

I am trying to see why Advogato does not return the Person not found page if the account name of the URL has non-alphanumeric characters as seen by isalnum(3). User names in Advogato are not allowed to have those characters (according to acct_maint.c), but a The document contained no data-like message results instead if you ask for /person/foo%20bar/, for instance.

I think it has to do with the call to db_xml_get on line 728 without checking db_key for NULL, but I am not quite sure.

Anyway, MyAdvogato has a bug having to do with non-existing or non-valid user names. IMHO what is a valid user name in the site it's not its business, so I'll try to fix it taking into account the current responses in both cases.

Work. We are rewriting the wrapper for CPLEX to use XML::LibXML (a Perl interface to gnome-xml ) instead of XML::Simple . We didn't anticipate input files could be that large. Now the Perl model of 4MB of XML is built in less than 3s (versus the former 50s) and it seems we can stay with Perl, at least in the prototype.

If we find the time, we would like very much to give a chance to lp_solve (perhaps through the wrapper Math::LP::Solve) and compare timings.

Home. I've been using FreeBSD in my laptop at home for some months. I have learned a lot of things because before I played with FreeBSD the only Unixes I had used were some GNU/Linux distros. However, I miss dselect, so I'll probably install Debian again.

Work. At work we are doing some integer linear programming related to sourcing. We are doing trials with a library from iLOG that resolves them like a charm, but have performance issues with the very XML that states the problem to be solved. We have written a Perl wrapper

XML problem -> CPLEX -> XML solution.

The XML input file can have 4MB and we are using XML::Simple by now in this proof-of-concept, which gives 50s for the creation of the Perl model of the XML against 6s for CPLEX to compute the solution. A SAX approach would be complicated, so If we were to write a real-life wrapper C would be necessary in my opinion.

Playing. I played Tetris in my laptop under MenuetOS then. I will boot it from time to time to learn more about this OS.

Music. l'll go to the Jamiroquai concert tonight. Looks great.

Lots of things have occurred since last entry: Took an introductory course to Shiatsu (20h), reported typos and comments to the documentation of the MIX Development Kit and to the essay Homesteading the Noosphere, wrote some code for MyAdvogato (nothing interesting), started a gym routine (I need to lose some extra Kgs) and solved those pending things one leaves to work out in holidays (which finished an hour and a half ago, any relativist physicians willing to do a charitable action out there? :-).

I would like to have dedicated more time to maths, but I didn't. I'll try to find some hours regularly next weeks for them.

More stuff in the TODO: install filters for my printer under FreeBSD and study a routine to maintain ports and packages updated. Find an IBM PS/2 keyboard, I have enjoyed for about a year and a half a Happy Hacking Keyboard Lite at work and would like to program with that old IBM keyboard now, if I found one. Ah!, yes, sleep, oh, well.

I have certified most of the active advogaters and don't need to get to their personal pages at Advogato so often. It seems it would be better to read diary entries from recentlog.html in this case (and I suppose there are people that prefer recentlog.html anyway), so next version of MyAdvogato will be a wrapper for that page as well.

MyAdvogato. links didn't render well the output because of a bug in the script I've fixed tonight. New flags have been added: boxes, labels and plain. The purpose of plain is to build a page suitable for text-based web browsers. This an screenshot of the current ouput rendered by links.

I have finished and enjoyed again Learning Perl and must address a pending issue with myself: I have bought some heavy must-reads over the last two years, I love them all, but I need to choose one and concentrate on studying it instead of reading all of them in parallel, which it's turning to be too dispersed to grasp them. They are (as of this writing :-):

• Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, by W. Richard Stevens,
• Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp, by Peter Norvig,
• The Art of Computer Programming, by Donald E. Knuth,
• Object-Oriented Software Construction, by Bertrand Meyer, and
• Modern Computer Algebra, by Joachim von zur Gathen and Jürgen Gerhard.

Once I finish the documentation of MDK I'll choose one and try to get focused on serious study. Advogaters' suggestions would be welcome!

No programming these days.

Mainly reading the documentation of MDK and the 3rd edition of Learning Perl, on behalf of the left side, and finished Soul Mountain, on behalf of the right one, it has been a pleasure. Now comes a book jao recommended, Island by Aldous Huxley, and Yoka Daishi's Shodoka commented by master Taisen Deshimaru. Shodoka is one of the four essential texts of Zen.