Older blog entries for jclement (starting at number 7)

Just found a very interesting project called cx_Freeze. It's basically like py2exe and installer in that it bundles a python program into a standalone executable with the related shared libraries so that it can run on a machine without Python. This one, however, seems to work for a wide variety of target platforms including Windows, Linux and commercial Unix systems. I've tried it out and it works quite well. I wonder if I can "cross compile" with it?

Cool! In my quest for more digits of Pi I found a Univeristy in Japan offering 4.2 billion digits to download for the general public. They are on their way down to my server. Once there I plan to revive my Pi search engine and allow it to search 4.2 billion digits! I think I'll have to implement some sort of Pi searching queue so that only one search is processed at a time since this will probably be a bit tough on my servers.

Update: So I've been working on my Pi search engine, trying to scale it up to 4.2B digits and have run into a snag. My previous search engine just mmap'd the whole mess and then used that to seek back and forth in. This does not, however, work with this much data since x86's can only mmap 2^32 bytes of memory and big chunks of that are, as I understand, already used up by the kernel and whatnot. So it looks like I'll have to change the algoritm to either not use mmap or to use several smaller files and hop between them. Ugh.

Kyle had an interesting idea. Since usually we are searching for phone numbers I could index all the phone numbers in the first 4.2B digits of Pi into some sort of database. I'm thinking my K62/550 probably isn't up to the challenge :)

Another update: Marco Aur?lio Graciotto Silva mailed me with this link to a distributed PI calculation project. Unfortunately the challenge is over :(

I switched back to DBJDNS from MaraDNS. The first reason is I know Dan Bernstein writes good solid and very secure code. The other reason is it is just easier to use. DJBDNS's config files do not resemble zone files (which MaraDNS's do) and that makes me very happy. Hopefully I managed to do this switch properly and DNS service wasn't / won't be interrupted.

Rebuilt website and webserver over the weekend. Site is more machine and bandwidth friendly. Limited dynamic content. Server is now K62/550 with 512M ram and running Debian 3.0.

Investigated secondary nameserver service secondary.org. It's really simple to use and works quite well. Not sure what the update interval is. Still waiting for it to pull over the last batch of changes from ns1.bluesine.com.

Also added a backup MX server for bluesine.com which is the domain handling most of my mail and quite a few others mail. This was really simple to do using Qmail. Basically Kyle added bluesine.com to his rcpthosts and I add his machine as the backup in my DNS records.