Older blog entries for mstarch (starting at number 14)

Back from Sicily. The weather was hot, and the island is incredibly beautiful. We spent the first week in Taormina, and drove around the last 4 days, to Syracusa, Agrigento and Palermo. If you're mind-numbingly bored, you can check out some pictures here.

Now a week of work awaits me, before I'm going for away for another week - this time in my mothers summer house.

I'm looking forward to reading "Design patterns" which I've finally acquired. Otherwise, I've been reading a bit on the vacation about the thinkings of Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer.

I've also bought the expansion set to Diablo - Lord of Destruction. Just thought I'd write that, so I can look back in time at some later point, to see where it went wrong ;-)

3 days before I'm going to Sicily for 2 weeks :-) The search engine finally went online a few weeks ago, and has (thankfully) run without any problems since then. Now I've started working on some new functionality that is needed in another search engine related project.

I was on a very nice company picnic a week ago, where we visited the prime minister of Denmark, and saw his house, and was showed around by his wife, who is also an active politician, but in the european parliament. It was a bit weird sitting there, listening to a guy you otherwise only see on television, but it was pretty interesting, and definitely a funny experience.

I have become addicted to freecell! Yes, it's true - what you would normally think unthinkable has happened. I have now played almost 200 games in the last 3 weeks, and soon I will be forced to uninstall it, because it's just too silly.

Today is a day called "Sankt Hans" in Denmark, where it's customary to burn a fires on the beaches in celebration of the longest day in the year (which is actually a few days before). I bicycled to Charlottenlund, and saw a huge fire on the beach. Nothing special, just thought I might as well write it.

Today I also read a small introductory text about the authorship of Søren Kirkegaard. It was interesting, but at the same time, it would probably be more healthy to spend my time reading something a little less depressing.

A little about my trip to Silicy. I'm going to be away for 10 days, and I'm travelling with my father and my little sister. We're going to spend the first week in Taormina (have you seen "The Big Blue"?), and the last days driving around on the island. I think the history of Sicily is very exciting - it's very few places in the world that has been influenced by so many different cultures, and I really love the mediterranean and Italy in particular.

Joyous celebrations! The search engine is now almost done, and is now officially a beta-version. It's being tested right now, but most searches show pretty decent results.

Have been reading an excellent book; Exceptional C++ by Herb Sutter. Although it isn't groundbreaking, it has some very good points, and it's very well written. Usually I actually don't like reading technical litterature that much, but this book I read in 2 afternoons.

Time for a diary entry.

I haven't made any new entries these last days, because I didn't feel I had much to write. Unfortunately this is still the case, so it's going to be a short entry.

I'm still busy completing the work on the search engine. Various adjustments to the search ranking logic keeps postponing the initial release, and I *really* want to get it over with.

I'm still reading Foucaults Pendulum - haven't had much time to read, but its definitely an interesting book. I think I will read a general-purpose book about the thoughts of the various philosophers next.

I just bought the new Depeche Mode album, Exciter. I downloaded it through napster a month ago, and have already listened a lot to it. Good example of how mp3 privateering isn't necessarily a bad thing.

I worked a bit on my home page. I'm trying to think of interesting subjects to write about, because writing is relaxing, but when I need a subject to write on, my mind goes blank. Bummer.

Guess it's the same feeling as when sometimes you really feel like coding some cool new game or program, but when you need to decide on exactly what it's going to be, no good ideas show up. Bummer.

Work: Been quite busy completing the work on the search engine. The code is now complete, some tweaking of the parameters controlling the search results are still needed though.

Books: Finished reading a book about the knights Templar, have started reading Umberto Ecos, "Foucaults Pendulum".

Been enjoying some great danish weather :-)

Not much new. Passed by slashdot and wired, and read about the Craig Mundie speech. It always scares me to see how worked up people can get as soon as GPL or the like is discussed. If the average linux person could use a little less time discussing the finer points of GPL, LGPL, BSD etc. and a little more time building usable and user- friendly applications, linux might stand a better chance.

Have been reading Ernest Hemingways, Garden of Eden, and enjoying the good weather in Copenhagen, where the summer seems to have finally started :-)

Book reading. Been reading "In the name of Rose" by Umberto Eco, and "To kill a mocking bird" by Harper Lee. Next in line will be Umberto Ecos "Foucaults Pendulum", which I look forward to.

Work. Still attempting to get the search engine ready for prime time. Sigh.

Gary Larson. If you havent got one of those uninventive table calenders with gary larson drawings yet, get one. Gary Larson has been my favourite cartoon drawer for ages, and his sense of humour is _good_ :-)

Programming. Sigh, it seems I haven't made any _new_ code in ages. Just bugfixes and small feature-requests. Need a new project soon. Read Bjarne Stroustrups brainstorm suggestions for language improvements in the next round of C++ evolution. Go Bjarne, Go Bjarne! :-)

Music. The new Depeche Mode album, Exciter, is so ... so... Depeche Mode :-)

Big improvement in the search engine department :-) I added support in our search engine at work, for pre-expanding the index list words, so that word-expansions can be avoided at runtime. This makes it necessary to load only one index list pr. user query word, just like "normal" search engines. The drawback is that these types of indexes can't be used to make sentence-searches, since the weighted expanded document list doesn't contain word positions. Another drawback is that it makes it impossible to do dynamic updates of the word relations/weights. However, these disadvantages are still insignificant compared to the huge speed improvements achieved on large scale index files. I also added support for using a more compact compression scheme for these preexpanded index lists, which should prove more effective speed-wise, compared to the huffman-encoding approach.

It's my birthday soon. Why does it have to be so difficult to think of birthday wishes? Thankfully I've just discovered "Dead can Dance", so I've added some of their cd's to my wish list. I would also like one of the new IPaq's, but I'm afraid the price tag would scare most gift- givers away ;-) (they look pretty cool though)

It's wonderful how computers provide an easy avenue for fooling yourself to believe that you do something to help others in need. Today I installed the new distributed cancer-cure program, so now my computer can work during idle-time, giving me a better conscience for free :-)

Went to Oslo thursday for a meeting with some guys from Fast Search & Transfer. I guess I could have stayed home though, because the meeting wasn't of a technical nature as anticipated, but it was still interesting to see their office building and to get an impression of "who fast is".

I read about the Microsoft Passport-terms-of-use controversy this week. I must agree, that the terms of use were totally unacceptable. Nice to see that they were changed immediately.

Thought it was time for to write something here, but I don't know what to write. The last month, I've been busy at work as usual, but I've also managed to get myself stressed up by committing myself to do a university project that require me to use approx. 270 hours on it until the middle of june. I don't see how I can make the time, but I guess I'll just have to somehow.

I have been playing a new game called 'Europa Universalis' quite a lot recently (aha, that's where I must find the time!). It's a strategic game that simulates the age of discovery up until early modern time. It's a lot of fun, and is definately the most comphrehensive game of it's type, but it lacks a little in the "creating-a-mood" department.

I took a day off to learn some python. I look forward to using it when I stumple upon the right little project where it makes sense.

Went to Paris with Unisys, testing the search engine on the ES7000 platform. The guys at the test center were very professional, and we got a lot of stuff benchmarked. The tests showed what I sort of expected, that the engine still needs some performance enhancements. (it also showed a lot of other stuff I won't bore you with (as if anyone is reading this ;-)) The trip was very work-intensive. Unfortunately we worked 13 hours a day, so we never got to see much of Paris, and the only highlight (except for the pleasant people from Unisys I travelled with) was some good restaurants at night. I really would have liked visiting Louvre again however :-(

I havent been doing anything ClanLib-related for months now, but I'm happy to see the amount of commits to the cvs repository that are done - the project is gaining a lot of momentum, and a lot of people are putting time into improving the SDK. It's really awarding to see the work already done being continued by "fresh" people.

I have decided to dedicate this semester to reading some books, because I've really been missing having time to read some good classical litterature. Lately I've read some Virginia Woolf; Miss Dalloway and The Waves. I've also read Steinbecks "Winter of our discontent", and are going to read "The name of the rose" by Umberto Eco - the film was a real classic, and I'm really looking forward to reading the book. When I'm done reading that I'll read "The God of small things" by Arundhati Roy - an impulsive lend on the local library. Maybe a book review will be coming up shortly :-O

I'm looking forward to a new album by Kristin Hersh that supposedly should be in stores in about a week. The first 3 albums she's made, "Hips and Makers", "Strange angels" and "Sky Motel" were all great. I think I like them best in the order written (chronologically), so it will be kind of interesting to see if she continue the road towards "less" good music (IMHO), or if she will "return to the roots" - probably a naive thought, but interesting nonetheless. No matter what she makes I'm sure I'll enjoy it.

I still thoroughly enjoy Advogato as a diary forum. It's nice to feel that you're not alone in writing diary updates, since you can surf around and read other complete strangers stories about what's going on in their daily life - it really takes away much of the distance, and it's funny to get small insights into other peoples lifes.