I noticed that someone had a look for gimpy on my blog today and I was wondering what terms people are finding my site with so I ran the following over my logs
perl -ne ‘/.*google.*?&q=(.*?)(&|”).*$/; print “$1\n” if $1;’ *.log | uniq
I am sure there is a shorter and better way to do it but this was more than enough to have a quick look.
Movable Type SpamAssassin Plugin
I have just finished the beta release of MT-SpamAssassin and so far so good. I have removed MT-Blacklist and everything is fine. I have not built the Bayesian database up completely yet since I don’t have that many comments. If you want to try it you can download it here.
MT-SpamAssassin Download
Please leave me some decent comments so I can seed the database 😉
Tools for manipulating Images
Occasionally at work that we need to do some simple task that involves converting images or finding their sizes etc. The problems with tasks that are “Occasional” is that you can never remember the way you did it the last time.
What size if that jpeg, gif or png?
How can I resize that image?
You can’t be bothered firing up gimp or some other tool so what can you do……
@debian:$ identify truman.gif truman1.gif GIF 258x333 258x333+0+0 PseudoClass 32c 24kb 0.000u 0:01
That was easy, wasn’t it. What if we needed much more info than this, well thats much harder we need to do the following:
@debian:$ identify -verbose truman.gif
The hard part is the extra typing. I will leave it to the reader to try that one (there is too much output for here).
What about those times when you just wish one of your images was half the size. Well here comes another great tool to the rescue
@debian:$ convert -sample 50%x50% truman.jpg truman_half.jpg
For those that are after a little bit more info on these handly little tools head on over to IBM developer works to get more information.
Even the article above only scratches the surface of what convert can do.
Spamassassin Plugin for Moveable Type
I asked on the Moveable Type support Forum if anyone would be interested in a plugin that uses SpamAssassin. There were no replies to the post so it looks like it is either longer such an issue in the blogging world or maybe its already been done and I have not found the link. Perhaps I posted it to the wrong forum 😉 I would have thought that there would have been some interest in it but I was mistaken.
I wrote the plugin on Saturday and it is almost finished except for the pretty GUI. The Bayesian filtering is also working on it and I have tested it by scripting a few thousand spam entries into it and seeing if it would start spotting them and it did.
Thanks to the pluggable nature of Movable Type the plugin sits quite unobtrusively in it. I was after a much simpler solution than Blacklist without the separate GUI and management facilities etc and I think I could achieve this.
I intend to keep working at it and eventually use it on this blog so if you would like to try it contact me.
Yahoo and Nutch
Its very true that you learn something new every day and today I learned that Yahoo are using Nutch in a research capacity.
Welcome to the Yahoo! Research Labs implementation of the Nutch open source search engine (www.nutch.org). This search engine is intended as a demonstration platform for a number of search related technologies
I found it purely by chance. If you don’t believe then have a look at Yahoo’s intall of Nutch. I think that its a smart move on their part because they get to see how it does its stuff and assess it. They may even be able to incorporate some of it into their own products.
Marketing a simple website
I have spent a fair bit of time working on another website that had some of the most horrible HTML I have ever seen. I managed to actually upload the site last night and it is now live. I didn’t design the site I just converted it to HTML Transitional that validates from some Dreamweaver mess.
I have already made a few entries about this in my blog so here’s the link.
Aerospace NDT
The people at Aerospace NDT realised they where not getting enough from their website so they contacted me to see if I could do something with it. I had a look at their site and wrote up what I thought of it and gave them some advice as to what I though could be done with it to improve its visibility etc. They seemed to like what I said because I got the job.
I am basically tasked with getting their site up the google ranks which I have already done and quite substantially. I was very lucky and they were unlucky in the fact that the single greatest change required to the site so far has been the removal of the splash screen. They were unlucky in this because their last developer had left them with a site that could not be seen by the search engine because there was not a single link off the splash screen. This also meant that in certain browsers without flash they could not actually see the websites.
I have made some fundamental changes to their site during the conversion from the old one so we should see an overall increase in the google ranks but time will tell. I am keeping a tally for certain search terms to make sure that what we do has a positive affect on the site so watch this space.
Open source tools for MARC LIbrary records
I am no librarian but today I got to put on my glasses and tell everyone to be quiet because I was investigating open source library systems. The first one I had to look at is
Koha
Koha is the world’s first free Open Source Library System. Made in New Zealand by the Horowhenua Library Trust and Katipo Communications Ltd, the Koha system is a full catalogue, opac, circulation, member management and acquisitions package. To our knowledge Koha is used by public libraries, private collectors, university faculties, not for profit organizations, churches, schools and corporates. People from as far afield as Australia, USA, Canada, Estonia, India, Nigeria and Poland have installed Koha.
Key features
This is apparently used by a lot of people and does MARC records searches etc etc.
The install was very swish (my idea of swish is not some flash GUI, a simple command line install is fine for me) which gave me the warm and fuzzies. It also came with some sample data which was nice. Different ports are used for different things which was a bit confusing because I initially went to the admin screen and was wondering where all the library data was meant to go when I discovered I needed to go to a different port number to actually use the library system.
I can’t say I was too impressed with the interface. First off, its not very intuitive. This might be because I am not a librarian and don’t really understand what all these funny numbers are for but I still couldn’t get used to the look and feel of it. I suppose this could be customized with a little css.
The other thing I tried was to load a Z39.50 MARC record into the database from one of the online servers. This failed miserably and gave some very cryptic pop up boxes telling me I had not filled in some mandatory fields. It took me 40 minutes to realize that there are some mandatory fields that are not marked as mandatory on another screen. On filling in this it still refused to work. On hunting around the logs I noticed that when you carried out a Z39.50 search the log would be hit every second or two until you closed the search window. I can only assume this is a bug because I cannot think why you would want to do it otherwise.
One thing in its favor is that its written in Perl so if we do decide to run with it I should be able to patch or add things to it that don’t work or that don’t suit our install. Tomorrow I am going to be looking at phpmylibrary which from what I have read of it is quite nice.
Continue reading “Open source tools for MARC LIbrary records”
Nutch and Lucene
We have been wanting a search engine at work for some time now so I started looking at Lucene. I downloaded it and got it running and doing some basic stuff but what we really wanted was something web based, ie an out of the box solution.
I suggested we try Nutch, so I spent today getting it running. Nutch itself is a piece of cake to get working, what wasn’t so easy was getting Tomcat4 working with Nutch.
After much swearing and perspiration I finally manged to get it working and it is as sweet as a nut. We indexed just over 200 word documents in a few minutes (test machine is an old celeron) and gave it a whirl. Straight out of the box solution to your search engine problems. I was very impressed. I may have more to report on this next week because we might be putting it on one of the larger servers for a trial run.
ICANN & IWILL
What planet are ICANN transmitting from!
They have decided to change the policy on transfering domains ie if you are unable to respond to the transfer request and deny it withing 5 days the transfer goes ahead. What does this mean and why is it bad.
I am the sole contact for all of my domains which means if I was on holiday and someone initiates a transfer request and I don’t respond which I won’t because I am on Holiday I get back home and my domain has been given to somone else. The same thing would happen if I was in hospital. For those non techs out there the following is a good analogy.
You decide you would like to rent in London so you have a look around and get yourself a nice property and sign a contract for 2 years with a first option to extend if you want. You pay your deposit and move in. Its great people learn where you live they know where to find you and your little falt becomes prime location. Having the option to always rent this flat is also great because you want to stay.
Then one day you go on holiday and someone who wanted the flat decides to move in, under current rules they cannot. Under new rules if they knock the door and there is no reply for fives days they are able to break the lock and move in.
So when you get back someone has moved into the flat you spent so much time on and there is not a thing you could do because you didn’t answer the door.
This is absolute nonsense and I can only assume ICANN are doing it because there is some way to make some money from all the court cases which are going to appear when the fraudsters start trying to snatch domains that they shouldn’t have.
Luckily for me I use 123-reg.co.uk which posted me the following today:
Dear Customer,
On 12th November ICANN will introduce a new policy designed to make
transfers of non-UK domain names between Registrars quicker and easier.
From this date, if there is no acknowledgement from the domain
owner/admin contact within 5 days of a transfer request being made, the
transfer will automatically take place.
While a great step forward in ensuring domains can be freely
transferred by their owners, 123-Reg is concerned that this new system
could make it easier for your domain to be fraudulently transferred
away from 123-Reg. We would like to reassure you that we are taking
steps to guard against this happening to you. From the 12th, therefore,
all your non-UK domains registered with us will be automatically locked
so that only you can unlock them and initiate a transfer.
The new system will not affect your ability to manage your domain in
the usual way, and will simply mean that should you wish to change name
servers or transfer a domain away from 123-reg you will first need to
unlock it. This can be done quite simply from your 123-reg Control
Panel.
As we will be unable to accept liability if you unlock your domain and
an unauthorised transfer results, we strongly advise that you make sure
domains are kept locked at all times except when absolutely necessary
to change name servers or initiate a transfer.
Best Wishes,
The 123-Reg Team
Thankyou 123-reg for protecting me from the idiocy of ICANN which should now be named ICANN&IWILL.
A Concise History of Mathematics
I have just finsihed reading.
From: A Concise History of Mathematics
ISBN: 0486602559
Author: Dirk J. Struik
Edition: 4th
If one thing I can say without doubt this book is concise. It flys along at blistering pace and in just over 200 pages covers several thousand years of mathemtical history. If you are looking for a brief overvirew of the topic then this is the book.
It is also a great book to try and guage your interest in the topic. Its well written, well researched and enguaging so if you are unable rummage your way through it then I doubt one of the larger or more in depth coverages would suit you. This is of course coming from someone who has not yet read one of these but I am now looking at some of the older classics that I might try next.
One thing I have to mention is the citations. You could use this book to research topics in maths based on the amount of cited literature at the end of each chapter alone.
Personally I think the amount of work that has gone into this book is vast and in stark relation to its size. I would recommend it to any maths enthusiast or historian.