Bugger damn and blast. I was such an obvious mistake. Tie::RDBM::Cached is failing tests due to dependency problems. As soon as I have a working PC I will fix that and wait for the next one 😉
My PC Gave up the Ghost
I am not a happy bunny. Although my PC (which was damageed by faulty products from www.scan.co.uk ) was on the cards I was hoping it would hold out a little longer or at least until I could get some cash saved up for the hardware that I want.
I would really have liked a dual opteron system but the price is way out of my league at the moment. If you are wondering why I want a faster system its because of my search engine hobby.
The database is several gigabytes in size and growing very rapidly. This means that backups are starting to take a long time to complete due to the lack of grunt in my current XP1700. It takes about 1 hour to gzip the database up, don’t ask me about bzip2, I gave up waiting. I also need more grunt when actually trying to create the vector space and get some results back, its fast enough now but this is only for a few thousand documents. I am aiming for the magic one million. Parsing the files is also exceedingly slow (I know I should just do it in C) and more grunt would also help with this.
I am probably going to go for a single AMD64 and hope that it will last for several months before I need more power at which point I may be able to afford a dual system. I am also going to try and do more of the grunt work in C for obvious reasons.
Google Adsense
I have decided to add some google adsense adds to my Uklug website. I have several reasons for doing this not least of which is trying to make a little money to pay for the hosting of the site etc.
Google adsense has a filtering facilty where I could if I wanted block adds that are in direct competition to me or adds I do not agree with. In keeping with Googles ethic with their search results ie they do not filter their search results of their competitors. I will not block any competitors based on competition grounds so you should see plenty of adds for other jobsites on my Google adds.
Happy Hunting!
Uklug Forum
Wondering what it would take to get people to start posting to the Forum. I would be tempted to offer certain priviledges to frequent posters but we are lacking one very important thing, A Poster of any description 😉
Potemkin Steps
I have managed to get the original message as received at the foot of the Potemkin steps scanned and onto the PC. You can see the original here or you can browse the image directory
Tie::RDBM::Cached
I wrote a Perl module several months ago. It’s entirely based on one of Lincoln D. Stein’s modules though I doubt my code is as neat as his would have been. I have to admit I am glad he did all the heavy lifting otherwise it might never have been released ( not sure if this is a good or a bad thing ).
Anyway, I completely forgot I had wrote the damned thing until Jenny mentioned it the other night. This was partly due to me moving PC’s and having several other things that have occupied me for a while (several months). Anyway, after a whole ten seconds wondering if I had actually checked it before release I decided to upload it otherwise I would have left it another several months. There are errors in it, of that I am sure but its out there and if one person finds it useful I’ll be happy.
Building an Online Community
I have installed phpBB2 on UKlug in the vain attempt at starting an Online Community. I am pretty sure it will be as successful as UKlug 😉 but I wanted to install phpBB2 to see what it was like and I did need a message board for UKlug no matter how unused.
I suppose if I could get more RSS feeds and provide a cleaner interface to the search facility I would get a lot more hits but how do you go about advertising that the tool exists? I have tried mentioning it in a few pertinent places but so far traffic is slow
From Russia with Love
I had the pleasure of visiting the black sea when I was in the navy and one incident from that visit really stuck in my mind. We where visiting Odessa which, bar this incident was a beautiful place to be. To cut a long story short we were going out into town and to get there we had to climb the Potemkin Steps which where made famous by a Sergei Mikhailovich Eisensteinenstein’s movie
The Battleship Potemkin.
Or another review for the movie buff’s
It was at the foot of these steps where we where greeted by a young lady handing out flyers. Innocently I took one and the following was the message. I still have the original. The steps have actually been designed so that the top is narrower than the bottom to make them look even more impressive.
Everything including spelling and Grammar are as per the original.
Start
To the Sailors of the NATO Navy
Gentlemen! Continuing active visits of foreign war ships to the berths of Odessa and other Soviet ports show the dangerous tendency to direct occupation of Black Sea Northern coat and of country as whole, which is masked under the name of “partnership for peace”.
We know about existing of American plan “Drop shot” foreseeing the landing of a half-million army army to the Odessa region with the following attack against Kiev and Moscow. It isn’t a secret that exist Western plans to reduction the population of Ukraine from 52 to 15 million with the help of destroying medicine, organisation of famine and spreading of AIDS. Tensity have artificially created around Ukraine and other Slav states.
It’s resembling that Yugoslavian events of the last years have considered by USA and NATO as a range for the further split of geopolitical area of USSR. One can see a directed playing of “Chechan card” and “Crimean card”. The degree of USA intervention into our social and political life mount to defiant scopes.
We, Soviet people, shall defend our Motherland by using all possible methods and shan’t allow to neither foreigners nor traitors to play the master here.
Please bring to the notice of your President, Government, leadership of Pentagon and NATO block that further increas-ing of the West presence on the Soviet territory will oblige us to consider any military man of NATO stepped on our land as a representativve of occupation army, with all consequences arising thereof.
Go Home!
Patriotic Forces
End
Needless to say this greeting was not what I was expecting and it did put a bit of a damper on the whole trip to Odessa. We where very pleased to find out that the residents of Odessa were a very nice bunch of people and we had several really good nights there.
RSS Job feeds
I added another
RSS Job feed to the database today. I NEED more rss job feeds for the database. I have aproximately 13 rss feeds from various jobsites now which are producing approximately 20,000 jobs every two weeks. I would really like to increase this and drop the cleanup time to just under a week rather than two weeks which is what I am using at the moment.
If you know of a rss job feed that I have not already added to the database then please email me with the feed URL and I will add it to the list and then you can search the feed along with all the rest.
Additional features for XML Resume
The XML Resume builder tool is coming on quite well. I have added the facility for users to edit the way the resume will look. This is a time consuming task and I am only about one third of the way through. It is effectively a very large form that has sensible defaults and the user can select which area they want to look different and make the necessary changes. I am hoping to finish the majority of the work this week so that I can start work on Parrot again.