500,000 Pages

The spiders have now collected over 500,000 pages. Considering I have been taking it easy it was surprisingly fast. I now need another 500,000 to get my goal of 1 Million for testing.

Recruited

I spoke to someone today who expressed an interest in the distributed search engine. I am hoping that he is able to start taking on some of the work which will speed the project up and give us a total bandwidth of 1.2Mb which although small it has doubled my current spidering capability. I may also have perked someone elses interest but I need to chase that lead up so its all good fun cultivating people who are a bit bananas.

More Google Adsense

I have actually managed to make a little bit of money via Google adsense. I am not at liberty to say how much but its nice to actually have made a little to help pay for the costs of hosting my sites. I have decided to put google ads on most of my websites to see if I can increase it enough to pay the hosting outright. Its a long shot but the sites are cheaply hosted so it is possible.

Top 10 Worlds Best Singers

I found a website the other day that had the following results from a pole of who was the best male and best female singers ever. Anyway the results where
Top 10 male singers
Frank Sinatra 21.2%
Elvis Presley 8.7%
Garth Brooks 5.7%
Luciano Pavarotti 3.6%
Elton John 3.1%
Bing Crosby 3.1%
George Strait 2.4%
Nat King Cole 2.3%
Perry Como 1.8%
Luther Vandros 1.7%
Top 10 female singers
Barbara Streisand 14.0%
Celine Dion 8.6%
Whitney Houston 7.5%
Reba McEntire 4.5%
Dolly Parton 3.5%
Shania Twain 3.2%
Ella Fitzgerald 2.8%
Aretha Franklin 2.5%
Mariah Carey 2.5%
Loretta Lynn 2.4%
I know this was a pole about who people thought was the best singers but I can’t help thinking that its should have been called a pole of the best known male and female singers not the best ever singers.
How did I come to this conclusion? Well to start, Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby are lower than Elton John, I am sorry, Elton is a fantastic singer but he was not a better singer than Nat or Bing by any stretch of the imagination. Personally I would have had Elvis Sinatra and Nat and Bing in the top four with Nat pipping Sinatra at the post ( Nature Boy is always good for a smokey room if you know what I mean ).
As for the women. Jesus christ they have Ella and Aretha coming in under Dolly Parton. For gods sake are they deaf as posts ( after an hour of Dollys high pitched voice they may have lost some hearing at certain frequencies), don’t get me wrong I like Dolly but much more for her writing than her singing ( “Whitneys” I’d do anything for you was written by Dolly) or my favorite 9 to 5 written by Dolly while on the set of the movie. I particularly like the line ” “Pour myself a cup of ambition”.
I am not even about to start on classical singers.
I know its all subjective but I would be interested to know who each one of the singers thought was the best.

Its about time

For years unscrupulous recruitment agencies have been getting away with shafting people left right and center but some new laws have been passed to prevent this. I doubt if the laws will have much impact on the agencies that are making money doing what they do but at least we now know that the brass have noticed.

Another HTML Lesson

I was visiting Rob this weekend and Melanie wanted a lesson in HTML. The reason for this is that she would like to create a website for their wedding which is a damned fine idea. Considerig I only spent half an hour teaching Mel the basics of an HTML document and ftp she took to it like a duck to water.

Word Parser in C++

I have been writing a word parser in C++ for a while now and noticed two things that had quite a distinct affect on performance. I was storing the words in a “map” which is a standard associative container. I knew I should have been using a hash_map but unfortunately when writing the parser I had access to a minimal Borland library on a windows box so hash_map was out of the question.
When I got home however and back on the Linux box I had a poke around and discovered “ext/hash_map” which is not officially part of the C++ standard but its widely used and so in my eyes ok.
This change had a marked improvement as the word list grew to just over a few thousand. Having a word list in excess of a few hundred thousand meant that it had a vast improvement in performance.
Another improvement was the way I was reading files into a single string object then parsing the string for its words. I was originally using “getline” and appending the string but this is slow even if you reserve space for the string.
If you are looking for a
faster more elegant way to read a file into a string look no further

Dizzy Spells

Since starting work at the ACU and using a Iiyama AS4636D TFT LCD display I have started to get dizzy spells. I have now had 4 occourances where I lost my balance for about half a second. Three of these times where in front of the screen and one was while walking down the road just after work.
I have been taking regular eys breaks and trying to read up on what might be causing the problem and if its a common complaint but so far I have not found any concrete evidence. I have also tried to fiddle with the settings but unfortunately I am using Linux so I cannot use their test.bmp program to see if I can set the screen up correctly.
Its a shame because the monitor is the dogs danglies but it just dosn’t seem to agree with me.

Text Parser

While on holiday I wrote a simple parser in C++ that will be used to create the word list for the lexicon. It now needs to be tested to see if its fast enough for use. It might just turn out that my C++ is a bit rusty and its a pile of crap. Nonetheless its pretty close to working.
I will post some times etc whenever I get them.