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.
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.
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.
We have objects
Parrot has now got objects, which means the limitations we faced before in building the DBD for Parrot are no longer there.
Parrot not having objects meant we couldn’t get a usable DBD for parrot without real hackery and much jiggery pokery. This happened at just the right time for me because I started a new job and the fourth year of my degree started in February as well which meant I was very busy in February.
Tim, punctual as ever, emailed me as soon as objects and various other bits were confirmed and suggested we start work on it again.
More on XML Resume
I have managed to get a beta release of the HR-XML Resume builder working at
XML Resume Now all I need to do is move the site to using Template Toolkit and write some helper applications and we are ready for some users to try it out. If anyone reads this I would love some feedback on it.
XML Resume Builder
The XML Resume Buider is now working. I have been very busy trying to get
XML Resume wiped into shape. Jenny came up with the design and I implimented it. I like the design but the user interface is far perfect at the moment but its getting there. I have also added the HR-XML builder tool to the site. To use it you need to create an HR-XML compliant xml resume. I provide templates for this, all you need to do is fill in the blanks then upload then load them into the tool. The output can be either PDF or postscript.
There is only one stylesheet at the moment but I am dedicatiing some time this week to try and get another one knocked up. Ideally I would like users submitting styles of their own for inclusion in the list. This would make the tool much more useful.
More on WebGUI
It looks like we are going to be using WebGUI after all. I have several misgivings about it but thankfully it is all written in Perl so if something bugs me that much I can probably do something about it.
I am not looking forward to migrating four sites onto it but hopefully after the first one has been migrated it will be a fairly straight forward process getting the other sites moved.
We also have several hundred CGI’s dotted all over the place that we are not really too keen on re-writing but its the glue. As part of the whole cleanup operation it would probably be prudent to visit them all and give them a good working over but this would be a very time consuming task. The old saying “let sleeping dogs lie” keeps running around my head every time I think about touching those scripts.
Investigating WebGUI
I am currently investigating the WebGUI Content Management System at the moment. We want to cut down on the amount of editing that we need to do because we seem to have a lot of applications in the queue to develop and the editing is taking up too much time. There are various other reasons but I won’t go into those.
The website says that it is hard to install but this is nonsense it was fairly straight forward once I decided to use MySQL. I have only scratched the surface of it at the moment but it looks quite capable, I tried to get it into Postgres but had no success, there were various errors all reported as log files having the wrong permissions but a quick look in the logs showed me it was dodgy SQL.
Being a Postgres advocate/diehard I would have preferred to use it but considering its not a supported platform and we are not trying to run Amazon then MySQL will do the job.
If it turn out to be easy to use I might just use it on my own websites.
Started my HR-XML Resume
I managed to get FOP, XALAN, Java and everything else I need to start creating my resume in pdf. Thank god for apt.
I did a little bit of it tonight in HR-XML or at least in a miniature subset of it. The results can be found on my resume page near the top there should be some links to the HR-XML file and the XSLT I was using to generate the pdf. Do not take this stuff seriously it took me an hour of blurry eyed fiddling to do it so it is by no means looking good.
I do intend do the resume builder for the recruitment ratings website so watch this space. I should have this and everything else done in the next few years.
Resume Builder
Since I am spending a lot of time using FOP and XSLT at work at the moment I am going to resurect an old project that I started for my agency ratings site. I basically want to provide a tool that generates a CV in pdf format from an XML file. I know of the project on sourceforge and I tried to contact them but got no reply, they are not using HR-XML which is what I want to use because some other clever bugger will be doing all the hard work of looking after the standard. They are using their own XML Resume Library Standard. If you are interested in this sort of thing visit them, their project is mature and they are doing a good job.
I have several reasons for doing my own:
1. It is more practice for work.
2. It is a hook for my website.
3. I have put it off long enough.
Ideally I would like to build a nice Java Applet and I had actually started one but that all went pear shaped. Java GUI’s are a bit too involved for the amount of time I am able to devote to the project this time so it will be all Perl.
My intentions are to provide a basic page where you fill in your details and then generate the pdf in the style of your choice (there will only be one style to start with ;-). Due to lack of time it will be fairly basic and based on my own CV. Like all my other projects if I ever get the time I will finish it, Hah.