peknet is Peter E Karman
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Dezi, now with Xapian backend
Read all about it.File under projects/swish Mon Apr 30 21:39:13 CT 2012
Sleep
When I've got a lot going on in my life, I often don't sleep well. That's not unusual, I realize. Now I know that eight hours of sleep a night is a socal invention just like everything else.File under general/ Tue Feb 28 09:05:25 CT 2012
Dezi search platform
This week I announced the initial release of Dezi, a new search platform based on Swish3, Apache Lucy, OpenSearch and Plack.As of about 15 minutes ago, there are now PHP and Perl clients available.
File under projects/swish Sat Oct 1 21:47:46 CT 2011
REST resources
Read through the comments for some good further reading.File under perl/ Fri Sep 23 09:58:18 CT 2011
libswish3 1.0.0 released
I am happy to announce the 1.0.0 release of libswish3:http://swish-e.org/swish3/libswish3-1.0.0.tar.gz
libswish3 is at the core of multiple Swish3 implementations, and has reached a stable enough API that a 1.0.0 release seems appropriate.
From the README:
libswish3 is a document parser compatible with the Swish-e 2.4 -S prog API.
libswish3 is a C library for parsing documents into a data structure that can
then be stored and searched with a variety of IR backends.
There are currently four different implementations available of Swish3.
- swish_xapian (C++ using libxapian, included in libswish3 distribution)
- SWISH::Prog::Xapian (Perl using Search::Xapian)
- SWISH::Prog::Lucy (Perl using Apache Lucy)
- SWISH::Prog::KSx (Perl using KinoSearch)
All the Perl implementations are available from CPAN. They each rely on SWISH::3 (the Perl bindings to libswish3) and the core SWISH::Prog project, a Perl rewrite of the swish-e 2.x C binary and accompanying helper scripts. The SWISH::Prog distribution includes a 'swish3' command line interface with options very similar to the swish-e 2.x command line tool.
Xapian, KinoSearch and Apache Lucy all offer robust UTF-8 and incremental indexing support, as well as the ability to scale to many millions of documents across multiple servers.
You can read more about Swish3 at the devel site.
UPDATE: Mailing list announcement here.
File under projects/swish Wed Sep 21 22:03:59 CT 2011
Montessori and Open Source Culture
My kids go to a Montessori school. As parents we have been very impressed by the philosophy of learning there, and our kids have thrived.It should come as no surprise to me then that there is a strong link between the Open Source community and Montessori.
File under general/ Fri Aug 19 09:40:23 CT 2011
I-94 Corridor and the East Side
I live on the east side of St Paul. These big changes to the I-94 corridor would happen within a mile of where I live.File under general/ Sat May 28 22:39:50 CT 2011
Search::OpenSearch::Server with REST API
Just uploaded several modules to CPAN that together implement a full REST API for KinoSearch indexes, using Search::OpenSearch::Server::Plack.
% curl -XPOST http://localhost:5000/foo \
-d '<doc><title>bar</title>foo</doc>' \
-H 'Content-Type: application/xml'
[response:]
{
"success":1,
"doc":{
"orgs":[],
"places":[],
"people":[],
"topics":[],
"summary":"",
"title":"bar",
"author":[]
},
"total":"21581",
"code":"200"
}
The modules are:
File under projects/swish Thu May 26 13:56:43 CT 2011
Rubber Soul
I've loved the Beatles since the summer of 1983, when I was 11 and my aunt introduced me to their records (including some rarity vinyl iirc). The first record I ever bought was the blue greatest hits double record. I played the first side of the first record (Strawberry Fields, Penny Lane, Sergent Peppers, Day in the Life) over and over in 6th and 7th grade.But it's taken me nearly 30 years to identify my favorite record. I've had lots of favorite songs, but Rubber Soul is now officially my favorite record. I realize no one but me cares, but it feels important somehow to have identified an actual studio record, rather than a greatest hits compilation, as my favorite.
File under music/ Sun Mar 20 19:53:57 CT 2011
Mounds Park
From my neighborhood email list:
For all of us interested in what being/been proposed/planned for Indian Mounds Regional Park here is a link to "City of Saint Paul – Indian Mounds Regional Park Master Plan" page. It includes an overview, meeting agenda, notes, presentation along with the Indian Mounds Master Plan Concept.
Link:
http://www.stpaul.gov/index.aspx?NID=4036
Link:
http://www.stpaul.gov/index.aspx?NID=4036
File under general/ Fri Feb 4 16:38:47 CT 2011
Bug
My laptop started making a Very Bad Noise on Tuesday morning, the kind of whirring creak I usually associate with the death throes of a hard drive. It didn't sound exactly like a hard drive, which often clicks or knocks, and the whir was rather slower paced than the high RPMs of a hard drive. But as I didn't think this Macbook Pro had a fan, since I had never heard one, I just assumed the only moving part was the hard drive and so I ordered a new one online using my wife's computer.When the drive arrived today, I opened the laptop to swap out the hard drive, and lo! there was a box elder bug caught in one of the two small fans on the logic board. Yes, my computer had a bug in it. I pulled out the lifeless, hard little black and orange-striped carcass, and put the cover back on. Started without problem or Very Bad Noise.
I had thought that the term "bug" used to describe a computer glitch was coined after someone found a moth in an early computer. But according to the all-knowing Wikipedia I was wrong. Nonetheless, I was relieved to discover this bug and to fix the problem so easily.
And now I have a spare drive for that time when my hard drive really does die.
File under general/ Thu Jan 27 20:16:25 CT 2011
False Laziness
One of the three virtues of programming is Laziness. Beware of false laziness. Andy Lester writes on the problem aptly when he describes an interaction with another programmer:
This person was one of those programmers who tried for the premature optimization of saving some typing. He forgot that typing is the least of our concerns when programming. He forgot that programmer thinking time costs many orders of magnitude more than programmer typing time, and that the time spent debugging can dwarf the amount of time spent creating code.
File under projects/ Thu Dec 23 03:40:32 CT 2010
Funny depending on whoami
Only funny if you're a programmer.File under projects/ Mon Dec 20 21:25:40 CT 2010
The Interruptible Programmer
A brilliant and humane essay on changing work habits.Excuse me while I get up and stretch.
I can vouch for the writer's experience, though for me it has been less about back pain (though I have that too) than eye strain (going on 7 years now). Biggest of all though has been having children and working from home: that is the interruption formula in a nutshell.
File under projects/ Fri Oct 15 10:43:06 CT 2010
CPAN test failures
SWISH::3 0.08_04 is passing all tests all over the CPAN testers universe, so that is encouraging.However, some reports (notably on FreeBSD) report false failures because of a Wstat issue.
I've posted about it at PerlMonks and hope someone out there has an easy fix.
Update: finally found a fix for this. The problem is that Perl has its own my_setenv() function that interferes with the native setenv() called by libswish3.c. The fix was to set the magic Perl var PL_use_safe_putenv as shown here. This took many hours and googling to track down. Glad to be done with it (I hope!).
File under projects/swish Mon Oct 11 00:37:31 CT 2010
Ingrid Sequoia
Our new daughter arrived yesterday. We are all home, doing well.Update: her middle name is inspired by this Wendell Berry poem.
File under general Thu Aug 5 10:38:41 CT 2010
Seduction and Betrayal
This is a really good op-ed. Mayhill Fowler gets just the right amount of "philosophical and epistemological" in her reflections on the recent McChrystal blow-up.The storyteller changes reality, because the story changes our memory, personal and collective. It's always that way. It's the great lesson of the Deconstructionist school. All narrators are untrustworthy -- or rather, trust is not the same as fact. And faith is an act of trust, not fact.
File under ideas/ Fri Jun 25 09:12:59 CT 2010
Open Source Business
opensource.com has an interesting thread on the open source business model(s).File under general/ Wed Jun 9 08:35:33 CT 2010
Past entries: 2004 . 2005 . 2006 . 2007 . 2008 . 2009 . 2010 . 2011 . 2012 .