Info
2007-07-24 isp connections
Well for the past day I've had no internet access here, sorry to all those who get free DNS from me, all those who I give free short URLs and the free news feeds.
You will all be refunded shortly.
Last night I had very little to think about, well without the internet and all that, what could I do? The majority of things which I use as information sources are via the internet. Well, I just had to go to the pub didn't I and have a normal conversation with some people.
However today I was thinking of some improvements which I could create for my own facebook/myspace/whatever social networking framework. It might be an interesting rethink on the way that those sites work. I don't personally buy into the whole "look how many friends i don't care about" mantra. It is not interesting to read a bunch of crap about how someone might be back stabbing. That's just not what the internet is for.
What is interesting is a number of resourceful links for people to use as educational references. Now that's worth my time to read.
Monday night I had a revelation, to spend all week in the pub. It's only Tuesday and already I'm thinking of reasons not to.
I just noticed how there are similarities between Ruby and pascal:
if( config["first_name"] != nil ) @first_name = config["first_name"] end
Notice in the block above:
- nil
This is used to determine a NULL pointer in pascal. Seldom used since pascal took it's place as a beginner teaching language. - end
Pascal used begin/end heavily, although case-insensitive.
I had been meaning to get back into the pascal language since it has very fast compile times and the resulting binary was very small and fast to execute. This lagging compile time with C/C++ became apparent to me when compiling on a 8 bit 8086 CPU some fifteen years ago. Even today, compiling an incredibly small C++ program can take upto a second, things really have not moved on when a perl script that applies a regular expression to a large text file can start and finish within that time.
2007-07-22 not much of an update
While I've been avoiding certain things, such as putting a vocabulary book together, I have done something productive.
There's now a quick overview of some hash functions in high-level languages at the following page: hash test. This page is only a quick overview of insertions, as an example of a few things, such as the rate at which the memory is consumed and freed and the rough size of the memory per object inserted.
2007-07-03 perl > *
This month, perl is greater than everything else. Until I find some reason to start supporting python or ruby a little more.
As I wrote earlier, I am in stages of writing my site from a database, I was going to write it using Python, and then Ruby, for experimentation reasons. However, perl and I get on so well these days that I had to use what I felt most comfortable with.
I am pleased with the end result. It operates much faster than the Java Runtime version. I imagine this is due to not using strict objects. The java version would take 80 minutes to write all news items from the database running on the webserver, and around 20 minutes if operating from my workstation. The perl version takes around 4 minutes from my workstation and even less running on the database/webserver box. I put this down to two things:
- the java version would make an object for each page, store it in an arraylist for making the indexes with later
- perl being closer to the hardware (although interpreted) than the JRE and it's objects.
Some people see perl as being hard to read/write, I myself found writing perl much easier than Java. This might be because I don't buy into all this IDE stuff, I like to work with GVIM, and use ctrl-n to complete things manually rather than let an IDE use reflection to tell me what I can complete with. The main thin about writing OOP code is the deep level of indentation that is required, perl is ok with just one level deep for the methods, since the package name starts at col 1. In java the method is already about three levels deep, and in .net, 4 with a namespace. Just not my cup of tea.
Once the two awaiting sections of the site are completed I'll be releasing this as a pseudo framework for making your own large sites from db, where reducing CPU work is a priority.
2007-07-02 freedom march
I totally respect what these guys are doing for freedom of information. They're putting a lot of effort into getting people to understand about freeness of drivers, information and standards.