May 2004 Archives

I was approached today about a possible collaboration between xresumes.net and xmlresume.org. I have asked what type of collaboration and am now waiting on a reply.

I have seen plenty of robots spider my site but by far the most polite as far as time goes has got to be the miragorobot. It waited a full minute between each page request which is almost unheard of.

I have just registered another Perl Module or at least I have asked if the name is correct / suitable.

Text::Convert::ToImage

I have been wanting to write another module for a while but CPAN is big and its getting hard to find a suitable idea that has not already been done in some way already. I had a good look around because I am not a fan of re-inventing the wheel and simplest method of doing what I wanted is by using PerlMagick. PerlMagick is not a simple module so I decided to write my own wrapper to it to simplify things a bit for this specific task hence the new module.

Just hope someone finds it useful.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I wrote an article last year about Recruitment Agency tactics and Sharp Practices and I posted it to London PM. It managed to make its way onto the London PM FAQ so I thought if its good enough to make it onto there then I can be a hussy and do some self promotion myself and stick another link to it on here.

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.

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

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.

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.

If ever you happen to be in Estepona and are looking for a restaurant and not to sure where to go I can recommend "Casa Pablo" which can be found in "Plaza de las Flores" which is a very pretty little square just off the main street.

I had the "House Pate" which come as two large portions and was excellent. I went for the stroganoff steak which was cooked to perfection and tasted as good as it looked. I didn't see a vegetarian dish on the menu but if you eat fish then you will be fine because there fish was seemed to hit the right spot for two of our party.