dark stats

I guess I should mention that I put together a new package installer for darkstat at the weekend.

The new Panther XCode tools turn out a smaller, faster binary, and if you are an old Darkstat user, I definitely recommend you upgrade to this latest version.

This has been a popular package, especially since Macupdate and Versiontracker (hot-linking fü©ké®z!) got wind of it (eventually), and I'm happy to announce a fully clickable OS X installer for Darkstat 2.6, the end of the line for Darkstat 2.

Work on Darkstat 3 had already begun (when Emil has time), and I'll try to keep you up to date with how that's coming along. Most importantly, it no longer uses pthreads - which will be fairly meaningless to most folks, I know - so we're going to be looking at an even faster and more efficient app when it's all done.

can't stop.
for now..

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org

when you're smiling..

I can't stop smiling.

it's been quite an adventure, this php stuff. As well as the inevitable excercise my logic circuits have been getting, it's been throwing up all sorts of deeper, more philosophical questions. I'm not going into those, for now.

Back to the smiling.. now, while I was very happy with corzoogle, there were still things I wanted it to do, two things, in fact..

1) allow searching for multiple terms, and..

2) rank the results by relevance

The first one I reckoned would be easy, the second I wasn't so sure about. I decided that the best way to go about this would be to do what coders the world over do when faced with a challenge; check out how others did it.

So I started to download. There are quite a few search engine scripts "out there", ranging from dumb (not to mention totally insecure, and I have emailed the webmasters concerned, informing them that their admin passwords are available to any web browser, amazingly, only one has responded positively..) wee scriptlets to massive sprawling search systems spanning multiple folders and dozens of files, mysql intgration, the works. It was going to be a long night.

Some of the solutions to the ranking "issue" were quite ingenious, but few of these managed to achieve their ingenuity in anything like the number of lines of code I was prepared to add to corzoogle. I want it small, fast, and simple. Some of the examples I perused involved whole php classes with hundreds of lines of code peppered with the most bizarre regular expressions. regex is slow, and anyway, mine sucks, I didn't want to go there.

In the end (and I should add at this point that - and yes I am probably biased - none of these systems had the oomph factor and sheer simplicity that corzoogle has, nothing like it) I decided to abandon this line of enquiry and approach the problem afresh.

Right from the start, I've been deleloping three different versions of corzoogle (remember, I'm still in my php apprenticeship - I figured it would be good practice) utilising different search and scan techniques. I've abandoned two of those now, the remaining version always was the smallest, simplest, and fastest of the three, and it turns out, also the easiest to expand.

So why am I smiling? well, with typical cor-like style I not only succeeded in creating a beautiful and elegant solution to the whole ranking thing, but achieved it in two lines of code. yes, two. read 'em and weep noobs!

okay, three if you add the title ranking I slotted it afterwards.

What this means is..

Corzoogle will now search for an unlimited number of terms (in actual fact I put a 256 character limit on the input, fit in as many terms as you can into that - google limits their search queries to ten words, I might consider this route), and return only hits for pages containing all those terms, ranking them for you in the process.

The bottom line: Nine times out of ten, the page you want is right there at the top. Oh Lordy! I do rock!

So now corzoogle does exactly everything I wanted it to do. Once I've cleaned up my comments a bit (ie. removed the swear-words), I'll upload it to my (recently refurbished) scripts section. And you can get this working for you at home, or on your website.

Then you can flame me to hell and back for my arrogance!

for now..

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org

erm.. HOORAY!

I think it was all the excitement.

Okay, I'm fairly certain that purchasing a domain shouldn't affect any domains one already owns, but there I was, redirected to corz.webexpo.org¹ for some 8 hours or so, until all the world's nameservers caught up again. A ghost in my old DNS settings, perhaps. Go godaddy go!

I love godaddy! okay, not love, but over the last half year or so I've gained a deep respect for this company, and it's quite incredible level of service, or perhaps I should say service:cost ratio. Where else can you get once-in-a-lifetime real-estate for $6.99? (pity about their so-called PayPal payments - fools! -ed)

Which brings me neatly to my announcement..

[drumroll]

Yes, this is what I was up to last week, well, the coding bits of last week anyhow. Usual story, I needed something - looked all over - nothing fitted the bill - I rolled up my sleeves.

What we have now is a pretty cool tool; it's sure revolutionised my working environment for starters; and very soon I'll release the source, so you can run this baby at home!

In the meantime, for you select and growing band of corzblog readers, a preview of the new domain, and the new technology; my second php project. have fun..




/me bows

It redirects to the corzoogle engine running on this site, for now, so you can search all my documents to your heart's content.

that's about it for now. gotta say an extra big thanks to rose (aka tokyorose) for her help last night. five minutes with rose always restores my faith in humanity.

happy corzoogling!

for now..

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org

work work work

This week basically evaporated.

Somewhere up there there is probably a cloud, a large cloud with all the days and weeks that have gone like that. One day it may rain, and we'll all get a chance to catch up.

In between the madness and malarkey, I've been "coding like a bastard" which is a play on "writing like a bastard", a small but perfectly formed booklet of poetry by Alison Kermack. I like to think that my coding projects share some of these qualities.

Alas, my main project must be, for now, completely secret, which is frustrating to say the least; I'm dying to tell you all about it, how it's changed my working life, and before it's even complete. All in good time. Meanwhile observant folks will have spotted small but significant alterations to this very site.

There's the speedy gonzales timer, for starters, which happily tells you how fast this server is, and that "comments thing" I have on the Amazing 2-Drive iMac page has been totally rewritten (the previous version someone else did for me, before I leaped into this PHP business). Anyways, I'm happy with it now! Expect to see this sort of functionality spreading over the entire site, probably in one big upload, not today¹, but..

NEXT WEEK!!!!!

[eh?]

oh, well next week I'll have broadband again (applause). After my old ISP finally saw the error of their ways and released my line back into the free market. Hopefully all should be superdooper 24/7 fasterthanthespeedofdialupX10 by Monday, but with these things, nothing is ever certain.

Truth is, I quite enjoy evaporation,
which is why I won't be holding my breath.

for now..

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org

internet explorer 5

okayokay it's fixed!

Note to self: never mix "px" and "%" values in a CSS statement. that's valid isn't it?

Wonderful stuff CSS, and still suspiciously absent from so many sites; like DOCTYPE and text encoding meta data. Oh let's not get started on text encoding again.

This would probably get past most parental gestapo censorship software..

ß姆å®∂§¡

But you know what I mean.

Next thing you know I'll be coding in effin NOSCRIPT tags for all those paranoid-schizophrenic non-javascript surfers. Did you know that it's possible to load a javascript on a user's machine that returns the real IP of that machine back to the websever? Regardless of the proxy he or she is surfing through. Well now you do. Oh damn! STOP! JAVASCRIPT IS GOOOOOOD!

I have a news-clipping¹ of an article from a very, if not well respected, then at least well read weekly journal that states quite categorically that "hackers" (and one day I will come to terms with the way that word is misused and abused, but not today), HACKERS, from anywhere in the world can send you an e-mail attachment that can instantly alter the chemistry of your CPU, effectively turning it into a bomb, which would then, of course, explode.

Of course, most of us have filters for that sort of thing, apart (and this loops around so beautifully it's like I thought it up) from the internet explorer 5 users, who really should get an upgrade, you know.

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org

ps.. Let them see pickled babies I say! Pickled! (photo withheld)

utf-8 NO BOM!!!

Since I went unicode I've been in text-editing heaven.

π <-- unencoded entity

Can you see it? it's a pi symbol

With plain old ASCII *spit* I would need to write that as &pi; for you to see it. And most of these "html encodings" are way more difficult to remember than little ole "pi".

For instance, what's &#8710; ?

Unicode takes care of all this and much more besides. You just type weird shit straight in, and ∆'s yer uncle from Gamma9, or Timbuktu, or wherever, it's like getting all the languages of the world into a group hug. Pity about most of the planet's keyboards¹, though.

heh, with a large grin on my face, I realise that if I edit this blog now, all these ugly & entities will be miraculously encoded into real unicode characters in my edit field! joy of joys of open standards! You can't win this Bill! Give up! hahahah

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org

lynx!

I'm posting this ssh'ed into my linux box, with lynx. lynx is a command line browser, text only. lots of fun. cool, reading this on a black background, too.
corzblog still rocks on lynx!

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org

more blogoodies!!!

I got carried away..

Let's be clear about one thing; I am not a perfectionist. I realised a very long time ago that man just isn't capable of such things, that being the realm of nature, of God. (as if I haven't mentioned this before, in many languages, the word "nature" and the word "God", are the same word). Having said that, I do like to make things "as good as they can be", and that applies to pretty much everything I do, including this corzblog thing.

We are squarely into "corzblog2" now, something vastly superior to the old system, and yet, very much the same, sort of more. Although the available source is, at the time of writing, still version 1.6.1 (if I don't get the new package together tonight then tomorrow for sure), the live version (which you are reading now) has for the last couple of days been evolving into corzblog2, son of corzblog.

Last night I uploaded the new system in its entirety, and it sure did warm the binary functions of my heart to see, on refreshing the page, not one pixel even moved. ahhhh.

Scroll down a bit however, and things have changed. Hover your mouse over the "Archives" menu, for starters. Now, how cute is that! Click the "edit a blog" link, and see (at last) fully automated blog archiving! (bugging me about stuff really does work, see!)

Most of the changes have been internal. I'll sift through the code now and remind myself what's new..

whole new display system: everything now runs from "index.php", this has made lots of other things possible.

improved preferences:

everything is in one single "config.php" file.

many more aspects of the system can now be customised

added support for non-root installs

(i.e.. http://whatever.com/someplace/whatever/blog/ as opposed to just http://whatever.com/blog/) though I still recommend you spend eight bucks and get yourself a domain!

added support for windows web servers *sigh*

rdf/rss 1.0 newsfeed. this is in addition to the old style rss 0.9.1 feed, and offers improved capabilities for today's news aggregators.

Automatic archiving! At the end of the month you can have corzblog archive you blogs for you, and they will instantly show up in the cute archive menu. note: because of the new internals, your archives look just as good as your current blog, images and all!

There's other stuff too, but you get the idea; all new and improved, etc.

You may have also noticed that There's now a "printer friendly version" facility on this site, and although you can use that to get print versions of this blog, it's part of the site, not corzblog, though I may do something similar for the corzblog distributions, if anyone asks me to.

okay, session over-

for now..

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org

blogoodies!!!

(noun)

Which, roughly translated means, "I've upgraded corzblog - that journaling software of mine, available in orange - I think you should know about it. it's not something I did overnight, or even the next morning.

In many ways I'm an engineer. Not that guy who dreams up bridges and stuff, though I sure do, but more like the wrinkly boiler-room mechanic dude who's forever tinkering with "Old Betsy", getting her running 'just so'. So I add bits, tweak..

If you've ever had a skek in the source you'll know I often just leave stuff lying around, spanners, one of the things you might have spotted was a news tag. The next paragraph demonstrates our new and improved news tag..

This paragraph exists only to demonstrate how cool these news blocks look in a big old pile of text, and how they help to break it up, make it more appealing. This paragraph exists only to demonstrate how cool those news blocks look in a big old pile of text, and how they help to break it up, make it more appealing. This paragraph exists only to demonstrate how cool thase news blocks look in a big old pile of text, and how they help to break it up, make it more appealing. This paragraph exists only to demonstrate how cool thise news blocks look in a big old pile of text, and how they help to break it up, make it more appealing. You didn't actually read that right through, did you?

More than usually, when you go to edit a blog containing one of these news doo-dahs, the page looks like a bomb hit it, clicking preview mysteriously fixes everything. Actually, that's fixed now, but that last line was too cute to delete. I expect ie5.0 and similar crap browsers will have even more troubles with the blog now; screw 'em. Bill's offered an upgrade for free. And if you like free, there are dozens of superior, standards-compliant browsers out there. Mac users have Camino and Safari, and Firebird impresses the hell outta me on all platforms. Bill Gates is fucking with the internet. don't support his evil ways. Yes, that swear word was necessary.

Regulars will have spotted my occasional flirtings with references¹. I luv 'em. I even have a button for them in the blogging page. However, this functionality left many things to be desired. Firstly, the wee "1"'s, or whatever characters you used, all pointed to the same reference section. So if you used a reference in more than one blog, all the links would point to the most recent reference. Anyhow, that's fixed too.

The new reference system is linked to the individual blog entry, hover the mouse over this two², and you'll see what I mean. Click the ref button in the editor for further enlightenment. note: if you click the word "references" (above the references themselves), it takes you back to where you were. Neat!

And lastly (good things come in threes) corzblog, along with everything in my life from the±wire, to my shopping-list and faithful dog, is now unicode savvy (okay, Karma is still on the ASCII-compatible glyphs; she has trouble getting her doggie-brain around the whole "code-point" concept unless you offer cheese with it, but it's early days yet) well, okay, that's not strictly true; it's PHP, you know, so not quite totally, as-such, kosher unicode-savvy really, but at least the files are unicode. Hey! it's a start!

There are some other improvements too, but those were done gradually over the last couple of months, stuff like the symbols pop-up menu. See the about page for more details.

I'm just gonna pad this blog out with a few meaningless sentences now, so you forget I was going on about the improvements and enhancements I made to the references system; then when you scroll past my signature and see the three cute references, you'll go "hey! cool!" or something along those lines. I feel those, so have a hearty smile.

Keep reading on though, that's important, inches count, it's like when you're on IRC and you say something about that annoying fcuk-pig who just went to the bathroom, and everyone agrees with you wholeheartedly, and with verbs, and then you think "shite! he's only gone to the lav, he'll be back any second!", then of course he'll see all these insults slowly scrolling past, so you all go-

yeah
sure
hmm
I say!
what
huh?
aye
totally
..
erm
(ascii art perhaps)
lol
w00t!
dood!
neway..
wha?
oh
well
frrrrr

.. and similar nonsense, typing like mad people, Mr.Eediot's plain text scrolling dizzily off the page; *phew*; ignorance is bliss huh.

Or maybe he just said he was going to the loo.

for now..

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org


ps.. happy birthday to me!