Random Stuff

Over the last few weeks I’ve actually put a good number of parts back on the Cougar.

The engine and transmission are completely bolted in.
The drive line is installed.
The brake master cylinder has been bench bled, but not installed.
I fixed the door latches and locks.
Alternator, power steering pump, pullies, fan, radiator, distributor, all installed.

Headers are next, followed by the clutch linkage.
I need to get some new brake lines before installing the master cylinder.
Lots more to go, but lots of progress.

A foot of snow! that’s how much snow I have here right now. It is still snowing, too. In fact, it has been snowing quite steadily since Thursday.

This is all quite surreal to me. I grew up with lots of snow. A dry, cold, powdery snow that stuck around all winter. In fact I took my drivers test in snow. But after living here for over a decade, I’ve gotten used to getting a day or two of snow. Snow that was reffered to as the “Seattle Snot”. Wet, slippery, and gone within a day or two. This snow is not the typical Seattle snow, though. It is dry, powdery, and cold. Very much like the snow where I grew up.

I find myself quite unprepared for it. My sidewalk really needs shovelling. I have no shovel. My car has no snow tires and has not moved in two days. I dare not move it because it will get stuck. Probably within ten feet of my house. Yesterday was running around in my girlfriend’s Jeep, taking time to spin a few donuts in a parking lot, and getting some holiday shopping done. But tomorrow when she’s at work, unless I want to walk, I have to stay put. This is the first winter in a long time that I haven’t had a 4×4 to drive. I think I need to change that.

But as unprared as I am, I still like this.

I’ve been sitting here in amazement for the last hour.

My son decided to figure out how to play “Carol of Bells”.

All by ear.

And now he is playing it.

As if he has always known it.

I’ve been working on putting my mapping website back up. So in the process of writing code and digging through old CDs I have laying around I stumbled on a set that was labeled differently than the rest. I thought I knew what they were but just to be sure I put in the first of ten to find an oddly named archive file.

When I extracted this file I found it was all of the original source code and web pages of my original mapping website. On the rest of the CDs were all of the tile images I had made to support the site. There are a couple missing, but I could have this site up in short order. It’s kind of exciting, but on the other hand, it shows how little I knew about programming when I put it together.

So, I may put it back up in it’s current form just to show what I did, but on the otherhand, I think it is going to need a full rewrite.

This is fun stuff to me.

I am thankful for my girlfriend, who has been unbelievably patient with me. Always putting up with my crazy ideas and looking forward to sharing whatever I am interested in at the moment. Most of all She lets me just be me.

My son, whose music constantly fills my house, which I miss terribly when he is not around.

My friends who really care. Who at time I don’t know how I would have made it without.

I spent thanksgiving day with a group of about ten friends and Debbie eating a home made dinner which everyone cooked together.  It was great. It’s not what I asked for but it’s what I needed.

I’ve spent some time this weekend improving my search engine. It’s amazing what lack of money with plenty of boredom can cause. There’s not a lot that will be immediately visible, but it’s there. A lot of work went into the crawler and the formatting of the search results. I also wrote an “about” page.

The crawler had a problem in that it never released URLs from the queue, so whenever the crawler started again, it would start with double the number of links it was supposed to scan. It has code to prevent rescanning web pages, but that takes time. When you are talking about 1000 URLs this isn’t a lot of time, but add 1000 more every time it runs, then it starts to cause problems. It now clears the queue for the specific instance of the crawler before it determines what it needs to scan. This also takes care of a crawler failing and being restarted. In all of this, I accidentally messed up the search data, so I had to reset the database.

The search results now have an abstract based on where the key words are located. Previously I just took the first 200 characters of the page, now it takes the first 200 characters starting where the key word or phrase was found. Failing that, it falls back on the beginning of the document.

The about page now touches a bit on why I wrote it, where I got my information, and a little about me.

There’s a long way to go.

• Records need to have a “time until next rescan”.
• A few more support web pages need to be written like help, legal, and contact information. The usual type of stuff.
• It needs to be able to read sitemaps
• People need to be able to submit URLs and sitemaps and I need to figure out how to put those into the queue and prioritize them.
• I have a couple more ideas on optimizing scoring of the search results, but I want to be sure they don’t slow down the queries.
• the html layout really should be controlled by CSS. It should not be hard coded tables and positioning. That way, I can format it easily by adjusting the css instead of editing the page. It would also allow me to format all of the web pages at once instead of needing to edit them all.
• and lots more

Since getting a chance to go skiing last winter, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. Now that winter is just around the corner, the itch has been getting worse. It was that day that reminded me of just how much I like it.

It is one way of turning the nastiness of winter into something to look forward to. “It’s going to snow? WOOHOO!!!”

Debbie and I spent the afternoon at a ski shop asking about lessons for her, clothes to wear, equipment needed, ski or board? The more I listened, the more I wanted to go.

How come it’s not snowing yet?

If you don’t do it this year, you will be at least a year older when you do.
If you do it this year, you may not be a year older next year. — Warren Miller

I got this link from BoingBoing. Caution: Stay well clear of this if you are afraid of spiders. I’m not afraid of spiders and it creeped me out a little bit.

Play with Spider

That’s what I think when wathcing the latest video from Dancing Matt. He’s had his last dancing trip around the world posted on his website for a while. I can’t help but smile while watching it.

An unexpectedly good surprise. I’ve recently started a new project and got a good start to it today. Debbie and I got what amounted to a private car show. So, despite my project not really being ready for prime time, I thought I’d give you a peak at it anyway.

The short of it is that we stopped to take some pictures of an old car we spotted for sale, and got a chance to see some true works of art thanks to a great guy who was willing to show us his garage. And boy what a garage it was!

So go check out RustingAway.com to see what I’ve been up to. (outside work that is)

Thought I would say hello to all of my former coworkers who over the last couple of days have let me know they read my blog.

Happy 08-08-08.

If you pay attention to the tech industry, or more specifically the Search Business, you have seen a lot of hype surrounding both Google and Cuil. Google recently announced they had reached the 1 Trillion mark. Cuil just came in with a bang saying they have indexed 120 Billion web page stating they have indexed more web pages than anyone else. So who is the biggest? Is someone lying?

Neither one is. It’s plain and simple marking. Both are playing with numbers and slight of terminology so that the detail is easily missed.

It is quite possible that Cuil has spent more resources on their crawler to scan web pages. They simply have managed to put a lot more effort into the gathering of data. It is quite possible they have managed to index 120 billion pages. This is no small matter. In my own exploration of indexing web pages, I found that the index really is a gigantic set of data. For 7000 indexed web pages, my index has 12 million records. It’s not optimized in any way, but you get the idea. Put in that context you can see that number may not be representive of what is important to the person doing the searching.

Look closely at the Google statement though. It says “1 trillion URLS”. It does not say they have indexed 1 trillion web pages. Those are two different things. Again, back to my own exploration of search engines. For 7000 indexed web pages, I have 300,000 URLS. Again, what google has done is no small matter, but needs to be put into context. What good are those 293,000 URLS if you can’t find them in the search engine.

So who is right? Which is better? What’s the meaning of all this? Pretty much nothing. It’s all marketing.

My personal opinion is that Google does a much better job of finding relavent data. Period. I do an ego search on Google, I find a few book reviews I’ve done on Amazon. If do the same on Cuil, I get the Amazon results but they are burried under a pile of websites that have hijacked Amazons book reviews. The reason for this could be that Cuil’s index is bigger, or that Google is doing better ranking of the same data. I can’t tell.

I do like the context and suggesting that Cuil does. And it has a slick interface. I also like the simplicity of Google seach.  I think the results that Cuil presents will begin to improve as they gain experience and figure out what is really important to the users. Google will then really have something to watch out for.

Ok, time for some boring stuff.

I’ve made some major improvements on the back end of my search engine. Response times so far are down to under a second for most queries. There are still some edge cases that still hang things up. I was able to make a query that took 15 minutes. But I think the most common cases are handled. Boolean searches are now possible. Scoring is a bit more accurate I hope.

I wiped the database clean and started repopulating it based on a different seed address (my own) so those that I have links to and those I have mentioned here will most likely be in there.

Right now about 5000 pages are indexed. 221,000 urls are left to be scanned. I read somewhere you should get about 8 links per page scanned, I am getting closer to 50 per page. I think that’s because I’ve scanned blogs and have managed to start indexing the BBC news site (I have a couple BBC links in my blog).

I can now run multiple crawlers across multiple machines across the internet if I so desire. I’ve limited them to 1000 sites per night and I am only running two, so I don’t piss off my gracious host (When your t1 is free, you try to be nice so you can keep it free).

Some things I plan on doing when I get the time…
1. Clean up the html
2. Create a logo
3. Write the typical “About”, “Legal”, and “Contact” pages
4. Create a page that lets people submit addresses to be indexed
5. Figure out a way to “update” the index for pages already scanned and how often to scan them
6. Write a better alogorithm for getting the abstract from the article.
7. Use the document title in the link instead of the link itself
8. Compress similar pages together (like subpages of a blog)
9. Write relevance ranking algorithm to compliment in text scoring.
10. Do more html parsing for relevance.
11. Figure out how to span multiple machines with the DB itself as it grows
12. Check out load balancing for both apache and the db. I’m sure my poor little web server wouldn’t handle a heavy load.

Maybe I should give my search site it’s own blog.
I think I might need to study up on information retrieval as well.

I’ve figured out some complicated items on search queries and how to handle them using forward indexes. I don’t have them implemented on the main page yet, but experimenting around I am now able to handle single word searches, multiple word searches and search phrases using the forward indexing.

There is still a long way to go yet. Multiple phrases and boolean expressions are not yet handled. Yet at the same time the queries now take 1/10 the time they used to.

http://rwack.com  (It also wouldn’t hurt if an ad or two was clicked )

There are also some things I need to implement which require I start over on the database so I get to wipe it out and start over.

Saying hello and introducing myself to someone from overseas in their native language.
But it’s so much fun!
Not that my ego needs to get any bigger…

This has to be one of my favorite interviews ever! Kudos to the guy being “interviewed”. The TV journalist is asking insulting questions to those waiting in line for an iPhone. He really picked the wrong guy (or right guy in my opinion) to ask “Have you ever seen a woman naked?”

My favorite part starts at the 1:34 mark where the interviewee clearly states “This is journalism to you?!” which strikes me as a pretty big insult to any journalist.

Well, OK. It’s not an accident. I decided to experiment around with writing a search engine. I’ve run into a few problems and still have quite parts I need to implement, but all in all, it has worked a lot better than I had planned.

http://rwack.com

There are the usual problems when you start looking at something big like this. Horsepower of the machines you are using for this, or in this case, machine. Memory is needed because databases are memory intensive. Drive space is needed because you are storing so much data to make this happen.

I did try to make it scalable. It is set up so that I can start adding more machines for doing different tasks as well as load balancing coming in from users doing searches. A real test of this, though, won’t happen unless I add more machines. That won’t happen unless I magically start making a lot of money off the Google ads running on the side.

There is a lot of work going forward. I’ve got some ideas about ranking web page relevance that I’m going to play around with. I need to work on the crawler and how it scans and stores links, also, this one part isn’t quite working how I want it to when I run multiple copies of it.

Another problem I have, which is mostly related to resources, is that I keep running into the big players on the internet. When I run into a site like Microsoft or Ebay, the crawler winds up spending all of it’s time indexing the thousands of links these guys have to their own sites. This wouldn’t be a problem with unlimited resources, but I want a more diverse collection of pages. And coming up with an exclude list is not a guarantee the results will be different. Imagine trying to come up with a list of all of the large sites on the internet?

So there it is. Search on a very tight budget.

Comment from Debbie to Jake “You’re going to be just like your father aren’t you?”

Jake replies “I don’t see how that’s a bad thing.”

Today I put down new carpet inside the car, put the back seat back in, put in one of the front seats.

I also bolted the transmission to the bellhousing, spend some time figuring out what clutch fork to use and how it is mounted. Tried to locate some dowel pins for the clutch, but no luck there.

And now that dinner is settling, I’m headed back out to work on it some more.

Part of the reason I’m doing this is gas prices. Running around using up gas is not in the picture. It just costs too much, so much so, that I am going to start riding the bus. So rather than sitting around bored, I decided to start putting the car back together.

I need to buy a clutch equalizer bar pivot and locate those dowel pins before I can go further on the transmission. So now on to the interior while I can’t work on that.

I just noticed that several letters on my keyboard have worn off so if you didn’t know what letter the key was supposed to be, you’d have a hard time with it. Also, all the keys on my keyboard used to have a matte like texture to them. A good majority of them are now smooth and shiny. You can tell where my fingers land on the keys, like I tend to use my left thumb more than my right when hitting the space bar, so it’s only shiny on one end.

This keyboard is only a year old.

I wound up leaving a party last night a bit early. It was for a friend who is shipping out to Iraq in a week. Debbie wasn’t with me, but my friend’s parties are usually quite safe. Attractive single women have not been commonplace at any of his parties in the past.

There was an open pit fire going in the back yard where a couple of people were keeping it well stoked, so it was a nice place to hang out while others from the party filtered by and chatted. It was also a good bit quieter than inside the house making it a good place for conversation. I got to meet and talk to lots of different people as the night went on.

Joon and her friends showed up, my friend introduced her to those of us sitting around the fire.

“Kobanwa.” she said with a slight nod to the head.
“Kobanwa.” I responded back in the same manner. Kobanwa is a Japanese way of saying Good Evening.
“Ah! You speak Japanese!” she said in Japanese
“A little, but not very well.” I said back in Japanese. Then I followed up in English that I didn’t know any more than that. Next thing I know, she is sitting on my left and we are talking about Japan and Okinawa.

Soon after Tina showed up. She was a neighbor of my friend from just up the street. A couple others from the party were openly trying to pick her up and failing miserably. It wasn’t long before she had that “Get me out of here” look on her face. I was watching this when she looked my way. I couldn’t help but smile, an acknowledgment that I knew what that look was. But then she smiled back. I actually turned my head and thought “Shit, I shouldn’t have done that.” Next thing I know she is sitting on my right.

The conversation was enjoyable, but they started to get a bit obvious. The hand on my arm when making a comment. The slap on the shoulder when I made a joke. The scooting closer and closer on the bench. I think the most interesting was I now had an entourage of two when I went up to get myself a drink. It was flattering. But as they both became more obvious as well as competitive for my attention, I decided to call my exit.

That’s the first time I’ve actually been uncomfortable with the attention I was getting.Flattering yet, but I was just looking for conversation. Had I been single I most definitely would have stayed and I suspect it would have been quite interesting to say the least. But I am not single.

I called my girlfriend as soon as I was back in my car and on the way home.

It’s a joke with my girlfriend that I can’t help it. Just being me is what “it” is and I can’t turn that off.

Just for fun I updated the engine and some of the website that I have for groveling car pictures off the internet. The engine code is much cleaner, the database is smaller, and searches are faster.  It’s also got a separate component for loading the pictures so the image information is preserved.

Check it out: carpicarchive.com

I headed out to visit a couple of friends last night and wound up coming home with a pile of parts.

Now add to the parts list of cool things I have:
World Class T5 transmission
Centerforce Dual Friction clutch
350hp 302 Ford Small Block Engine
and a pile of other misc parts that I need.

I now officially have every part I need to actually put my Cougar together. I just need to finish taking it apart.

“Great tits cope well with warming.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7390109.stm

Someone, somewhere has got to be laughing that they got that headline past the editor.

I’d say it’s a pretty high compliment when someone you know marks one of your pictures on Flickr as a favorite without knowing it’s you.

Today was an amazing day. I’m too tired right now to go into too many details, but I’ll give a few now before I hit the sack.

We took Debbie’s Jeep for some light offroading today up at Rieter pit. Top down, it was  a bit chilly this morning, but  things warmed up quite a bit. By around Lunch time we were several hundred feet in elevation driving through about a foot of snow spinning tires and throwing mud all the way up to some of the most spectacular scenery this area has to offer.

Back down, then to the house, then out to Lake union into Ivars for dinner (not the fast food, but the restaurant on the north end). From there we headed out to Alki and watched the sun go down amidst the hundred of cars and motorcycles out cruising around.  Around Alki point and back home again.

We have a few pictures from the mountains, but to be frank, I’m just too tired to upload them right now. Maybe tomorrow.

Having fun and playing around with settings on my camera.

Enjoy

Nothing was open. It was pouring down rain. No family around. Didn’t fee like programming. I was bored. So I just made the best of it.

I just set my camera up on my $10 tripod, took a few pictures to get the alignment and settings close, then set the timer for 10 seconds and “posed”.

I then downloaded and installed “Gimp” which is a free photo editing program similar to Photoshop and pasted the pictures together. Really anyone with a cheap camera and a computer could do this. It took me maybe 20 minutes from the time I had decided to do it, until I was done editing the picture.

Have fun, and happy Easter.

Well, actually, it was pretty hard to beat the view I had on my ski day, but a friend of mine just posted all of her pictures from a recent trip snowboarding. Here’s one.
No, that’s not Mt Hood.
It’s Mt Fuji