From 4b6c0e31385f5f27a151088c0a2b614495c4e589 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Paul Duncan Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2021 12:47:50 -0400 Subject: initial commit, including theme --- content/posts/2005-02-16-guess-who-s-back.html | 254 +++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 254 insertions(+) create mode 100644 content/posts/2005-02-16-guess-who-s-back.html (limited to 'content/posts/2005-02-16-guess-who-s-back.html') diff --git a/content/posts/2005-02-16-guess-who-s-back.html b/content/posts/2005-02-16-guess-who-s-back.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f98c9c5 --- /dev/null +++ b/content/posts/2005-02-16-guess-who-s-back.html @@ -0,0 +1,254 @@ +--- +date: "2005-02-16T00:40:23Z" +title: Guess Who's Back? +--- + +

+The blog post hiatus has ended! Here's what's new in the world o' Pablotron. First of all, the main hard drive on +vault — my file/database/LDAP/email +server — bit the dust last Wednesday. Fortunately the drive +just started to fail (instead of dying outright). I had ample +room to do immediate backups, and I had an unused 160G drive laying +around. I spent most of Sunday afternoon and all of Monday evening, +partitioning the new drive and copying stuff back to it. As far as I +can tell, the only thing I actually lost was the words file for spamprobe. I don't really consider that much of a +loss, since I +save all my email (even the cursed spam), so I can easily toss the +requisite good and bad corpora at spamprobe to get things +going again. Even though I'm short a 100G drive now, the experience +overall has been a positive one. Here's some thoughts I had; maybe +they'll prevent a week of stress for someone else: +

+ + + +

+On the non-catastrophic hardware failure front, I upgraded +halcyon to the latest Xorg, then +promptly downgraded to the latest stable release. Here's the +approximate order of events: +

+ +
    +
  1. Spent an hour or two configuring, compiling, and installing the +latest Xorg.
    2. +
  2. Ran X, and found out that the proprietary NVidia driver isn't compatible with the latest +CVS snapshot of Xorg.
    3. +
  3. Discovered just how painful the composite +extension is without hardware acceleration by foolishly attempting +to run X using the nv driver. Hint: Imagine using +Netscape Navigator 3.0 on your old Commodore 64 with Photoshop doing an +RLE Gaussian Blur on a 100 meg image in the background.
    4. +
  4. Promptly downgraded to the stable release, cursing both NVidia for their proprietary sillyness, +and the bastards at freedesktop.org for having the +audacity to make source code changes that inconvenienced me. I spent +plenty of time on this step, so go ahead and re-read that last paragraph +a couple of times.
    5. +
+ +

+Since I spent the majority of a Sunday afternoon recompiling X no less +than 3 times, I also took the opportunity to try out the latest Enlightenment DR16 from CVS (yes Kim, I'm one of +the few +people still using e16). It's got it's own built-in, mostly (semi?) +working composite manager, so the neither the patch nor the +xcompmgr hackery I describe in this post are necessary any +more). The new default theme looks great, too! +

+ +

+Why use other peoples' broken software when you can write your own? +Here's the latest on the Pablotron +coding front: +

+ + + +

+The big stuff I've been working on lately is core of the future Raggle. Before I begin, here's a +high-level overview of how the components interact with one another +(yup, a diagram!): +

+ +

+next gen raggle +

+ +

+I've mentioned Squaggle previously, +but for those of you sleeping in the back of the class (you know who you +are), here's a brief +recap. Squaggle is +the SQLite-Ruby-based +engine for Raggle. It's cleaner, faster, it +uses less memory, and it lets me do all sorts of cool things I can't +really do with the current engine (fancty delicious-style tagging, fast cross-feed +searching, smart/auto categorization, and more). The version of Squaggle in CVS +is functional (it even includes a usable WEBrick-based interface. +

+ +

+So what's this new stuff on ye olde diagram? libptime is a +C-based +RFC822 datetime and W3C datetime parsing library. It's +BSD licensed, so you can download +version 0.1.0 (signature), +and use it to your heart's content. The other new library on the +diagram is libfeed, an +Expat-based RSS +(0.9x, 1.0, and +2.0)/Atom +feed parser. Why bother writing an RSS +parser in C? The existing Raggle engine is +slow, partly from being DOM-based, and partly from being +written in Ruby. Don't get me wrong, REXML is a +great XML parser, +but RSS +aggregators deal in volume, and I want to be sure the volume isn't +constrained by parsing. I also noticed there wasn't a nice C-based RSS/Atom +parsing library. Now there is (well, almost!). If that doesn't convince you, then maybe this will: +

+

+pabs@halcyon:~/cvs/libfeed/test> du -sh data/big-pdo-wdom.rss 
+15M     data/big-pdo-wdom.rss
+pabs@halcyon:~/cvs/libfeed/test> time perl -mXML::RSS -e \
+  '$rss = new XML::RSS; $rss->parsefile("data/big-pdo-wdom.rss");'
+real    7m56.892s
+user    4m31.578s
+sys     0m19.939s
+pabs@halcyon:~/cvs/libfeed/test> time perl -mXML::RSS -e \
+  '$rss = new XML::RSS; $rss->parsefile("data/big-pdo-wdom.rss");'
+real    5m57.838s
+user    4m28.727s
+sys     0m3.703s
+pabs@halcyon:~/cvs/libfeed/test> time ruby -rrss/2.0 -e \
+  'RSS::Parser::parse(File.read("data/big-pdo-wdom.rss"))'
+real    2m30.950s
+user    1m46.904s
+sys     0m8.610s
+pabs@halcyon:~/cvs/libfeed/test> time ./testfeed data/big-pdo-wdom.rss \
+  >/dev/null 2>&1
+real    0m2.195s
+user    0m1.472s
+sys     0m0.104s
+pabs@halcyon:~/cvs/libfeed/test> time ./testfeed data/big-pdo-wdom.rss \
+  >/dev/null 2>&1
+real    0m2.010s
+user    0m1.475s
+sys     0m0.099s
+
+ +

+The Perl times were so bad I had to run +them twice to be sure. 60 times faster than Ruby and over 100 times faster than Perl; I'd say that's a pretty good start :). +

+ +

+Unfortunately, I have to be awake in three hours, so I'll have +to save the rest of the next-gen Raggle +description for another day... +

+ -- cgit v1.2.3