Multi-threaded programming

By Jim, on March 30th, 2007%

I’ve been head-down here working on the Web crawler and haven’t had much occasion to sit down and write blog entries. It’s been a very busy but interesting and rewarding time. A high performance distributed Web crawler is a rather complex piece of work. I knew that it would be involved, but there’s a lot . . . → Read More: Multi-threaded programming

One comment - (Comments are closed)   Programming, Web Crawling

New Computers

By Jim, on March 21st, 2007%

David and I went to Fry’s on Monday to pick up parts for three new computers. We’ve been plugging away on this project for the last two months using our personal machines and some castoffs, and started bumping into hardware limitations. Time to upgrade.

The new machines are Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.4 gigahertz with . . . → Read More: New Computers

One comment - (Comments are closed)   Computers

Is there a question here somewhere?

By Jim, on March 19th, 2007%

I uninstalled the Nero InCD program today while I was cleaning up my Windows machine. The uninstall program told me, before I confirmed that I wanted to remove the program, that I would have to reboot in order to complete the task. Fine. Except that when it was done uninstalling, it displayed this message box.

. . . → Read More: Is there a question here somewhere?

Comments are closed   User Interface

What housing bubble?

By Jim, on March 18th, 2007%

Almost two years ago in The Housing Bubble, I warned that the then-current home building boom was unsustainable and that soon we would begin to see record numbers of defaults and foreclosures. I said then that I hoped I was wrong. I wasn’t.

Last Tuesday, the Mortgage Bankers Association released their Latest MBA National Delinquency . . . → Read More: What housing bubble?

One comment - (Comments are closed)   Finance

Tasha, 1991 – 2007

By Jim, on March 11th, 2007%

Tasha the poodle came to us in May of 1997 along with her mom, Tiffany. Tasha was tiny when we got her. I think she weighed all of five pounds. I was always afraid that I’d somehow hurt her.

Timid as she was, and kind of dull personality-wise compared with Tiffany, Tasha still managed to . . . → Read More: Tasha, 1991 – 2007

One comment - (Comments are closed)   Pets

Crawling Along

By Jim, on March 5th, 2007%

After you get your basic web crawler downloading pages and extracting links, you find yourself having to make a decision: how do you feed the harvested URLs back into the crawler? For instance, if I visit www.mischel.com and extract a link to blog.mischel.com, how do I feed that new link back to the crawler so . . . → Read More: Crawling Along

3 comments - (Comments are closed)   Web Crawling

A New Look

By Jim, on March 3rd, 2007%

That’s a surprise, huh? You came here expecting to see the same old Random Notes page and you got something entirely different. It’s still me. But I’m in the process of changing things around a bit.

I’ve installed WordPress on my hosting server. WordPress is an online blogging tool that lets me post entries from . . . → Read More: A New Look

Comments are closed   Administration

Crawling the Web

By Jim, on March 1st, 2007%

I’m writing a Web crawler. Yeah, I know. It’s already been done. It seems like everybody’s done some Web crawling. But there’s a huge difference between dabbling at it and writing a scalable, high-performance Web crawler that can pull down hundreds or thousands of documents per second. Granted, processing more than a few dozen documents . . . → Read More: Crawling the Web

One comment - (Comments are closed)   Web Crawling