The VPN as a barometer of overwork

It's Sunday, and my Tellme VPN reads 15 hours, 38 minutes. Wait, scratch that — it's 1:20am on Monday. Maybe I'm working too much?

I blame Danny for daring me to write up how twinql works. The document is underway!

Posted at 2005-10-23 17:19:18 by Richard • Link to The VPN as a barom…
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Big graphs

On #swig:

sky_:

it is 100k documents, 16k unique words and 8.7 million edges

sky_:

the downside is, that loading that into memory currently takes an hour or so

danja:

hmm, big data

JibberJim:

hmm, does an 8.7million edge polygon have a special name?

danja:

JJ, "ball"

Posted at 2005-10-23 15:00:23 by Richard • Link to Big graphs
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EAN to ISBN conversion

Don kindly gave me a ‘neutered’ :CueCat USB barcode scanner, so I've finally got round to scanning some of my books.

Of course, it scoops in the EAN, not the ISBN, from the barcode. This doesn't hamper Books too much, but it does mean I've got an incorrect field that's a pain to fix.

Enter 15 minutes of Lisping, producing ean2isbn.lisp. Two useful functions are exported from the ean-to-isbn package:

• ean-to-isbn does exactly what it says on the tin. Takes a 13-character string.
• ean-file-to-isbn-file takes two filenames. The first must exist, and contains EANs, one per line. The second will be appended to if it exists, and otherwise will be created and filled with ISBNs.

Enjoy.

Sometime I'll wrap this with cl-launch… a shell script will do for now.

Posted at 2005-10-23 06:52:35 by Richard • Link to EAN to ISBN conver…
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Persistence

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

Calvin Coolidge

Via Vowel Movement.

Posted at 2005-10-23 01:56:48 by Richard • Link to Persistence
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