Cîmpii de duminică – cum să fii diplomat

Citeam ieri un ziar de alaltăieri și am văzut că guvernarea chineză a refuzat participarea la un summit UE-China. Cît tact trebuie să ai ca porți niște relații cu așa guvern de rahat, să stabilești întrevederi cu ei, să discuți despre economie, mediu, armată și politică în general (drepturile omului sunt altă treabă).

Vorbind cu un chinez am încercat să îndrept discuția spre sportivii lor care au cîștigat medalii la jocurile olimpice. Aproape orice altceva aș fi vorbit despre țara lui mi-ar fi trezit un sentiment cumplit de ipocrizie. Două fire total paralele, pe de o parte încerci să îndrugi ceva plăcut despre ei, pe de alta știi că e țara în care: cel mult cîteva sute de mii/milioane de oameni cu funcții în stat oprimă o majoritate de peste un miliard; în care a avut loc scandalul cu melamina din lapte; în care cîteva mii de oameni sunt executați oficial în fiecare an; în care faci închisoare pe motive politice fără nici o problemă; care implementează Great Firewall of China; care nu a reușit să infirme zvonurile despre oamenii omorîți pentru organe, și or mai fi.

Ce altceva puteam să mai discut? Eventual despre cultură? Dacă tot e atîta cultură de ce **** *** își conduc țara în felul ăsta?

Ș-am scris pagina asta în română ca în caz de-oi fi prieten cu vreun chinez să nu afle cu atîta ușurință că eu m-am căcat pe țara lui pe blogu ăsta. Cred că prima dată cînd mai aud pe cineva că plînge după Ceaușescu nu mai stau pe gînduri înainte să sar la bătaie .

Full text search – bachelor’s thesis

Long after the bachelor’s exam I am uploading my bachelor’s thesis project, as I promised some time ago.
It is a desktop text search engine, written entirely in C++ and the Qt libraries, with all the code related to scanning, storing and searching the information written from scratch and only using the basic C++ and Qt data structures.

You may download the torrent (http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4538524) and can also find it here, on a thing called sendspace (first upload service that Google revealed, I don’t know if it is working).
I will upload also the paper when I’ll find it, altough that is not a big thing either.

The archive contains:
-Windows executable + Qt libraries
-Linux executable (debug build).
-All the source code.

The scanning speed is CPU bound, and it is incovenient to fix. It toped at around 1MB/s on the old system and 1.5MB/s on the new one. The space overhead tends to around 13% of the scanned contents. The search is fast and can use simple AND, OR and exact phrase combinations. I even used it for a few weeks until going back to Recoll.
The source code is GPL v2+, as Qt requires. There is no license notice on each source file but nobody will die from that. Try the tree viewer as I consider it very nice for the small quantity of time I put into it.

The blatant limitations and defects:
-the scanning speed;
-the inconsistent and unfinished threading + crashes.
-the bad and unfinished user interface;
-the overall usefulness is by far not that of a real program anyway.

It comes so late as I did not have a Windows machine or a cross compiler until now, and I finally installed a Windows copy in VirtualBox. That’s enough for such a small project.
Note:
Remember to add a screenshot tomorrow .

Deutsche Sprache (și chestii de pe coclauri)

Mi-a cam trecut avîntul de învăţat germană. Mai continui pînă mă întorc acasă. Îmi iau cărţi ca să mai scot oleacă din praf franceza, şi mă apuc şi încep încă o limbă latină (nu spui care). Germana, cine ştie…

Diverse 1:
În buna tradiție a omului oleacă extremist acest blog va conține de acum doar „ș” și „ț” cu virgulă, indiferent de cîți cititori ratează cu această ocazie (și așa nu-s foarte mulți).

Google alternative

If you want to search on Google for an exact word, without leting the search engine to replace it with another more popular word, all you need to do is to place a + (plus) in front of the word. For example searching for a Romanian and an English word in the same page: +temă +book.
I thank sirrocco for sharing this. This was update no. 3 and the last one.

Today I am trying to search for some obscure terms that goole insists on aproximating with much more popular words. As I don’t know exactly what I am looking for, I can’t make a refined search or create an exact phrase. I don’t know how to instruct the search engine to look for my exact words and not aproximate them.

I tryed with Yahoo search and with the more anonymous Exalead (http://www.exalead.com/search). Yahoo altough is not “rounding” my words, is still not giving me a good order. Exalead on the other hand seems to have an interesting order but it looks like it is not indexing too many pages, and I am afraid my page is too obscure to be found (it exists/existed for sure).

Since someone requested a more serious explanation
Aproximating means that if there are two paronyms (or words that are similar, but from different languages), the least used one may be eclipsed by the most used one as in the artificial examples (I don’t want to share on my blog what I was looking for):
Search terms: movie akelas
Google will show many results with akela’s, movie. Thus it transformed “akelas” in akela’s and akela. That is usually exactly what I want, but not this time (movie-akelas-google-search).
Yahoo will show more results exactly with akelas on the first page, thus being somewhat closer to what I want (movie-akelas-yahoo-search).
Exalead will be even closer (movie-akelas-exalead-search).
From the difficulty of gathering this example, I can tell you that Google does an incredibly good job with most searches.

The situation is not even that bad in this artificial example. What I was actually looking for was non-english words in an english context, the non english words will be aproximated to english ones. Say for example I am looking for the word temă, in an english context, thus, have the search for: temă book going into : tema book.

Please excuse the file name, they where automatically given by wordpress, I won’t reupload them to fix this. I already made enough extra effort to describe a problem which I eventually solved (with Yahoo this time).

So no, this is not a message that tells people how bad Google is .

If you have any recommendations please tell me (be it that you know how to instruct Google to search for the exact words, or you know a search engine that works better in this case).

Early update:
Looking with Google for google alternatives (how ironic is this?) I got to Screwgle (http://www.google-sux.com/). I thought is was a Google joke, but is actually links to Ask.com, and the results of the search are not better at all. It does the exact same aproximation of the words. “The Algorithm is not working.”

Contagieux

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yawn)
(http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Yawn)

Using the microphone in Debian – I hope Windows XP works on my laptop

Update: Using the ncurses program “alsamixer” I was able to get decent settings and make the mic. work right. Unlike KMix and Alsamixergui, changes made with alsamixer were applied. It is also keyboard friendly (it’s stupid console in fact, couldn’t be otherwise). I’m still thinking about other OS, this was too big a hassle

VoIP is finally reaching us, and offers prices that are unbelievably good. Buy credit from a VoIP provider (TerraSIP in my case), start a VoIP program (WengoPhone in this Debian case), do some settings to the program and call home. I have mention that quality is also surprising, I guess that in more than half of the case it is better than phone to phone. Being abroad this means very important savings.

And I did this, until Debian sabotaged me. To make the microphone work correctly on this laptop, a fair bit of experimentation is necessary, I did that and everything worked. After some time, with no conscious ALSA related changes on my system, this doesn’t work anymore, and the sound is no longer clear. It now misses all the higher frequency sounds and transforms them in squeaks.

The bad thing is that I don’t know where the problem is coming from, and more, I have no idea how to solve it.

Here’s a picture showing Alsamixergui with the best settings I could get. The program has tons of controls and none of them is explained. Googling didn’t give me too many answers. Some of the controls cannot be used (although KMix uses them, but to no effect), and also the range of possible combinations, without using a manual, is frightening.

So counting the sacrifices done for running Debian:
-no 3d acceleration -> No playing CS with friends. No other interesting gaming. I never got too far with Blender to feel the need for real 3d, but I will.
-problems with opening fancy shit office documents, not using proprietary math software from the university, others like this -> A few bad marks and some time wasted.
-calling at home from abroad with prices as much as 15 times higher than the VoIP ones. Well, this is the hot point, the costs are directly measurable as money. I guess now I have enough reasons to leave the Debian away.

So, where to?
I guess Windows XP/Server 2003. (The Vista saga is also written on this blog, and it is also not happy.) After about 3 years of running Linux on an underpowered desktop (but at least with good sound ), I have to give up goodies like KDE+Kwin, a decent console, nice package management from Debian, easy development with Qt and easy plugging in of external libraries, the Xorg middle click paste and easy switching of users and desktops. The good thing is that Amarok, Kate, Konqueror, KOrganizer and others make their way to Windows, I will be able to use the decent Visual Studio debugger and some others.

There are alternatives, but with shortcomings:
KUbuntu, I’am afraid they will try on me stuff like PulseAudio, the kernel TCP/IP bug (they didn’t release this one after all), and other half working thinks.
SuSE looks attractive, but it seems they said goodbye to KDE 3 and I guess there are not as many programs as with Debian.
Mandriva. My all time favorite, although the lack of proprietary packages (and also free ones) makes it hard to use.
And also, there’s no guarantee the sound problems will go away, while with Windows I have high hopes they will.

Oh, and later random thoughts:
-the man/woman/guy/dude (I didn’t dig to see who he/she is) from linuxhatersblog said he would stop. I still think he knew a lot more about Linux than I do.
-I still hate AMD/ATI for tricking me into buying a laptop with a radeonhd “supported” shit video card. I hope they will get their shit together though, as competition is always good.
-I will ask some help from some ALSA guys before leaving Debian. I would do some coding myself, but it’s a bit beyond my power.
-I think this message has a record number of “shit” words, I think 5 if we include this one. There is no f-word though. I hope there’s none on this whole blog.