(no subject)
Well I got my new phone and I like it! It's like my Razr of old, but with updated tech and a funky flip screen thingie. I still haven't used all of its features, but it does everything I need very well. The keyboard can be a bit overwhelming (lots of keys), but isn't too obnoxious since the number keys are very obvious so they're easy to hit.
We had a meeting at work today with the company president to discuss my projects. Basically my projects (a parts catalog and an analysis site) are completed and he wants people to test them and provide me with feedback so I can tweak things and fix bugs. This is a good thing as working endlessly on the same project becomes mind-numbing. I had feared that this would signal the impending end of my work there, but instead he's asked me to take on a new project for him. Essentially it amounts to a specialized search engine of internal documents.
I'm kind of looking forward to it, really. Search engines use some pretty cool technology and it's fun to brainstorm how to make it locate information quickly, accurately and provide useful results. I made a prototype today that is pretty simplistic: it just searches through the database, locates keywords and returns the results with a rating of how strong of a match each result was. I'm hoping to go down to the letter level and provide a much more accurate rating. Also I'd like to sort those results; which is remarkably challenging in ASP without making some incredibly slow code. I read up on that today and found some benchmarks showing that a standard bubble sort operation through ASP quickly becomes inefficient. It starts off at like 30ms or something for 20 records, but by the time you hit over 1000 records it's suddenly over 7000ms. That's some pretty bad scaling. Fortunately there are alternatives with JS, but it will require some data manipulation to get everything going to the right place.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to it!
We had a meeting at work today with the company president to discuss my projects. Basically my projects (a parts catalog and an analysis site) are completed and he wants people to test them and provide me with feedback so I can tweak things and fix bugs. This is a good thing as working endlessly on the same project becomes mind-numbing. I had feared that this would signal the impending end of my work there, but instead he's asked me to take on a new project for him. Essentially it amounts to a specialized search engine of internal documents.
I'm kind of looking forward to it, really. Search engines use some pretty cool technology and it's fun to brainstorm how to make it locate information quickly, accurately and provide useful results. I made a prototype today that is pretty simplistic: it just searches through the database, locates keywords and returns the results with a rating of how strong of a match each result was. I'm hoping to go down to the letter level and provide a much more accurate rating. Also I'd like to sort those results; which is remarkably challenging in ASP without making some incredibly slow code. I read up on that today and found some benchmarks showing that a standard bubble sort operation through ASP quickly becomes inefficient. It starts off at like 30ms or something for 20 records, but by the time you hit over 1000 records it's suddenly over 7000ms. That's some pretty bad scaling. Fortunately there are alternatives with JS, but it will require some data manipulation to get everything going to the right place.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to it!