I’ve revoked my old PGP public key and replaced it with a 4096 bit DSA key, my new key is available here and is also listed on subkeys.pgp.net. Please update your keyring.

Paul Raven, bass player for Killing Joke, Ministry and others died unexpectedly of a heart attack in Geneva in the early hours of Saturday October 20th 2007. He will be sadly missed!!

Here is the obligatory ‘Happy New Year’ post, if a little late. The site also has a new look for the new year.

Making some decent progress with Pry lately, a web based search engine that I am writing for my Uni final year project. I pretty much have the basic search functionality working without problems, and now need to work on some more advanced crawling techniques and some stuff to improve searching like stemming and page ranking. I was a bit concerned about the speed of performing searches and indexing while initially designing the system, but thanks to python and the Berkeley DB libraries the whole thing should be pretty scalable. I’ll upload a working demo here shortly.

Back to Uni on Sunday for another term so progress should speed up a bit.

After a few months without really getting chance to work on my content management system I have finally decided to switch the site back-end to WordPress for now. At least it will allow me to have a fully functioning website while I work on finishing off the CMS. I’ve been really busy with coursework and revision for uni recently and really havn’t had time to work on it a great deal, it’s looking like it will be summer before I have a chance to finish it now. I was getting a bit bored with the theme I’d written for the old site so I decided to write something completly different for WP, it still looks a bit “theme” like but I’m working on improving it.

I’m slowly porting the content over from the old site as I get chance, it should all be up soon althought I am pretty busy at the moment. I’m also going to stick my CV and some other stuff up and hopefully make this site a bit more useful than it has been.

Things have been a bit dull lately, last term was a lot of work and I didn’t get up to much that was a lot of fun. Quite a lot of the work was pretty boring and massivley time consuming, ended up pulling more all nighters than I can remember. We had quite a bit of work to do at the beggining of this term for the software engineering project and my exams start next week, so I still have quite a bit of work on. After exams we also have preparatory work to do for our finaly year project, which means I’m going to miss out on a holiday to Newquay with the rest of my housemates. I’m really looking forward to the end of term and the beggining of summer. Hopefully I’m going to learn to drive over summer, provided I get a job to pay for it all. Anyway, it’s pretty late and I need to get up and revise tommorow.