Tim Bray has started a series of articles about search. So far he’s covered the background of searching, what users want from search engines, and the basics of building a search engine. All great articles, with more to come.

I mention this because one of my summer projects is to build a search engine for this site. I was going to use a fast dynamic form of Latent Semantic Indexing with no real index.

Basically, I was going to generate a vector space based on the query words alone and not the overall dataset (it’s normal to get all the words in every document, create a vector space and then project a query into it). For a small data set, I think my proposed method would work better: providing better spacial efficiency (for sure) and time efficiency (as long as the query and data set were reasonably small).

Of course, this site is still growing. I wouldn’t want to build a search engine only to have to rebuild it in 6 months because the number of posts had grown substantially. So I’m going to wait until I’ve finished reading this series before going ahead with the project.

In a piece rightfully called The Holy Grail, Simon has come up with a method of writing form validation routines in PHP much easier.

At the moment, validating form data is one of the most tedious things a developer can do. It’s a lot of effort for an important, but barely noticeable effect. I think I’ll be following the progress of this project very closely.

It’s only been up for 2 days and someone is already using my Palindrome API. Hooray!

Derek is using it in quite a similar way to the already existing form, but who cares? It’s really just an academic exercise just now anyway. So, go visit the Palindrome Game.

In related news, I’m going to introduce a few new methods soon. Just need to get into the mindset to code again.

Identity (starring John Cusack and Ray Liotta) is stylish, tense, genuinely creepy and, ultimately, stupid.

The basic premise is interesting enough: a bunch of strangers get stranded together at a motel until morning, their numbers lessening as the night unfolds. So far, so slasher flick. But the strangers come to realise that they all have a connection to each other and they might not be their by accident after all. At this point, there is a real sense of sinister going-ons.

And then the words “ancient Indian burial ground” are mentioned. Thankfully, however, that most laughable of plot devices is never capitalised on. Instead, we’re subjected to something far more embarrasing; the sort of surprise only a writer who ran out of interest could come up with. The audience left laughing.

A perfect example of a movie ruined by a twist.

So, it’s happened once more. To turn it into an end of term tradition, some of my friends and I went bowling today. The last time I went bowling, my hand was all but crippled. This time it’s my knee. How that happened is anyones guess.

We played 10 games: each winning three before the big finale. The person who did worst last time absolutely stormed it this time, stealing the last game and ridiculing the rest of our scores.

On the plus side, I managed to get the high-score of the day: a modest 150. It’s probably my personal best.

Anyway, bowling might look like a sport for the lazy, but boy does it hurt if you’re not used to it. Ice-pack this way, please.