This past week has been pretty hectic. I’ve spent most of my time working on a ‘Related Search’ engine for work. Basically, if someone searches for ‘cat’, it can suggest alternate searches, such as ‘cat food’, ‘cat toys’, ‘pet care’, etc. It’s a fairly large project — one that I’ve been working on in one shape or form for a year now. My original prototype worked with only a limited subset of data, but worked fairly well. I expect that this new and improved system will work orders of magnitude better.

It’s kind of silly the the way deadlines work. I was supposed to deliver implementation documentation before the system was assembled. I managed to delay that until, you know, we had decided on how we were going to implement it. Then there’s the actual act of deployment; it would be really nice if I had the hardware to deploy it on. Right now, it’s all running off of a single three year old development server with 512M of ram. With a database into the tens of gigabytes (and growing rapidly), this poor server is straining under the load. I just know that the question of when we can actually start selling this service and I’m going to have a minor battle on my hands to get the necessary hardware.

At least I have one thing to look forward to: five days til election day. I hope that there is a clear cut winner by the end of the day. I’m afraid of what will happen if this drags out like last year. I enjoy watching news and debating politics but there’s only so much partisan bickering I can take before I want to move to a shack in Montana and start a letter-writing campaign.