Some days make you feel so hopeless

Tough day, couldn't focus. And although this blog was primarily intended to go about all my wacky projects, programs and whatnot, I couldn't just ignore the fact that I lost my grandpa today. Grandpa, I'll never forget your great character.

I had loads of things on the planning, but scratched pretty much all of them. I needed to do something simple to get my mind off things, so it was time for some doodling with Huffman encoding. Huffman encoding is pretty simple once you understand the concept, but I didn't want to do a full implementation integrated into perennial before I knew that it would actually improve things.

So, I grabbed a simple library, worked my way through it's internals (some people really got to learn the concept of documentation) and retooled perennial to use it. It wasn't perfect, but it'd prove the point of whether or not this would work. The reason I was so hesitated to use it was because it's completely incompatible and useless for database usage (which is one of the requirements for perennial) but does give a little extra 'boost' in your output. Most compression tools out there currently use it in one way or another.

Luckily it did improve things quite a bit. The output went from 72583 bytes (2.2x compression) down to 53625 bytes. That's 3.0x compression! I'm actually getting close to bzip2, so it's even more important to check if the output is correct. To be honest, I still haven't done that part, but I believe most of it is sound.

Right, I'll keep it short today. My mind is going in all kinds of directions and I guess I'm just going to get some sleep and think things over. As of tomorrow I'll be away for the weekend so the next update will be most likely on Monday. Good night to you all, you too grandpa.

[: wacco :]

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