Doing my Bit for Research

I've been working on a 'little' project recently.

Over the past five years or so, I've been researching my family history. Thanks to the growth of the interweb this has become far easier. Using free and subscription services I've built up a large family tree going back several centuries on several ancestral lines. Others unfortunately don't go back so far.

As a result of my research I've actually contacted distant cousins who have had similar research projects.

Some of the resources I've used haven't always been big and fancy. Many family history websites contain information that an individual has gained by something as simple as spending a few hours walking around a graveyard and transferring the information to the net. As families are all interconnected, the information they transcribe is likely to be useful to someone else.

Once indexed by a search engine, such information can then easily be checked and used by another researcher.

This is the aim of my project. I have found on the net a huge resource consisting of thousands of pages of useful information. Unfortunately the information only exists as scanned images. Some basic indexing has been done by the website that provides the information but looking for specific information is very time consuming.

I have started collating that information into a database. Eventually I shall upload this to the interweb in some fashion or the other. Hopefully others will make some use of the information to trace their own family histories.

The entire project is huge for a single person. At the moment I'm transferring the information from about ten or so scans a week. The first section alone is over 300 scans. So optimistically I can't see myself completing it for about a year. The entire project is even more daunting. There are approximately fifty entries on each scan, each 300 or so entries to a book (approximately 5 or 6 pages). So I can do about 2 books (600 database items) a week.

There are over 1200 books. Doing some guestimating, if I don't get bored and I can continue my current rate. It will take me 600 weeks, which would mean eleven or twelve years. So I'm hoping I'll get this first section completed, it will be a huge success, then I'll get some volunteers and maybe it will only take a couple of years.

Testing Times

Boring technical type entry.

I've added a search facility to the blog. It's still in the testing phase at the moment. I might have to do a few things to it, to get it to do what I want, so I can get all my permanent links indexed not just the ones on this page. The engine I've used allows multiple URLs, so I've not only indexed the blog, I've added the Nice Nostalgia Archive too.

A word of warning though if you decide to do this yourself. Be careful how you set these things up. At first I tried connecting the NNA index to the blog index through the sidebar link but it ended up indexing EVERYTHING that I linked in the blog. It looked nice but used up my allocated index space rather quickly as it sucked up all those progressive links into it's database. Even resetting it didn't help. Had to delete the index and start from scratch with two different indices (I love weird plurals, that might be worth an entry in itself).

Edit: Dumped that one. Trying a different one, see if it's any better. Seems to index both URLs which is cool.

Game Submission

I hate posting two entries on the same day that could easily have been combined into one. I'm a self-loathing kind of guy, so I'll carry on.

After playing about with the ZX Spectrum Emulators that I mentioned a while ago, I decided to submit a game to the annual CSS Crap Game Competition. It's more of a simulation than a game to be honest. It's written in Sinclair Basic, so runs very slowly. Thankfully many modern emulators allow you to speed up the old Speccy to a decent Megahertz-age.

The game is called Langton's Ant. I even made up a cassette inlay for it.

This doesn't look like anything fancy but it took me a while to put together. It took me ages to find a decent picture of an ant. I thought with the size of the interweb and the amount of ants in the world there would be plenty, but I was wrong.

Anyway, if you have a speccy emulator download it and have a go. If you like it a lot you can even transfer it to cassette. Feel free to print the inlay and make it look like a proper Spectrum game.

If you are wondering what Langton's Ant actually is, then click here.

I Made Some Science

All those years of toiling in my evil laboratory have finally paid off. I have made the ultimate discovery, a weblog survey by MIT. Behold it's mighty power! The power to create a graphical hyperlink from the primal forces of nature itself.



With this power, no mortal can stand in my way. My plan for world domination shall be complete. Right after I've been to the shops and washed the dishes.