Hello
This is the first post. I’ll be writing about programming and somehow related areas that I’m interested in and want to learn more. Basically I’ll document what I have done and learned, mostly for myself, but if someone manages to get here by googling, it’s even better. At least for the summer I should have some time to spend on this, but after that the amount of posts will decrease.
For the first real post I will write about Boyer-Moore string searching algorithm. When I implemented it, I couldn’t find any decent explanation about the implementation of the good suffix rule. The basics behind BM are quite easy to understand but the implementation itself is not so straightforward. By writing about it, I’ll see if I really understood it.
Next, I would like to experiment a little with Linux from scratch. I have used many different Linux distributions, but I don’t have a clue what is required for a working system after you have the kernel image. I have been using Emacs for awhile, and it would be nice to try to setup Linux with as few libraries and applications as possible and just use Emacs for everything (as a terminal, shell etc.). I think it wouldn’t be very usable for the long run since it would miss a lot of modern features but something like writing and uploading blog post on it should be possible.
I chose Octopress for my blogging needs since it seems to be quite lightweight and just what I need (and of course, who doesn’t like Markdown?). It doesn’t require anything on the server side (except SSH access for easier deployment) and writing new posts seems to be easy. I don’t really know anything about blogging platforms at this point and at first I thought that I have to use Wordpress or Joomla which might have been little too heavyweight. As a web hosting provider I chose Webhotelli.fi because it was quite cheap and offered SSH with their smallest plan where providers only include SSH with more expensive plans (i.e. buy more disk space to get SSH).