About Sean
A picture of my email address. Annoying, isn’t it?
Recently arrived back in the UK from a slightly over-long break in Malaysia, looking for an excuse to put down some roots somewhere. We’re currently gathering moss in Devon, though I suspect we’ll be rolling again soon enough.
I wrote some Damerau Levenshtein MySQL UDFs and Java methods. Well actually, I enhanced some existing Levenshtein-only code – the attribution is still in the source. You can download them from my Damerau Levenshtein page.
Spider.my was … interesting, but is now gone. It was a fairly full-featured, multi-language search engine just like Google only not quite as good. I thought it was at least as good as Gigablast, better than Cuil and Baidu (why is Baidu not a thousand times better than it is?), *and* it offered more currency exchange conversions than Google, and instant shipping quotations, and it featured a cheerful yellow spider.
It was an awful lot cheaper than Google, running on a small VPS for the web front-end and on two or three cheap Dell PowerEdge servers on my desk at home, responding to RMI requests from the web front end over an SSH tunnel. Totalling 18GB RAM (on a good day) and 1.2TB data, it consumed about 300RM of electricity per month – a few percent of what I would have paid if I’d rented the equivalent from a data centre. It’ll be a while before I’m in a position to host my own search engine again, the servers wouldn’t fit in my suitcase.
Some of the API from spider.my is now reincarnated at shipping-quote.net. If you’re looking for automated shipping quotations to integrate with an e-commerce site, drop me a line and there’s probably some code lying around here that will plug you straight into some.
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