I recently had a reason to parse a large data set, for another project. I decided that an ideal “large data set” would be my Outlook mail saved archives. Sadly, Outlook for Mac doesn’t output PST files, it outputs OLM archives, which are, essentially, giant zip files full of XML. I was coding this all in Java, so I needed a Java library to parse OLM files.
The resulting source code is here. Schema for OLM XML is here.
Pragmatach version 1.38 has been released Here are the notable changes: Numerous bugs that were identified by Findbugs have been resolved. Upgraded from Antlr3 to Antlr4 Upgraded to scannotation 1.03 Added url_for API to make generation of urls in templates simpler
I recently got a call from a friend who has a library of thousands of PDF documents. He wanted to know there was a such thing as a personal search engine that could index his library of documents, and allow full text search inside of them. I have a giant document library too, including PDF…
If you haven’t read this book, I highly recommend it. I discovered it in high school and finally purchased my first copy at the now-gone Duthie Books in Kitsilano. Without going into the details of the book, the author uses a simple Peano arithmetic called Typographical Number Theory (TNT) to illustrate some of his points. An example…
Back in the day, Paradox was a pretty amazing database. I recently had a reason to read some Paradox files for a friend, who had a client with a Paradox database. They needed their data out of the database to insert into something more modern. Googling for the file format of a Paradox DB didn’t…
I recently found myself in a situation where mission-critical software was suffering from performance problems due to relying on a remote API which was both slow (as slow as 11sec / transaction), and unreliable. In this case, it turned out that there were multiple applications accessing this API, and every individual application was affected….
I recently had a chance to learn a little about Bioinformatics, and ended up browsing the NIH’s database of genomes here. Inside the genome data for any particular strain of a species, you’ll find various files with file extensions like “ffa”, “fna”, “ffn” and “frn”. These are FASTA files. If you’d like an example, here’s…