Greetings, monks!

I'd like to take a moment to shamelessly plug the new book The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America's First Superhero by my friend and client Bill Kalush, and co-author Larry Sloman.

The copious research for the book was made possible by a web-based, fully text-searchable, categorized database of over 700,000 documents.

The system, called Alexander, used MySQL as a backend, mod_perl, and several batch processing jobs that talked to pdftk, iconv and Image Magick.

It also made heavy use of dozens of CPAN modules. Among them:

It was all made possible by Perl, and of course the gracious help of The Monastery!

2006-10-24 Retitled by Arunbear, as per consideration {tye: (edit) Remove "OT:" from title} (Keep: 7, Edit: 15, Reap: 0)

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: The Secret Life of Houdini
by robot_tourist (Hermit) on Oct 24, 2006 at 10:15 UTC

    Not really off-topic, even though it is a book-plug. but any notes on the architecture ofthe system and how you put it together would be cool. Is it feasible to roll your own? Do you distribute your system? Is there a cost? What is the license? Is Alexander currently searchable by the public/is there a link to it?

    Hope that's not too many questions.

    How can you feel when you're made of steel? I am made of steel. I am the Robot Tourist.
    Robot Tourist, by Ten Benson

[reply]

      but any notes on the architecture ofthe system and how you put it together would be cool.

      I've been thinking of writing a detailed meditation or article about building the system, which was a lot of fun and also a real challenge. Right now I'm beginning work on version 2, which will have some new features.

      Do you distribute your system? Is there a cost? What is the license? Is Alexander currently searchable by the public/is there a link to it?

      Alexander is currently proprietary, but subscriptions are available via the Conjuring Arts Research Center. There aren't any plans to open-source the code right now, and much of the indexed content is under copyright and licensed to CARC, so it's not publically searchable. And since it all runs on a single 1U server which is on the verge of melting into a smoking heap of liquid metal, that probably wouldn't be a good idea anyway. :)

[reply]

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