Klingon OCR systems???

The forum ranking system is loosely designed. Basically by looking at the way the forum gets used, the system attempts to guess how valuable it's going to be to potential readers. For reasons of speed it has to calculate this based on the index files, and may not (at present) consider the actual text in the forums. Anyway, the following characteristics are used:

  • Forum age – How many days old is the forum?
  • Forum size – How many total posts are in the forum?
  • Average post size – How long is the average post?
  • “Last24″ – How many posts have happened in the last 24 hours?
  • “Last168″ – How many posts have happened in the past week?
  • “Posters24″ – How many distinct posters have there been in the past 24 hours?
  • “Posters168″ – How many distinct posters have there been in the past week?
  • “Peak168″ – How many of the last week's posts have come from the top poster?
  • “Peaks168″ – How many of the last week's posts have come from the top five posters?
  • Inflation value – Is this forum being artificially inflated or deflated?

If anyone has suggestions for other things I can quickly generate that would be useful in determining forum rankings, please do point it out. I've written the code for most of the above and built the data structures to hold it, but I'm going to sleep on it before I do any more work on it.

Anyway, I've got an encryption project I want to put some more work into tonight… It's based around a few ideas I've explored in the past, including the Dilaudid Glide “harmonic quantizing engine” that I built while institutionalized. This engine was loosely based on the music system in one of the Dirk Gently novels; in essence it allows any numeric input data to be slightly “tweaked” (quantized) in order to make harmonic sense. This is coupled with a melodic engine that allows not just the creation of mathematically sensible harmonic structures, but also rhythmic structures and logical pattern systems.

One of the first companies I worked for wanted me to develop a method for sending secure faxes between computers. Please note that this was before the days where you could buy fax modems, so it was built around the small set of stand-alone fax machines that had been wired to computers. To overgeneralize, the system first utilized a “transmogrification engine” that converted the data from (presumed) English into Klingon (obviously inspired by the Navajo encryption method). Then traditional encryption was applied, and then the whole thing was output to an irregular Klingon font, which was then faxed. At the other end, a custom OCR application fine-tuned for Klingon (seriously) brought it into the destination computer.

Anyway, put those two things together and you've got a vague idea of what I'm working on.

Wow Shannon, that's really annoying! What is it, 1997 on Geocities? Retroweb is NOT cool!

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