www.marginalia.nu

You may be looking for one of the following things

🔗 Search Engine
🔗 Encyclopedia (not mobile-friendly!)
🔗 Website Explorer^improved
🔗 Similar Website Finder
🔗 Server Status

My name is Viktor. I’m a Swedish software engineer and hypertext enjoyer. Marginalia is a website I’ve built. It’s really almost a bunch of websites on a common theme. If you find yourself clicking a link and ending up on a page that looks completely different, that’s just how things are.

🌎 Marginalia Search on GitHub
🦤 @MarginaliaNu on Twitter
🦤 @marginalia@mastodon.social
📺 @ViktorLofgren on YouTube
✉️ kontakt@marginalia.nu on Email

Site Index

Recent Updates

2024-11-05 Notes on binary soup in log

I recently put together a small library called Slop, for intermediate on-disk data representation for the search engine, replacing a few ad-hoc formats I had in place before. This post isn’t so much an attempt to convince anyone else to use this library, as it makes trade-offs catering to a fairly niche use case, but to explore some of its design ideas, as it all came together very nicely, in the hopes that other libraries can draw ideas from it.

2024-10-14 Release Notes v2024.10.0 in release-notes

This is a new major release of marginalia search, mostly leaning toward the technical side. Emphasis has been on ensuring the search engine has the technical capabilities to serve more types of queries, especially longer queries which it previously did not handle very well. Effort has also been put toward making sure it’s possible to install and run outside of docker. There is still some work to be done to streamline the installation process, but we’re getting there.

2024-09-30 Phrase Matching in Marginalia Search in log

Marginalia Search now properly supports phrase matching. This not only permits a more robust implementation of quoted search queries, but also helps promote results where the search terms occur in the document exactly in the same order as they do in the query. This is a write-up about implementing this change. This is going to be a relatively long post, as it represents about 4 months of work. I’m also happy and grateful to announce that the nlnet people reached out after the run of the grant was over and asked me if I had more work in the pipe, and agreed to fund this change as well!

2024-09-22 The sorry state of Java deserialization in log

I’ve been on a bit of a frustration-driven quest to solve a problem I frequently encounter working on the search engine, that is, reading data from disk. You’d think this would be a pretty basic thing, but doing this in a way that is half-way performant is surprisingly hard and requires avoiding basically all the high level tools at your disposal. There’s a common sentiment that modern hardware is fast, so this may not matter, but we aren’t speaking a 30% performance hit, the the question is how many orders of magnitude you’re willing to forego.

2024-07-31 Less Coffee, Better Sleep in log

As an experiment, I’ve reduced my coffee-intake to a single cup a day for about a week now. It’s made an enormous difference in sleep, mood and energy. I get tired at night, fall asleep quickly, and wake up refreshed. As mentioned previously in the context of morning sunlight exposure—another thing that’s aided my sleeping habits, but is somewhat less practical to sustain as it requires fair weather—I’ve always been slow to get going in the morning, active at night, bad at getting to bed at sane hours.

Tags