Triceps 2.1.0 released

After a long break, Triceps 2.1.0 is finally released: http://triceps.sourceforge.net/

It includes two important features:

1. The fast compiled Ordered index. The code for it has been sitting in SVN for three years, and I have finally found time to update the documentation to replace the old ordered index implemented in Perl with the new one.

2. Triceps now builds works with the modern versions of C++ and Perl. This was harder to do than it sounds, since the C++ standard has changed in an incompatible and unpleasant way. But the good news is that the code produced by the new compiler is a good deal faster than by the old one.

Principal component analysis

Today I've learned about the existence of the Principal component analysis. It's supposed to find the orthogonal dimensions that best describe the variance of the data set. Perhaps this is the real answer for removing the duplication in the dimensions that I've been thinking about some time ago. And it had been invented in 1901! I haven't understood it yet, will need to read up on it. For now just making a note so that I won't forget about it.

Triceps in flux

I've finally updated my machine to a modern version of Linux (Mint 19), and now I'm going through, so to say, bringing Triceps into the Century of the Fruit Bat. Both C++ and Perl languages have changed, (and as has been mentioned in a previous post, Ghostscript had functionality removed).

Most annoyingly, C++ doesn't allow to call even the non-virtual methods on the NULL pointers any more. Well, it does allow to call them, but  auto-removes any checks for (this == NULL) inside the methods. And I've been using this in multiple places. But now it's all worked around by using the special static objects and the code builds again.

The tests still fail though, but now it's hopefully all trivial: some message got changed because of the different hashing, and also the Perl tests fail because the syntax of regexps got changed in Perl 5.26, it doesn't accept the plain "{" in the patterns any more. But I'm working on it.