Friday, July 29

Finished debugging today. Also put the final touches on the optimized compression length mode (that compresses each column using all segment lengths and then picks the one that resulted in the smallest file). Also cleaned up my code a lot. It's looking good!

Thursday, July 28

Good day today! Started debugging my code and found the bug. Turns out my code was fine, I had just forgotten to reformat the original file into a format to support the 64 bit compression. See the base length for VAL 32 is 7 so I reformat the file by chars so that I can read in one byte at a time (with an extra 0 at the beginning to signify a literal). However, to compress in VAL 64, it makes more sense to reformat the file by shorts (2 bytes) since the base length is 15. Once I reformatted the file correctly, it compressed the file perfectly in 64 bit. As a result, I changed some of reformatter and compressor code to make sure that it would select the correctly formatted version before compressing into the desired format. 

Wednesday, July 27

Unfortunately I had to go to urgent care for the second time this summer so I took another rest  day to recover. 

Tuesday, July 26

Feeling good after today! I finished reorganizing all of my code for simplicity and to extend it into VAL 64. I started debugging but there's more to be done the rest of the week but it's looking good!

Monday, July 25

Last week was an interview heavy week so coding took a bit of a back seat last week but now I'm back at it full force! Continued streamlining it all. Fairly close to my end goal. Just need to do some more overall reorganization and refactoring of all of the code. 

Thursday, July 21

I think I mentioned this in my last post but I have a few job interviews this week so I've been stepping back from my project to prepare and focus on those but I should be done by tomorrow morning and then I'll be jumping all the way in again!

Tuesday, July 19

Continued my work from yesterday but didn't work as much as I had hoped. I have a job interview on Thursday that I have been preparing for. 

Monday, July 18

Putting the final touches on the extension to 64-bit compression. I think all of the variables are set up but I want to streamline the entire program and move the old WAH compressor to use the active block struct I used for VAL. I think it should be finished by tomorrow and debugged/polished by the end of the week. 

Friday, July 15

Still continuing the extension to VAL 64. It's a bit trickier than I anticipated as it requires the addition of quite a few different global variables that I need to integrate throughout the entire compressor and query engine. Number of segments and word length are only two. The biggest change that I need to make is the reformatting segment length. For VAL 32, it was simple enough to reformat the bitmap byte by byte as the segment length was 7 so every 7 bits would be written with a leading 0. However, now that the segment length is 15, I need to reformat the file by every 16 bits with the addition of a leading 0. This means I need to use a typedef short to reformat the file. A bit tedious but it should be done next week. 

Thursday, July 14

I've just been working on extending my code to support 64 bit compression. It's mainly a matter of changing variables throughout my code. For example, instead of 7/14/28 bit segments it will use 15/30/45 bit segments. I just need to make sure I make these changes everywhere in the code and then it should be good to go!

Tuesday, July 12

After running tests on my VAL query engine, I have decided that I am satisfied with the code I have written. Now I can move on to extending the entire system into a 64-bit compression scheme using VAL. 

Monday, July 11

I went through my code today and debugged it, finding some errors. But I think everything is running properly! I have started running some tests to make sure it is all working and am going to continue doing so tomorrow. After that, it only be a matter of extending it into 64-bit compression and then editing the old WAH code to use the activeWord struct if I have time which I think I will since I am running ahead of schedule!

Wednesday, July 6

Today I worked extra hours to make up for the next few days because I am going to the mountains with my family for a few days. I got A LOT done today and I believe I'm pretty much done with all of the logic and flow of the program. There are a bunch of kinks to work out like parameter consistencies and which variables are being passed through but that will be all debugging work for next week. For now, I think the program as a whole is fairly close to working which is very exciting!

As I mentioned, I will be out of town Thursday and Friday so am taking those days off of coding. Until Monday!

Tuesday, July 5

Took the day off yesterday for the holidays. Today I continued adapting my WAH compressor to utilize the activeWord struct I'm using for the VAL compressor. For now I've decided to keep the WAH compressor using the old code but eventually I would like to alter the WAH query engine to use the new struct. The apending method is proving to be harder than I was expecting it to be but it's going. 

Friday, July 1

I finished debugging the decoder and have moved on to incorporating that into the query engine. This requires a bit of reorganization of my old code so it uses the active word struct instead of the raw word as in the WAH query code. It will take some finagling but shouldn't be awfully difficult.