Doesn't work

Geo Swan

“Running” is what you get when there are a very large number of images, like thousands, that flickr2commons has to check, when looking for eligible images.

Once flickr2commons finds them, it sorts them. Back when I took computer science 101, we spent about a week learning about numerical analysis..

Sorting can be time-consuming. You won’t notice when the number of items to sort are small. But the amount of time to perform a sort doesn’t scale linearly.

Here are my suggestions. The first flickr2commons form lets you specify a maximum number of images for it look for. Try specifying 199, or 499, or 999.

The first flickr2commons form lets you request all eligible images in a flickr album. That should limit flickr2commons to a manageably small number of images.

Back in my day first year computer science students were supposed to learn that sorting using bad algorithms could cripple the performance of a program, and that they should always use the highly optimized sort function from the standard library.

But, nowadays, I suspect many apps are written by smart people who either didn’t spend that week being introduced to numerical analysis, or didn’t think they had to pay attention.

Amazon’s kindle is an instance of this. If you install kindle on a new android device, download a large number of books, and then tell kindle to transfer them to secondary memory chip, you could find that after slaving away at it for tens of minutes, kindle will crash your android. Someone is not using the library sort. Worse, in order to store the books you bought in a form that makes it difficult to copy that content for a friend, kindle does not use android’s actual file system. Instead it maintains one big file where they build their own proprietary file system. Guess what? Your big transfer of books to your memory stick? It it crashed on you that proprietary file system in maintains gets scrambled. You lose all your books, and have to redownload them all - but it does not free up the storage it used.

2022-10-10T17:51:27+00:00

Comments (1)

Geo Swan
“Running” is what you get when there are a very large number of images, like thousands, that flickr2commons has to check, when looking for eligible images.

Once flickr2commons finds them, it sorts them. Back when I took computer science 101, we spent about a week learning about numerical analysis..

Sorting can be time-consuming. You won’t notice when the number of items to sort are small. But the amount of time to perform a sort doesn’t scale linearly.

Here are my suggestions. The first flickr2commons form lets you specify a maximum number of images for it look for. Try specifying 199, or 499, or 999.

The first flickr2commons form lets you request all eligible images in a flickr album. That should limit flickr2commons to a manageably small number of images.

Back in my day first year computer science students were supposed to learn that sorting using bad algorithms could cripple the performance of a program, and that they should always use the highly optimized sort function from the standard library.

But, nowadays, I suspect many apps are written by smart people who either didn’t spend that week being introduced to numerical analysis, or didn’t think they had to pay attention.

Amazon’s kindle is an instance of this. If you install kindle on a new android device, download a large number of books, and then tell kindle to transfer them to secondary memory chip, you could find that after slaving away at it for tens of minutes, kindle will crash your android. Someone is not using the library sort. Worse, in order to store the books you bought in a form that makes it difficult to copy that content for a friend, kindle does not use android’s actual file system. Instead it maintains one big file where they build their own proprietary file system. Guess what? Your big transfer of books to your memory stick? It it crashed on you that proprietary file system in maintains gets scrambled. You lose all your books, and have to redownload them all - but it does not free up the storage it used.
- 2022-10-10T17:51:27+00:00
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