Marginalia
Viktor Lofgren
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.
July 2026
Top Words
- marginalia
- search
- index
- software
- years
- grant
- crawler
- astrolabe
- internet
- query
All posts (137)
I found myself effectively without a job on short notice. I’m not at all worried about finding another one, I have savings, and I have experience, and I have demonstrable skill. What I am concerned about is finding a source of income that’s compatible with putting some time on my personal projects. Last bunch of...
I’m going to think out loud for a moment about a problem I’m considering. RAM is a precious resource on any server. Look at VPS servers, and you’ll be hard pressed to find one with much more than 32 Gb. Look at leasing a dedicated server, and it’s the RAM that really drives up the price. My server has 128 Gb, and it...
I’ve been working lately on a bit of an overhaul of how the search engine does indexing. How it indexes its indices. “Index” is a bit of an overloaded term here, and it’s not the first that will crop up. Let’s start from the beginning and build up and examine the problem of searching for a number in a list of...
This is mostly a post to complain about something that chafes. I wish there was a programming language (ideally several) that acknowledged that computers have hard drives, not just a processor, RAM and other_devices[]. Something that has struck me when I’ve been working with the search engine is how unfinished the...
The search engine index has grown quite considerably the last few weeks. It’s actually surpassed 50 million documents, which is quite some milestone. In February it was sitting at 27-28 million or so. About 80% of this is side-loading all of stackoverflow and stackexchange, and part of it is additional crawling. The...
Note: This is satirical in nature. Slight CW if you are at a point in life where “Office Space” has unveiled itself as a disturbing existential horror movie. This taps into that the same darkness. A tale of six brave Internet pioneers. Senior Business Founder / Senior CEO – Zach Senior Tech Lead / Senior Architect /...
Let’s define a simple mathematical function, the function will perform integer factoring. It will take an integer, and return two integers, the product of which is the first integer. F(int32 n) = (int32 A, int32 B) so that A*B = n This is fairly straight forward, mathematical, objective. Let’s examine some answers...
I’ve caught some bug and don’t have the energy to write more than a brief note. I want to commemorate the fact that work on the Marginalia search engine started one year ago. The first commit was on February 26th 2021, and contained a sketch for a website crawler and some data models. In many ways, the paint is...
In a near future, a team of desktop computer designers are looking at the latest telemetry and updating the schematics of the hardware-as-a-service self-assembling nanohardware. Steve: “Hmm, they don’t seem to be using the power button very often.” Bob: “Compared to the other buttons, it’s only used 0.1% of the...
Not what I had intended to do this Saturday, but a hard drive failed on the server this morning, or at least so it seemed. MariaDB server went down, dmesg was full of error messages for the nvme drive it’s running off. That’s a pretty important drive. The drive itself may actually be okay, the working hypothesis is...
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