In December and January, I’ve continued working on my master thesis, while simultaneously preparing for my exams in January (which I passed without problems).
In a previous blog post, I had indicated that I ran into problems while parsing dates: Qt uses the system locale for this, but on Mac OS X there turned out to be a severe performance problem with that functionality. I solved that by developing QCachingLocale, which is a class that introduces a caching layer to prevent said performance degradations.
Further parsing {#further-parsing}
Now, parsing the date was of course only one tiny part of the problem: I also had to parse the episodes information embedded in each Episodes log file line (which is trivial), as well as map the IP address to a physical location and an ISP and map the user-agent string to a platform and actual browser.
Finally, we also want to map the episode duration to either duration:slow, duration:acceptable or duration:fast. This is called ‘discretization’: continuous values (in our case: durations) are mapped to discrete values.