I am a huge fan of Regular Expressions (Regex).  There are a lot of cool technologies, but no other technology seems as much like total hocus pocus.  I take most every opportunity to use Regular Expressions in my applications, and I'm pretty much a sucker when a friend asks me to figure one out.  I'll spend hours tweaking an expression in The Regulator, a cute little .NET regular expression utility.  Actually I just noticed that the last release is 2004.  What are other people using to do regular expression development and testing?

There is one rule of thumb I observe whenever I use a Regular Expression in an application: Make it overridable by a config setting.  Regular Expressions are forever a work in progress and very often the first slice needs some tweaking after you get it into the real world.  This little practice has saved my ass more than once, most recently I was able to fix a production application by just tweaking a config rather than pushing a whole patched release through QA and doing a full deployment.

At this point I just automatically do this when I put a regular expression into an application:

Saw The Darjeeling Limited last night and I loved it. First of all I'm a huge Wes Anderson fan - like back to Bottle Rocket big.  If you haven't seen this one you need to.  I've conveniently included the trailer here for your viewing pleaure:

I'm not going to drag you down with great themes and symbolism, but they are all there and delivery. You should see this movie for no other reason that the visual richness, but the music is great as well. And if all that weren't enough the movie was shot on a freakin train - no really, like on a train underway not just some we'll-CGI-it-in-later train. I'm kind of sad I already put it back in the netflix envelope.

Dinner at Nha Trang on Centre Street, originally uploaded by astoriahermit.

148 Centre Street, New York

I've been going to Nha Trang for years, and something was different last night. The usual cadre of servers wasn't there, replaced by a new bunch. I can't help but wonder if the place has changed hands. I'm still recovering from a cold so my taste buds are not up to full speed, but my wife said stuff wasn't as good as usual. I fear I may have to find a new favorite Vietnamese place.

There is a great, great Irish bar out here in Astoria called The Quays.  You can scuttle off and find the mentions and what not.  Frankly, I don't want you to find it.  But if you doubt it's a fantastic bar I have two things for you: 1) for some reason the Smithwicks on tap there tastes better than anywhere else I've had it and 2) Here is the view at the top of the stairs down to the bathroom.

Yeah, that's money.

Working late with Vijay, originally uploaded by astoriahermit.

I suppose I should tell him I stole his soul with my talking box.

FW: Me in a Fez, originally uploaded by astoriahermit.

I am setting up post with picture and email in anticipation of my trip to Vegas next week for the Microsoft web development conference, Mix08. The Saitz stopped by today and talked me through it. This is exactly what I've been looking for to give me that post verite that I am after.

If only I could find the open tag key on my phone so I can do basic html.

I remain impressed with the functionality of flickr but man finding the info on their site
to fully utilize their features is a pain in the ass.

And, yes this is fun for me too.

Spokane, Washington



Stratosphere, Las Vegas

Okay, this is both intriguing me and weird-ing me out.  I am fascinated by the possibility of huge visual variety, but at the same time, what will I see in the crystal ball come screen saver that big brother has lovingly made for me?

You all judge for yourself.  I'm still deciding. I'll let you know if I go for it and please let me know if you give it a try.

SurveillanceSaver is a screensaver which shows live images of over 400 network surveillance cameras worldwide. Yep, when your computer is idle you’ll get to see a live feed of what’s going on in other parts of the world. It’s quite fascinating because of the voyeuristic element involved but also surreal because it compresses time-space.

Something is happening right at the moment elsewhere and you are a witness to it. It is real but since it’s only an image, you tend to question its verity a little more than what you see with your eyes. Sometimes I can’t bear to look away from the screen because I’m always expecting something to happen just that moment, maybe a car accident or a cute girl would enter into the frame.

It’s these thoughts that make this screensaver (and surveillance) quite an intriguing process.

FYI:You more or less have to have seen "There Will be Blood" for this to make sense

Some of you likely noticed that around late Thursday of last week, in conjunction with my lengthy post about my adventure into canning this blog went wonky and showed something that was an incomprehensible mix of two posts. The good news is no one wrote or commented telling me my writing had improved.

I think the problem had to do with using BlogJet. It seems to support dasBlog nicely but something went horribly wrong. This post is using ecto. I so, so so want to like ecto, and I do it's got that perfect mix of raw dork horse-power ( html-templating with keyboard short-cuts; solid html generation; and flickr/Amazon/YouTube buttons). But, and there always seems to be a "but", it was barfing on a post I was trying to make again my humble little dasBlog instance. I attempted to debug into the code on the dasBlog side, a big reason I chose dasBlog. In my initial look through I concluded that the problem was likely somewhere in ecto, not that dasBlog is a shining example of good code practices. 

I know, I know dasBlog is open source and I'm so critical, why don't I roll up my sleeves and dive in? The truth of the matter is, I'm not interested in writing a blogging engine, or even really fixing on this one. I've got other side-projects I want to work on and the list is already too long. While I don't believe blogging is fully mature, the issues I've been having with what seems to me a late teen set of technologies: blogging APIs and blog software) frustrates me a bit. And maybe this problem lies in the technology I've chosen. Blogging comes more or less from the PHP side of the tracks and .NET being my comfort zone I opted to use a .NET open source tool. Maybe it's time to learn PHP. (You hear that Bill?)

Back to the dangle-y loose thread holding this post together. I won't be using BlogJet on a live instance without further testing. Windows Live Writer (thanks for the suggestion Ben) hasn't really gotten a workout from me, will be making an audition on a laptop near me. And ecto, oh ecto... What am I to do? I went to your help page hoping you could tell me how to tune your software for dasBlog and this is what I saw:

Looks simple right? You'll notice I've included both the left and right edge of the browser window in the screen shot. In fact, I even went so far as to view source - there isn't an input tag on the page.

I'll give it another try, cause I like it so much, but it looks like Windows Live Writer might win. While it was fun to do raw HTML and I like the spell check and ability to have drafts of future posts.

This last Saturday, my friend Jenn (soon to be a linked to blogger) and I took our CSA bounty and canned it. This was the first time for both of us at canning. In my enthusiasm I had picked up several books on canning and pickling. We used Pickled: Vegetables, Fruits, Roots, More--Preserving a World of Tastes and Traditions as our guide this time. The CSA had delivered about 19 medium large beets and well over 30 beautiful carrots. So we selected two recipes one for Beet Pickles and one for Pickled Carrots.

Earlier in the day I had run out to get jars. I had remembered that a local 99 cents store had them. Indeed, they did. Not paying as much attention as I should, I purchased a partial case of jars small jars and one quart jar and one half gallon jar. The recipes both said they made 4 pints. When I got home I realized that the smaller jars were in fact a box of half pint jars put in an empty box for pint jars. As Jenn pointed out, I should be well acquainted with the pint - touché. We adjusted by making 8 half pints of carrots, and 3 quarts and 1 half pint. This involved a little scrounging around the apartment but luckily I had bought extra lids and had spare rings. Read More...