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Posted on 12/01/2006 12:55:15 PM PST by ecurbh
Welcome to The Hobbit Hole!
Sing hey! for the bath at close of day
That washes the weary mud away!
A loon is he that will not sing:
O! Water Hot is anoble thing!
O! Sweet is the sound of falling rain.
and the brook that leaps from hill to plain;
but better than rain or rippling streams
is Water Hot that smokes and steams.
O! Water cold we may pour at need
down a thirsty throat and be glad indeed;
but better is Beer, if drink we lack,
and Water Hot poured down the back.
O! Water is fair that leaps on high
in a fountain white beneath the sky;
but never did fountain sound so sweet
as splashing Hot Water with my feet!
Regular expressions are evil. Glad Ramius sorted you out.
You're kidding me. right?
In my one afternoon of experience with them, I have to agree with you. Of course, I am now finding that a few results are using double line breaks (<br><br>) instead of paragraphs, but that opens a much worse can of worms. I'm going with what I got. :)
They're powerful, but mastery of regexp eluded me. Or... I avoided it, perhaps.
My old boss (who quit, and whose job I have now) really, really wanted me to learn regexp and do my programming in perl. It came up on an annual review because I utterly disobeyed a direct order. There was a little gizmo that the accounting department needed that took a text file and manipulated it and spit out a new text file in the format they needed to send to their bank to cut payments by direct deposit. I think I've talked about it here before. It's the acronym I'm most proud of in my career: the Automated Clearing House Output Organizer [ACHOO]. The name of the program is, naturally, ACHOO.exe. There's just something wonderfully appropriate about that.
But my boss had specifically *ordered* me to develop this thing in perl, using my (assumed) new expertise in regular expressions.
I fought with perl for a couple of weeks on that thing, and just couldn't make it work. I knew I could do it in FoxPro in a heartbeat, and so I did. In only a couple of days I had a fully functional compiled exe that did exactly what they wanted, and as it would happen, is STILL used to this day.
He was really ticked about it. But the customer was happy.
And there is the nub of the gist. :)
I'm working on a blog aggregator, that will compile feeds from lots of blogs into one site. But some of the articles are too long, so I want to display only the first two paragraphs. Now that I've had a bourbon, I realize I could have easily have just written a replace function to change all the uppercase tags to lowercase with having to deal with regexp in the first place. Would have only taken a matter of minutes. ~sigh~ One of the hazards of coding sober. :)
I dunno... I spring from a proud line of Okies myself.
Only code sober if you're getting paid for it, dude.
Watching a show on lawnmowers. You know that robot vacuum cleaner you have? They've got one for lawns too... you run a wire around the perimeter of the lawn like one of those fenceless dog fences and it mows around within the border.
But since it's random and takes a long time to get the job done, theft is a problem (at least in the front yard) if you don't sit and watch it so there's really not much point. :~)
I love mowin' the lawn. Looking forward to it this spring :~)
Well, see... there's yer problem right there... :-)
I've done much of my best work after hours there at the old waterin' hole (now closed, peace be upon them).
Like the SOX crap... our entire IT policy document (ITPD) was written under the influence of Wild Turkey and some RedHook ESB (Extra Special Bitter). It remains the signature document in our whole SOX compliance infrastructure. I think it's now up to about 17 chapters and sixty or so pages. In fact, from our consultants, I've come to learn that it is being used as an examplar good policy document for some of their other clients. I'm really proud of it. When I finally pull the rip cord and bug out of here... that's something I'm going to take with me.
I've seen those robot mowers. It's an interesting idea.
Something tells me that there ought to be a better way than a wire border, though. Seems like it should be easy enough to "teach" the system about the border of a yard, and have it mow the remainder without bothering with the random-learning algorithm.
We've got some variants of that that we're playing with. They have rocket and grenade launchers on them too. :-)
Well, that'll raise the ticket price a bit, I reckon... ;~)
See, I like that idea. Though I imagine it doesn't handle rocks that well.
And it'd probably drive Cisco out of his little mind.
Yeah - you'd like it... Not me... pushin' the mower is half the fun :~)
Not so much, really. :-)
The whole mission of the robots program was to make the things out of easily replaceable COTS (commercial, off-the-shelf) parts. That way... the guys can walk into any Radio Shack or whatnot around the world and get new parts.
The batteries, for example, are just un-altered DeWalt 18V battery packs. Both the batteries and the chargers are easy to find anywhere in the world. The field charger system is just a Honda Generator with a bunch of outlets.
Even the tracks for the wheels, the wheels themselves, and whatever parts.... almost all of them can be found in the standard Radio Shack inventory.
It sounds funny, but we've had the guys in Afghanistan running downtown to the Khandahar Radio Shack to replace parts on some of the stuff. or... to try a new design from the parts they could find there.
It's neat stuff. And it is paying off every day.
Of course, my ignorant reaction in the meeting was:
"There's a radio shack in Khandahar?? Holy Crap!"
:-)
That would have been my reaction too!
Heh... Now we're watching weird weapons... some good ideas, some bad. :~)
Hittin' the couch. Bed early, no sleep last night did I get.
Yah. What's unusual from the standpoint of MSM treatment, is how ordinary life has become in places like Khandadar or Kabul. Nah... they'd never report that.
Part of me wishes I could get over there to be part of it. There was a company-wide message a little while ago looking for people to replace the folks that were there on the ground doing stuff, but nonetheless getting to the end of their commitment. They want engineers and stuff. I wouldn't probably make the cut, and they appear to have no shortage of people willing to go over and do it (even more amazing given the liberal bent of so many here) but still I wouldn't mind getting more involved.
So... there's that...
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