mcpantz.org

If I haven’t already given you an ecstatic phone call or instant message, then I should tell you that I’ve just accepted an offer from Zmanda as a design engineer. I feel really lucky with this; as I’m going to be working in my most familiar language (Perl) to make some fairly robust code user-friendly. I’ll be heading up a new project to investigate adding a new open-source project to our lineup; so I’ll be in a lot of murky waters, but it’s going to be a lot of fun to work with, and give I’ll have the opportunity to collaborate while being fairly autonomous.

I’m sure I’ll be blogging more about the crazy things I’m going to end up doing in Perl as a result. Object-oriented Perl is simple yet quite bizarre, so it’ll be an interesting experience to delve further into its depths. I also have a couple fun ideas for some perl modules, so keep your eyes open.

A gem of a post came across my alma mater’s computer science mailing list: Prime detection using regular expressions. It’s quite a clever hack; what it actually defines is all numbers that are not prime, but the negation of that creates the primes.

It’s that pesky /\1+/ that makes this whole expression work, and it’s what prevents this regex from being a regular expression. Regexes have long since stopped being regular expressions, but it’s a programming language unto itself.

A while back, I did LaTeX parsing in Perl, and used a one-level parser (custom for LaTeX) and a incredible amount of regexes in order so slice and dice this massive corpus of data. Unfortunately, I didn’t know about Parse::RecDescent then, or else I would have put myself out of a job very quickly. But I wonder, can parentheses (a recursive language) be validated as a regular expression language yet? Better yet, is the language itself Turing complete? Perl regexes, at least, have a lot of very extended features, and this will require some unusual digging.

Ever since I was a kid, I wanted a legitimate excuse to use that phrase. Thankfully, it seems that io9 has found a few good ones.

So I don’t know if any of you are familiar with Dr. Fun, but it’s a webcomic that I’ve been reading since i figured out what webcomics were. At some point in my college career I realized that the author was lurking around the basement of the Regenstein, the library at the University of Chicago, but I never went to go ferret him out.

It turns out that he’s directly my friend’s Dean’s boss, who this week gave me some old hardware they were not using. I met Mr. Farley, who was a quiet, enthusiastic geek; pretty much exactly like I envisioned him. he then showed me an original VT100.

A couple ex-coworkers and I have come up with a startup idea and bought some domain names.  I can’t divulge much, but I assure you the idea is very worthwhile and completely hilarious.

There are about a million things I feel like I could be doing to prepare myself for employment. Unfortunately, I am considering so many divergent paths that’s there’s no real good way to get them to feed into each other. I get the most immediate feedback from tyoing around with this blog, but I know that I’m probably get the most financial return from studying massive amounts of C++, and probably the most brain workout as well. It seems like if i want to go anywhere as a serious programmer, I need to start learning some hardcore Python. I still tinker around with LaTeX because I find it calming and I’m occasionally helping my past employers, and everyone’s telling me to do something different. But hey, I’m just going to keep doing what’s fun and rewarding.