mcpantz.org

How do you like having an extremely extensible, mature, and stable text editor. I sure do. One thing that always bugged me when writing code is going through and finding all sorts of annoying trailing whitespace. For most major modes, tabs are converted to spaces for consistency, but trailing whitespaces are neglected. I was considering writing an elisp function to go ahead and take care this until I found This little gem. I suggest that anyone that has to deal with syntax where trailing whitespace is ignored to have a crack at this.

For that matter, the rest of the interface enhancements on the main page look like they’d be excellent additions to one’s ~/elisp/ folder even today; as for the most part, the code here dates back to the early 90’s. Emacs isn’t exactly a popular mail client anymore…

I have been fighting with Samba recently, to get it configured correctly. I only wish this wasn’t such a black art, but it’s what I do. I had thought backups were working, but something far more sinister was happening, and I didn’t know what to do about it. A coworker of mine recently suggested that we hang out in the #amanda room on irc.freenode.net, so I hopped over to #samba. one half hour later; I learned a lot more than I thought I could in a chat room.

So here’s a hint for all you young programmers out there: open source is here to help, and a lot of us are bored and hanging out on IRC, because we are cool check it out! In fact, if anyone would like to talk about BackupPC, join me on irc.freenode.net in #backuppc.

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.

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.