Joshua Go

I came across a situation where I had to parse a list of e-mail addresses. E-mail clients these days take e-mail addresses in two forms: one showing the name of the individual as well as their e-mail address, and one with only the e-mail address. When multiple e-mail addresses are listed, they are separated by commas, whether they're of the full form or of the simple form. When I had to extract the list of e-mail addresses initially, I assumed only that I could separate them using commas. This would capture a list such as the following. "Joshua Go" <joshua.go@playpure.com>, joshuago@gmail.com It would capture two e-mail addresses: "Joshua Go" <joshua.go@playpure.com> and joshuago@gmail.com . A problem arose when I came across one form of the full e-mail address that threw off my simple parsing technique: the occurence of e-mail addresses such as "Go, Joshua" <go.joshua@yahoo.com> . Since I am no master of regular expressions, and wor...

Last night, I picked up a book and read the preface at the beginning of the book, and the "Special Thanks" section caught my attention. The author thanked his wife and daughter for "putting up" with the authoring process. This isn't the first time I've seen that kind of thing written in a preface. Does writing a book necessarily have to put a strain on the author's family?

For the programmer who is used to C-like syntax, working with arrays in Visual Basic or classic ASP can be aggravating. In this post, I will briefly go over declaring single- and multi-dimensional arrays, then iterating through them — the basic operations that make arrays useful. One-dimensional arrays Let's declare an array with six elements. Dim OneDimArray(5) Yes, that says "5", but it has six elements. When we're going through the elements of this array, we'll start counting from zero and end at five. Iterating through one-dimensional arrays For i = 0 to UBound(OneDimArray) Response.Write(i) Next There will be six elements iterated through. General notes about arrays in Visual Basic So far, we're left with the impression that Visual Basic is a strange language. When we declare arrays in VB, the real size is the declared array size plus 1. If you're used to programming in a C-like programming language such as C++ or Java, it's the declared array...

I've always been too busy to figure out how to map the useless Windows flag keys on my keyboard to do something useful in Linux/X11. On traditional Unix systems, there's a Compose key . According to Wikipedia, "On some computer systems, a compose key is a key which is designated to signal the software to interpret the next keystrokes as a combination in order to produce a character not found on the keyboard." To see what the Windows flag and menu keys are mapped to, I ran the following. xmodmap -pk | grep 11{5,6,7} This resulted in the following output: 115 0xff20 (Super_L) 116 0xff20 (Super_R) 117 0xffcc (Menu) This output told me that the flag keys (left and right) were free to map to Multi_key . I figured I would leave the menu alone. Next, I had to perform the remapping. I created a file, .Xmodmap , which is sometimes already there in a user's home directory. For me, it wasn't, so I went ahead and created .Xmodmap with ...

I like to tinker so that I know how every little bit works. I also like the feeling of knowing I've achieved something. I'm sure it's already apparent to the reader that these tendencies sometimes come into conflict with each other. My tinkering leads to more extensive knowledge. Undoubtedly, it has helped me many times in the past, and I continue to reap the benefits of my past fiddling. Still, I hold myself to strict standards of productivity, and I become frustrated when I can't do enough in one day. Setting clear and reasonable goals for myself allows me to satisfy both my hankering to tamper and my drive to have something to show.