Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Tuesday, 13 May 2003

# 5:40 AM

not dead yet

However, I have been head down in work, hence the dead air for two weeks in this here weblog. Most of the time I was writing a paper for the 2003 GCC Developer's Summit, which is titled A Maintenance Programmer's View of GCC. The final edition is 6400 words; considering how much text got ripped out and rewritten, I probably wrote closer to ten thousand. In seven days.

Despite this, I did manage to make it to a They Might Be Giants concert on April 29th. Ran into Benjy again there; he has the set list and a review of the concert. Being a rabid fan, he went all three days they played San Francisco; it sounds like the Tuesday show was the weakest of the lot, but I was delighted to hear them play Turn Around and See the Constellation. Not to mention In the Middle with vocals by Robyn Goldwasser, who is John Flansburgh's wife and apparently has a following, judging by the cheers when she took the stage.

The show was at the Great American Music Hall, which is smaller than the Fillmore, and I think it suits TMBG better. Unlike last time, I had earplugs (purchased for 50¢ at the bar)... and my giant sunglasses, which solved the 1000-watt-stage-lights-shone-directly-into-my-eyes issue nicely.

Still haven't heard them do Ana Ng nor Spiraling Shape. Grumble.

correspondence

Tkil suggests a number of notational tricks for making Emacs regexps easier to deal with -- an example:

  (let ((abbrev "[a-z][a-z][a-z]")
        (ws     "[ \t\n]*")
        (wsd    "[ \t\n---]*"))
    (concat
     "^"
     "\\(\\(" abbrev "\\),\\)?" ws
     "\\([0-9][0-9]?\\)" wsd
     "\\(" abbrev "\\)" wsd
     "\\([0-9]*[0-9][0-9]\\)" ws
     "\\([0-9:]+\\)" ws
     "\\([a-z][a-z]?[a-z]?"
        "\\|"
        "[+---][01][0-9][0-9][0-9]\\)"
     "$"))

This is a way to get the effect of perl's /x modifier. Personally, I find all the appearances of \\ detract from readability more than having it on one line with no whitespace, but that's just me.

Kevin Maples reveals himself as the creator of the goddamned internet sticker, and says it isn't supposed to be a M*A*S*H reference, but a "got milk?" reference. Indeed, it did come to me via Sumana, who didn't remember where she got it, but the Leonard connection is the obvious explanation.

misc

The archive links are now up to date. One of these days I'm going to automate that. One of these days I'm going to make an RSS feed for this blog, too, like someone asked me six freaking months ago. Upgrading to a newer version of Blosxom is not really an option, as I would have to repeat the substantial effort of grokking Rael's code (sorry, it's just not written in a style I can cope with) and figuring out what bits needed chainsawing. I suspect I would have to do the performance tuning I did for 2+4i all over again.