Monthly Archive: April 2008

Much after the fact, here are a few notes about my trip to Boston last month for the Free Software Foundation’s 2008 annual associate member meeting. This is part one. Maybe I’ll get part two up before another 6 weeks go by.

I like to travel, but I guess mainly with my wife. I didn’t like leaving her and our little baby girl behind. So while the outbound trip was pleasantly uneventful and I made it there with plenty of time to see the city, I felt a bit lonely walking around Boston Friday afternoon. I took some pictures which I’ll be posting here in the days/weeks/months ahead.

Stopped in at the FSF offices at 51 Franklin Street. One of my ears was plugged from the flight, making me feel like a deep sea diver in one of those old metal helmets. It was hard to hear others or myself. I felt awkwardly conspicuous. More conspicuous than I …

Hackers

Many years ago I read Hackers for the first time and thoroughly enjoyed it. Levy takes exhaustive research and interviews and weaves them in to a great tale. I like reading about the people behind technology and how they came to do what they do (or did what they did), and this book is full of characters and their stories: “The Heroes of the Computer Revolution.” Starting with the origins of hacker culture at MIT in the Tech Model Railroad Club, I felt transported back in time and was absorbed by the story.

Crypto

A month ago, I saw a reference to Levy’s Crypto, and I immediately ordered a used copy from Amazon. This is a story about how we finally got good crypto outside of the NSA. Having just started it, I’m finally learning something about those Diffie and …

This post is a rather lengthy analysis of a short regular expression:

(.+?)(\.[^.]*$|$)

I’m continuing to enjoy and learn a lot from Jeffrey Friedl’s Mastering Regular Expressions. One of the things that works well for me is the way he walks through examples and iteratively builds a more robust pattern for a particular task. It helps to develop logical ways of thinking about these things.

While you may not need to accomplish the particular task described in this article, I hope you might benefit by following along with the explanation. (Although it’s probably not as clear and concise as the ones in MRE!)

So! I recently wanted to modify a filename by inserting some text before the extension and was pleased with the regular expression I built for the task. Here it is again in all its glory:

(.+?)(\.[^.]*$|$)

The two capturing groups here will collect (with an exception explained below):

Everything up to but not including the last …