Category Archives: Programming

Why are regular expressions called regular expressions? Two regular expressions that achieve the same result can often look completely different, so what’s so regular about that? And also: they’re not even expressive. Who can really understand what /(<[^href]*href=(\"|'))([^(\"|')]+)(\"|')/ does off … Continue reading →

Programmers are brain surgeons is a blog post I was sent that looks at how programmers are perceived in the pecking order of job titles. The basis of the argument is that programming in itself should be valued, that programmers … Continue reading →

Three days after building a little bit of code to publish posts from this blog directly to del.icio.us, I still haven’t got every post on there. Despite following the “don’t hammer our server” guidelines and waiting over a second between … Continue reading →

I’ve been playing around with getting my blog to automatically post to del.icio.us when a new post is added (just because I can) and it’s actually very easy to talk to the del.icio.us API. To get any communication going, just … Continue reading →

I was pointed towards Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags by Clay Shirky and decided to read a few more posts. This one about the semantic web is interesting too. I particularly like this section on proposed uses for … Continue reading →

This article entitled Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags is interesting for any programmer who’s had a client say they want a taggable/searchable/categorisable system of some kind. They’re all the rage at the moment, apparently. The interesting ideas reall … Continue reading →

I’ve been in enough meetings where a vendor or technical architect has insisted that their product can interoperate with any other system because their data transfer uses XML, and this excellent piece on The Daily WTF shows exactly what a … Continue reading →

This article on the BBC site purports to be about how to create accessible websites, but reading between the lines I get the feeling there’s a press release from the company that built J K Rowling’s site behind it. It … Continue reading →

If a language is going to be loosely typed, then that’s fine as long as you know how to use it. If it’s going to be strongly typed that’s even better. So in JavaScript: var i=1; var j=”1″; if(i==j)alert(“Loose typing … Continue reading →

I kept on getting a problem whereby on trying to recompile a project in Visual Studio a dll assembly would be locked when I loaded the project up in a browser with a message such as: Cannot copy assembly […] … Continue reading →