Regular Expressions Sunday, 02 December 2007  
Regular expressions....who wants them?!

We all do - they can make complex tasks trivial to do, e.g. search and replace, swapping of columns.

Unfortunately they tend to be cryptic and read-only for anything other than the most trivial of things.

CRiSP supports three flavors of regexp - the original BRIEF version, Unix style, and Perl style.

Perl regexps are very powerful - too powerful. Perl 6 is introducing sophisticated parser based regexps which allow you to do things regexps could never do before.

But a one liner becomes a program, with loss of readability.

I am not knocking them - I am jealous, and maybe CRiSP will adopt them too in the fulness of time, but, where a regexp ends, a macro begins.


Posted at 16:36:59 by Regular Expressions | Permalink
  Virtualisation Sunday, 02 December 2007  
I have been a fan for many years of virtualisation products, especially VMware. It just works.

Until I encountered vmware server 2.0 beta release and I just screamed at how poor a product can be.

The early vmware products were a few megabytes of executable, and a functional and easy to use interface.

The new server release is 500+MB of junk - a crippled interface running on a browser, loss of functionality, change for changes sake and not to be recommended.

I took VirtualBox for a test drive - a free product, and....it just works.

I may try Xen again, but it too suffered in the past of difficult to use and setup.

Why do companies take very good products and detonate them?

Who knows


Posted at 16:33:44 by Virtualisation | Permalink
  Editor War Saturday, 01 December 2007  
I haven't blogged for a while, but thought it worth trying to resurrect the idea.

CRiSP is a powerful editor - it has so many features, from the simple to the obscure. Each feature was created with a goal in mind - either a request from someone, or a desire to fix a specific problem.

CRiSP's grep feature where you can select specific lines in a single file or all files, and then filter them down to just the set you require is predicated on the unix command line and pipes - where you can start by using a simple grep, and pipe into another grep to reduce the selection to what you want.

You can activate this in CRiSP by using the "<F10>grep" command and once you are in a popup window, use <Alt-F> to invoke a "Filter:" prompt and start to cull the selection.

A feature so powerful, that many people may not understand it, until you try it.


Posted at 10:04:33 by Editor Wars | Permalink