- Currently lives in Kyoto, Japan.
- Married to Fumie since 1998.
- Son Anthony born October, 2002.
- Has studied the following languages in school: English, Spanish, German, French.
- Can actually speak the following languages: English, Japanese.
- Languages I apparently wasted a lot of time on for nothing: Spanish, German, French.
- Born in San Diego, California.
- Raised in Rootstown, Ohio.
- BS Math/Applied CS: Kent, 1987.
- MS CS: University of New Hampshire, 1988.
- Have been in a couple of big earthquakes (Loma Prieta '89, Kobe '95).
- Spent 2.5 painful years writing the first edition of Mastering Regular Expressions (O'Reilly Media, 1997).
- Spent 2 more painful years writing the second edition (O'Reilly Media, 2002).
- Spent only 9 months updating for the third edition (O'Reilly Media, 2006).
- Catholic
- Have programmed in C since 1981, Perl since 1990. Don't know C++.
- Has used jfriedl
@yahoo.com as an email address since before there was Yahoo! Mail. Still use it. - Reads these blogs regularly.
- Peak Web Consulting (2007 — ?)
I work on backend infrastructure tools for top-tier bandwidth users (big Big players on the Internet, whose names I'm not allowed to mention). - Adobe Systems, Inc (10/2007 — 8/2008)
I consulted on issues related to Lightroom. - Yahoo!
Sunnyvale, CA, USA (1997 - 2005)
Architecting and engineering on the Y! Finance site, using mostly Perl/MySQL to fold, spindle, and hopefully not mutilate reams of financial data. I was employee #192. When I left )-: I was the 30th most senior (by time, certainly not influence) employee. - Omron Tateishi Denki
Nagaokakyou, Japan (1989-1997)
Mostly kernel work on a four-processor symmetric shared memory system that Omron was developing. While at Omron, spent about three years as a “visiting scientist” at Carnegie Mellon University (and was mostly unimpressive to the superbly smart people there). - Northeastern Ohio Universities College of
Medicine (NEOUCOM)
Rootstown, Ohio (1981 - 1986)
Worked with a first-run IBM-PC with DOS 1.0. (Unfortunately, Microsoft has not improved on their software much since then). Washed a lot of lab equipment. Did a lot of programming, including some really advanced flow cytometer control software in FORTH.
I enjoy researching a subject of personal interest, and then, because I occasionally stumble across an ability to write well, sharing the results. Examples include my long writeup on digital image color spaces and the autofocus test chart that I developed. (See all in my list of geeky photo-tech posts.)
I also seem to have become the main provider of export plugins for Adobe Lightroom, such as my plugins that allow direct export to Zenfolio, Flickr, SmugMug, PicasaWeb (with Facebook and more on the way for Lightroom 2.0) — see my Lightroom Goodies page for current details. I develop these on my own time, as a hobby, which is perhaps a bit odd because I don't actually use any of these photo-hosting services myself.
Occasionally in response to my camera-tech writing, and much more after
I released my plugins, I have been surprised to find how many people wanted
to make a donation to thank me for my time and efforts. Like I said, I do
all this as a hobby, so donations or payment are not required (nor is my
reply to your support request 
), but I've finally succumbed and set up a
PayPal account. Donations are still not required, but if provided, are
gratefully accepted via the button at right.
Hi Jeffrey,
I came on your site by accident and was surprised to learn that you’re back in Kyoto. Sueko and I got married in 1999 (at long last!) and left Japan in 2000 and wandered around in the western US looking for a place to settle down and finally moved moved to Congress, Arizona, in 2001. Sueko’s been back to Japan a couple of times and we both went back in 2002 for her father’s hoji.
We get visits a couple of times a year from an old Kyoto friend, who translates Japanese to English some of the time up near Seattle and the some of the time in Mexico. And we’ve had some of my students and some of Sueko’s students come for ten days or so for trips to northern Arizona and southern Utah.
Otherwise, our time is spend working on our Souzai project (see website) or Sueko’s cooking classes in nearby Wickenburg.
Best to you, Fumie and Anthony,
Dave
I thoroughly enjoyed the first edition; I thought it read like an interesting novel! I have just ordered the 2nd edition now that I’m using PERL again (parsing logs for a company which supplies telephone directory info in Manhattan).
I was interested to see that you are from Rootstown Ohio…I can’t imagine that there are a great number of people who know anything about Rootstown. I grew up in Garrettsville and had some relatives in Rootstown…spent many happy holidays there.
Regards, Barry
Loved your book “Mastering regular expressions”, I was new to it (read about it on php website), bought directly your book and read it within a week (except last few chapters, since I don’t use these languages). Very clear and understandable (even for someone who speaks some English, but not for 100%).
Especially liked your quote “Far from being some stuffy science, writing regular expressions is closer to an art.”.
Greetings,
J. Hollemans
Greetings from your long lost cousins! Michele, Philip and Melisa…Uncle Lee and Aunt Estelle. We googled you and were pleasantly surprised that we could actually write to you! The website is great!
Happy Thanksgiving! Warm wished to you and your family.
The Friedls
Hello Jeffrey
I just happened upon your blog/website via Yahoo! 360 and enjoyed reading some of your impressions of life in Japan and would enjoy dropping back in on occasion to read more in the future. My wife and I have lived in the USA, Singapore and Thailand and have always been interested to travel to Japan, so maybe we enjoy visiting Japan circuitously through your blog until then!?
Cheers,
Scot
hi jeffrey,
was just thinking of you and was fun to read your blog to get caught up. hi to fumie and anthony. miss you guys.
katie
Hello Jeffrey:
I am the person who asked about purchasing a camera in Japan: http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/readflat.asp?forum=1007&message=16777534&changemode=1
Thanks so much for your answer! : ))
I note that you are in Kyoto. We are staying in Osaka but plan to come to Kyoto.
Would love to see more of the old parts. Any tips?
Thanks,
Photologist
There are a lot of different answers to that, depending on your schedule, the season, what kind of transportation you have, and your interests. (I live not too far from the first electric generator in Japan — is that the kind of “old” you’re talking about, or are you thinking of temples and such?
Send me an email with your particulars, and I’ll try to give you some ideas; my address is above.
Dear Jeffrey
It’s great to have you back in Japan now and I love to see you some day soon again! I live in Kanakgawa now, please let me know if you come to Kanto area!
Miharu
Every few years, I try to re-learn regular expressions and I get up one or two more levels on the learning curve. This summer I spent a few days reading your 2nd edition of Regular Expressions and really love the book.
But I came across a really dumb problem that I can’t figure out:
I’m using Microsoft’s .NET regular expressions which I thought acted as “greedy” match machine. But I’m having a problem understanding how Regex.Match interprets an extremely trivial match problem.
If I’m searching the string “ban” with the pattern b*, the matched string is b as one would expect. But if I change the pattern to a*, there is no match.
Now I would have thought that since .NET Regex is supposed to do a greedy match it would match the first ‘a’ in ban. The only way I can explain the behavior is that the match engine sees the first ‘b’ and says “this is a match because the pattern says match zero or more a’s”. Since zero is a match it returns zero matches.
But if my interpretation is correct, why does the pattern ba* return ba as the match and not just b?
Thanks for any help you might have time to offer.
Hi Jeffery,
I ran across the link to your blog in the /. review of Mastering Regular Expressions. I lived in Japan from 1994 - 2002 and was married there (to another foreigner), discovered Linux there via TLUG and also regular expressions there as a result of becoming a sysadmin and wearing the postmaster’s hat at GOL for a stretch as a result of having discovered Linux and fallen in love with it.
After returning to the US, I extended my love affair with regexes by taking a job at one of the major antispam service providers, where we we cook up regexes to match spam so obfuscated it doesn’t look much different than line noise at first glance
I recall sometimes visiting the page you maintained at Omron back in the day, a little memory that was brought to the surface after reading your blog. AFAIK we’ve never met, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we had fewer than the usual number of degrees of separation between us.
And I’ll never forget my first visit to Kyoto, on my first trip to Japan in 1990, pounding the very hot streets of Kyoto in a very hot summer. Later, I came to be so taken by a little mountain town by the name of Gujo-Hachiman in Gifu-ken (perhaps you’ve been there, or at least heard of it?) that if I were to win the lottery, I’d probably retire there to a nice little house on the edge of town, near to Nagara-gawa or Yoshida-gawa, practice tomozuri every day of ayu season, and become one of the few foreigners to build skill in it. As far as I know, I’m the only foreigner with a certificate in Gujo-Odori, the thing I miss the very most about Japan.
Thanks for the nice little trip down memory lane your blog inspired
Best,
Jonathan
P.S. I’m also from San Diego, too
I learned of the 3rd edition of your book on php.net and, I must say, it is one of the most informative, best books I have ever read about anything. I used O’Reilly’s pocket manuals in the past, but I never read any of their larger books due to how I thought other publisher’s books (like Sam’s) were superior.
I love your style in writing the book. I had bought it just because I wanted to learn some basic regex techniques (I used to think that the + quantifier was some kind of linking thing between subexpressions *embarrassed*) and I learned far more than I ever could have in any other book. Thanks for the awesome authoring. God bless you and I wish you more success in your life!
Hi!
Great blog, especially the camera orientated stuff!
I am a programmer myself since 25 years or so ago and have touched on regular expressions once or twice in that time
I live and work in the UK and spend most of my time writing Flex apps for an american company. Will be in Tokyo on a trip in February and will be toting my D200 . Any tips on what to go see/photograph while there? (assuming you have been there/done that etc)
hi Jeff, I was searching for an online Exif Viewer & your’s came up first, awesome software. anyways I end up reading your Blog Instead hahaha. I’m a photo Hobbyist & would really like to visit Japan one of this days just to take lots & lots of photos. Handsome son you’ve got there, i’ve got 3 boys myself
more power to your Blog
Thanks for sharing
http://wheelee.multiply.com/photos
I am reading your book (2/e) and it is one of the best I have read. I write code for a telephone company, so it could prove useful. Thanx for writing such a good book, I don’t think it is such a “pain” writing good books.
I think the photos you’ve shared are wonderful. The colours of Japan are stunning. A very clean look about your photos (as wellas those of Shimada san). Like someone else has commented, I don’t think your camera was backfocussing. You really can’t tell that easily. At 10 megapixels, the sensor could be “off” by a few hundredths of a millimetre…!
Should you take Japanese politicians seriously? I’m Indian, and we’re used to worse morons and at higher posts…
I wish you all the best. Good to know the tribe of good rechnical writers is still alive. It is a dying art.
You’re background is very interesting: I arrived at your site from your section about executive compensation at Yahoo! I used to work with some people at Yahoo! UK when they were starting-up in ‘94-95 and so found your blog edits about your time at Yahoo! interesting indeed. Now I work for a large financial services company in the UK as a web art director/designer although — as with you and your time at Yahoo! — I yield very little influence in reality. Enjoy Japan! One day I shall visit the country as I’d love to see Tokyo.
Peace, Stan Smith, Newbury UK
Nice Site. I got here while searching for info on NEF compression. I left a comment on your analysis page.
On another note. Will you be giving updates on Sakura and other bloomings? I will be in the Osaka area from March 19 to 29. Hope to catch some early blooms. I really like photographing Japan (this will be my third trip).
ps. I think I recall using your book on Regular Expressions way back when I worked on Unix systems!
Bill
dude. you are still the RP for checker.yahoo.com, can I turn it off or what?
heh.
Hmm, I was a reviewer for the 1st edition. Didn’t know about this blog, but will have to subscribe.
Found via “what the duck.”
Ophs! left of the e-mail address.
I have no idea where I first found your site but I have been a dedicated visitor for some time now. I see the adventures of Anthony and the rest of your friends and family through my rss reader so you never see me. That’s why I thought I’d just stop here and let you know I’m stalking. Plus thank you. I love seeing your beautiful pictures of Japan. And, while I am nowhere near being a ‘kid’ person, I cannot get enough of Anthony’s expressive face and wonderful adventures.
Susan Dennis
Seattle, WA
Hi Jeffrey, now I know why your blog writing is of such high quality. I am of mixed mind about getting your book. I was never much of a programmer. Started in 1960 on IBM 704. I mostly was an industrial engineer and manager. Worked for the Defense Department.
I was born in San Diego but in 1938, a little before you. Now live in Beavercreek OH, a Dayton OH suburb.
I enjoy your photos and captions.
Mel
Hello Jeffery,
I saw your name pop up in a google search once or twice and finally followed the link. I’m always a little curious about others with the our last name.
I’m also a programmer from way back. I read and appreciate your books.
Robert
Hello Jeffrey
As the translator, I’m glad to tell you that Mastering Regular Expression 3rd edition has been translated into Simplified Chinese.
I spent about 7 months’ spare time, and great effort, translating it. Really a tough task(but enjoyable). Finally I finished it. The first time I read your book, I found it an outstanding masterpiece, and, regexes really helped me a lot these years. I grant it’s my duty to introduce such good book, good knowledge to Chinese developers, and, fortunately, I got this opportunity.
You can find links about the simplified Chinese book at:
http://www.china-pub.com/computers/common/info.asp?id=35269
greeting to your great book!
Yurii
Hi Jeffrey: I hope we can see a chapter on Apache URL rewrite with regular expression in Fourth version of “Mastering Regular Expression”
Thanks.
Che Dong
http://www.chedong.com/blog/archives/001379.html
Hi there,
I am an Australian webmaster and musician with a long standing interest in Japan from the days when I used to speak regularly with Japanese amateur radio operators on 21MHz. I stumbled upon your blog and was greatly impressed by it, especially your wonderful photographic work.
I know you get heaps of comments. I just wanted to add mine, saying “thank you” for the great entertaining site.
Best wishes from NSW Australia,
Bill
Hi Jeffrey,
It has been a while we have not been in touch. How is life in Kyoto? I am not sure whether you know, but I am working once again for Panasonic (different division). This time is much better since they allowed me to work from home here in Bellevue, WA. If you ever come to Seattle or Vancouver, please let me know.
Matsunaka-san? That’s cool. Is this just Tsuushoumei or have you became a citizen?
You can take a look at our youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/bianconilo , it has some recent videos of my family.
Keep in touch,
Claude Huss Bianconi
Hi I’ve been reading your rss feed for quite some time. I’ve always liked your work and was very pleasantly surprised when you came out with the flickr plugin for Lightroom.
That’s all secondary to my “begging” intentions. I would like your permission to post the “Bamboo” wallpaper to my site and the “Origami Dog” to my dogs site. The url is above. The dog’s site is /dogblog
Thanks for everything, especially the enjoyment.
I happened upon your site via Lightroom News as I wanted to try out the uploader to my Smugmug account. Needless to say I was shocked to see you too are living in Kyoto. I’ve been here in Kyoto for about 11 years. If you’d like to meet for a beer and talk about photography feel free to email me.
Chris
Jeffrey, this is a question about your EXIF viewer, for which I thank you profusely.
I have recently bought a Canon SD700 IS, for which most photo editors cannot read the ISO if the setting was on Auto-ISO. Apparently yours can, in a sense: for one of my pictures, I found the following: Camera ISO AUTO, Base ISO 100, ISO 75. my question is about the meaning of all this. Is the actual ISO 75? In that case, it is lower than the lowest selectable ISO offered by the camera, which is 80. I can’t guess what Base ISO means. If I am correct that the actual ISO used was 75, then it appears that this lower value is only available if one uses Auto0ISO. puzzling.
Sorry if all this is beyond your ken or your interest.
Hi there,
Enjoying what you have done here.
I am currently trying to work with the metadata in Lightroom so that I can add text to one field, and in another, the french equivalent shows up. i.e put people in the caption field, and I would like personnell to show up in location automatically, like in keywords when you have a loaded language, and type in the first three letters and the rest of the word shows up.
This is for a database that we designed using IPTC core field.
If you can point me in the right direction for this that would be great.
Best,
Colin Rowe
Hi Jeffrey - As a Catholic and a computer scientist, would you be interested in joining the Association for Catholic Computer Programmers - http://accp.ning.com/ ?
Also, I’m proud to say that I have read Mastering Regular Expressions (3rd ed.) cover-to-cover. I was delighted to learn about recursive regexes.
Jon
Hello there, I have been looking through your Lightroom related work. I’m impressed! Have you thought about doing a geotagging plugin for Lightroom? Select a few photos, point the plugin at a log, and bingo!
That indeed would be very nice, but I don’t know of a way to do it with the current API. Until Lightroom allows for it, the best I can recommend is something like this. —Jeffrey
Hi Jeff,
I’ve enjoyed reading your blog and your photos. I also bought a D200 about a year ago and am trying out different gadgets, lens, etc. I started out with a Nikon 17-55 but then grew disenchanted with its weight and sought alternatives. I settled on the Tamron 17-50. It weighs about 1/2 of the Nikon and costs about 1/3.
I didn’t do extensive testing but it seems to be that the drop in quality is maybe 5-10%. But I am much more willing to bring the camera along now then I was with the heavy 17-55. Since I do similar type of photography to your’s (check it out - vicrad.zenfolio.com) I thought you might want to check out the Tamron. Since you are much more diligent / technically savvy, you might even quantify the difference in image quality between the two.
Thanks, Vic
Hello Jeffrey.
I like to congratulate you on a very entertaining Blog.
I noticed that you have not posted any photos taken with your Nikon 70-200 2.8 VR for a long while. Did you ever encounter any issues with the lens; like connectivity with the camera and times when the focusing just stop working? I have not experienced the issues myself, but I am interested in the lens, and there are many people writing about there upset on the Net.
Thanking you in advance.
Alex
Well, I wouldn’t call 8 days ago a “long while”, but my 70-200 is fine. I did experience D200 Dead Battery Syndrome in the summer, which may (or may not) have been related to the lens. I dunno. It’s been fine since that one episode. —Jeffrey
Today I installed the update for Lightroom….1.4…now I can no longer export to my zenfolio??:-) is there an updated plug in for this to happen that I am missing?? I enjoyed the ease of the plug in when exporting my photos to zenfolio and now it’s gone????? Thank you!!
I had a boo-boo in the plugins that necessitated a new version for 1.4: http://regex.info/blog/2008-03-14/762 —Jeffrey
Hello Jeffrey,
I bought a second hand Nikon D200 not so long ago and I find it a very nice camera. Shooting in RAW (NEF) and using Adobe Lightroom I found that there is a difference in color between my NEF file and the (preview) JPEG. On the net their is a lot of discussion about this subject but none gives me a satisfying answer. In my quest to find an answer I came to your website.
Have you experienced this phenomena? And if yes how do you handle it? I have tried several presets in Lightroom but I think it is better to develop my own preset. Can you advice me with a solid workflow?
Kind regards,
Joost
There are a lot of reasons why the two might look different, at various levels. First you have to make sure that you’re viewing the images with a color-managed application that understands the images’ color-space indications. Safari, for example, will understand those from Lightroom, but may well not understand those directly from your camera. (Older versions of Safari were guaranteed to ignore the color-space information in direct-from-camera JPGs, but the most recent versions now ignore the color-space settings only for Adobe RGB.)
(Here’s a post about NEF, Color Space Settings, and Embedded JPGs,
and my Primer on digital-image color spaces.)
Then there are the in-camera picture settings (”vivid”, etc.) that impact how the camera converts from raw data to the in-camera JPG, but external raw converters ignore (other than Nikon’s own Capture NX, I’d guess). You can still achieve the same results by twiddling the settings in the raw converter yourself, but it’s not automatic.
Then, at the most basic level, is that the general “look and feel” of each raw engine differs (as coincidentally described earlier today in Jon Van Dalen’s All RAW Processing Is Not Created Equal). One would suppose that Nikon’s Capture NX would exactly mimic what’s done in camera, but other raw processors will likely differ here and there. Lightroom, for example, is often knocked for its rendition of reds in Canon raw files, but praised for its Nikon renditions. This is apparently much more an art than a science, so equally talented people can differ greatly on what is good and bad. —Jeffrey
Hi Jeffrey,
Any chance of the next version of Mastering Regular Expressions containing a dedicated chapter on Javascript as you did for PHP in the most recent version?
Cheers,
Patrick
Yes, Javascript seems to be a logical choice for the next expansion, although there’s currently no plan on the table…. —Jeffrey
Hello Jeffrey,
I just spent an hour reading and enjoying your blog (originally came because - or thanks - of the LR tool for SmugMug) and I felt the need to thank you and say hello
First of all, I am a Nikon user (and LightRoom), I love Kyoto (and Japan in general) and I had the chance to be there a month ago, working for a Japanese company.
Thank you for your tutorials on the 70-200 mm, are you satisfied wth it (after the revision has been done)? And thanks for all your pictures of Japan and Kyoto.
Here are two pictures I took there (you can see them in big on my flickr account: www.flickr.com/yes-pictures):
Flying Zen —
Golden Temple
Also, I tried to check your book and I wanted to let you know that the link to the french version (being french myself) is broken. I hope the links to my pictures will work
I now live in the Netherlands, so if you come some day to Amsterdam, let me now and I can show you some nice location to shoot!
Thank you for all your efforts and for sharing your knowledge
Greetings to your wife and to Anthony, and speak to you soon!
Best regards,
Emilien
Dear Jeffrey, Thanks alot for the Picasa LR export, your tools are great!!
I enjoy your blog (although I’m on record as wishing you’d write more technical articles instead), and every one in a while I think one of your pictures is great.
Like this one:
http://regex.info/i/JEF_055717.jpg
–Marc
very nice personal life and i think it will be very interesting for knowing Japanese…
Hi Jeffrey,
I don’t mean for this blog to be posted regularly, but I’m looking for a photo-based blog template and yours is truly the best I’ve ever seen. Did you use a template for yours? A theme? IS there any way I can produce a similar yes customized version of this site. My site tackles the business-making of poor schools. Images of these kids and their schools would make a visually stronger impact than just being text based. You may email me back.
thanks
-K