I've finally finished the writing and production of the Third Edition of my book, Mastering Regular Expressions (published by O'Reilly Media). I'd been working on it since the early fall, and finished the day before my travels started earlier this month.

This third edition is 58 pages longer than the second edition, and now reaches 542 pages in length. The main changes from the second edition are a new, 48-page chapter on PHP, and a rewritten/expanded Java chapter taking into account the many java.util.regex changes between Java 1.4 and Java 1.5/Java 1.6.

I've not yet updated the [...]

(wow, my third post of the day -- rare for me)

My parents and sister have used TracFone prepaid wireless phones for years, so I thought I'd give them a try to fill my cell phone needs while in America. We'll be here for six weeks, and then from time to time in years to come.

There are three cost components to using TracFone: you must buy a phone, buy service time, and buy minutes. The latter two are combined into minutes that expire some months or years after you buy them.

Last weekend, while [...]

I like the little Apple iBook I bought in 2002 (just before Anthony was born), but the iBooks have a design flaw that causes a wire leading to the screen's backlight to become frayed and fail. It manifests itself with a "flaky" backlight that flickers when the screen angle is adjusted, getting worse and over the course of days or weeks until the screen just won't come on anymore.

It's a common problem.

My iBook had this problem while it was still under the extended warranty I'd bought, and was fixed, but then started acting up again [...]
View full post »

Have you ever noticed that some parking lots have yellowish lights that make things look crazy colors at night? A movie theater in Santa Clara, CA we used to go to made Fumie's silver car look perfectly green, or something like that.

Such situations are an extreme example of the simple fact that all light is not created equal. Any middle-school student can tell you that perfect white is an even dose of all colors across the visible spectrum, but it's only common sense that if the light shining on something white doesn't contain that even dose of [...]

I'm pretty good at creating software, but for me it's a very different story when it comes to electronics and mechanics, so it was with great awe that I read one man's attempt to photograph insects in flight.

His saga has 10 pages, starting out with a laser sensor he built to trigger the camera when a bug is in the right spot, and includes taking apart a 1950s mechanical shutter, finding a way to open and close the shutter with electromagnets 20x faster than his modern digital SLR camera's shutter lag, and, well, a lot of smarts. [...]
View full post »