December, 2009

Comment Spam

Submitted by Bevan on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 - 3:52pm

Sorry to say, but the Spammers seem to be winning the war. I've just spent a bunch of holiday time cleaning up a mess caused by someone posting a bunch of spam laden comments.

Effective immediately, all comments posted here will require approval before being published. As always, spam comments will be exterminated with extreme prejudice.

On Priorities

Submitted by Bevan on Thu, 17 Dec 2009 - 7:35pm

Browsing the Great Programming Quotes question over on StackOverflow, I found a really thought provoking quote:

Make it Correct.
Make it Clear.
Make it Concise.
Make it Fast.

In that order.

(Attributed to Wes Dyer)

While there's a lot that could be written about this, I've just one observation ...

All too often, it seems our customers would rank things different ...

A Regular Expression Bug

Submitted by Bevan on Mon, 14 Dec 2009 - 7:43pm

Several years ago, I specialized in Delphi software development.

Amongst several other endeavors, I wrote and sold a Regular Expression matcher. Well, it turns out that my matcher has a significant bug that was only just noticed by a user - handling of "$" to require a match to finish at the end of the line was broken.

Yikes!

For future reference of anyone consulting with Professor Google or Doctor Bing, here's the fix.

The code inside TniRegularExpressionMatcher.MatchExpression is missing a check for mfFinishOnly.

Inside the repeat loop: