Sapere Aude
Month: November 2008
This is a tale of 2 approaches to regular expression matching. 1 of them is in widespread use in the standard interpreters for many languages, including Perl. The other is used only in a few places, notably most implementations of awk and grep. The 2 approaches have wildly different performance characteristics:
death to PCRE
very nice industrial design blog. why do things still look crappy today?
fracas over baptism between Mormons, Jews, and Catholics
Apparently, Mormons are allowed to perform a ritual that is intended to “baptize” dead ancestors so that those ancestors can get to heaven. This “baptism” is purely virtual, since of course the dead ancestors were not actually Mormons, and aren’t around to attend the ceremony themselves. Jewish Holocaust survivors are so alarmed about this prospect that they are demanding that the Mormons revise their religion
Washington should not approve any bail-out that doesn’t include consolidation. Clearly, America can’t support 3 functioning automakers. The government should take this opportunity to cut out at least some of the industry’s dead weight. Then next time, America will have to spend taxpayer money saving the jobs of only 2 lumbering, unprofitable firms instead of 3.
Google has stepped up as the next concern to wrap a train, wrapping 3 exterior cars with an advertisement for Google Maps, slightly less understated then the History Channel’s ad, if such a thing could be, as Google has only wrapped the exterior of the train, leaving the interior with the more traditional ads we are used to seeing in the square displays or banners up top.
looks nice
In Antiquity, it was known as Uttaräpatha, ‘the upper road’, and it connected the cities of the Ganges plain with the towns in the eastern Punjab and Taxila in the western Punjab.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said the idea of using WebKit as the rendering engine within its web browser was “interesting” and added “we may look at that”.
Whoa. Likelihood of that happening? 5%
2021-08-05: This eventually happened in 2018.
Livius offers information on ancient history. There are currently 4381 pages. You will also find more than 10700 original illustrations.
If you followed or were at all interested in the 2008 presidential election, this 7-part series by a group of Newsweek reporters is a must read. The reporters were granted exclusive access to the campaigns of Barack Obama, John McCain, and Hillary Clinton for 1 year on the condition that they wouldn’t print anything until after the election was over. The series, of which the first 3 parts are currently up on the Newsweek site, is a fascinating look at how the political process works and contains all manner of salacious political gossip.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 