Zaemis

A friend of mine was tasked with writing a regular expression that could recognize a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) and break apart its primary components. Not a terribly difficult task since there are a lot of sample regexs one can just pluck from the Internet. But he asked my opinion and I deferred to RFC 3986 which outlines the generic syntax for URIs. The RFC provides this example expression : ^(([^:/?#]+):)?(//([^/?#]*))?([^?#]*)(\?([^#]*))?(#(.*))? Personally though I think that's rather sloppy. Were I to write the expression from scratch myself then I'd probably be more verbose and restrictive; I'd expressly match patterns specified in the RFC's ABNF . For example, the RFC defines the scheme portion of a URI as: scheme = ALPHA *( ALPHA / DIGIT / "+" / "-" / "." ) The portion ^([^:/?#]+): will match characters that are not lexically permitted, such as an underscore or percent-sign. Assuming the i (case-insensitive matching) modi...

I'm changing shared hosting providers for my websites and the sites I manage for clients as Salt City Tech. Most of the sites are basic websites powered by PHP, share a common code base, and store data in MySQL databases. But I've also been taking advantage of the situation to transition the sites from MySQL to SQLite. There are a lot of things that annoy me about SQLite (such as allowing NULLs in primary-key columns , ignoring foreign key constrains, and incomplete ALTER TABLE support ) and a few things that I think are pretty awesome (such as user-defined functions in PHP ). Pragmatically speaking, SQLite will be more convenient for deployment to and backup from the shared hosting environment and the sites' simple storage requirements fall exactly in SQLite's sweet-spot. The transition hasn't been terribly difficult... the biggest obstacle has been configuring a development environment that adequately mirrored the shared hosting deployment environment. I happened ...

Happy New Year! I hope everyone has had a rewarding holiday and will have a prosperous new year! Last year I tentatively designated 2009 as my "Year of Balance." I wanted to make a concerted effort to focus more on what's really important in life. With a busy full-time job, a death in the family, juggling several side-projects, and buying a house this year (2009 was probably my "Year of Expense" in retrospect with the new house and all the joys that come with home ownership)... my head would probably have exploded had I not been making that effort. I'm not sure what my theme for 2010 will be, but I'll still be doing my best live, laugh, and love as much as I can and I hope you will be to!