Speed Freak

Just had the cable man over to switch out my old cable modem for the brand new one which supports the "Extreme" broadband internet I ordered.

I *was* getting bandwidth test speeds of ~350 kbps. Now on the same tests I'm getting 6.5 Mbps! That's like, 19 times faster!

I'm in love with the Internet all over again.

Regular Expressions Tool

Whilst scripting today, I chanced to be working with regular expressions. I use The Regulator to hash out an expression, because it has syntax highlighting, intellisense, and can search Regexlib.com via web service. This helps a lot, but it doesn't have the ability to test the expression with a client-side regex engine - it's .NET or go home. Still, better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, as mother says.

The script? Makes an Inmagic search box more Google-esque. Single words, and phrases marked with quotation marks, are automatically demarcated with a boolean operator, like... ["Land Cruiser" Toyota] to ["Land Cruiser" & Toyota]. Existing boolean operators are respected, so... ["Land Rover" Toyota ! "Range Rover"] to ["Land Rover" & Toyota ! "Range Rover"].

Meet the Feet

I have, I confess, the feet of an athlete. Not the kind that win the 100 meters in 9.98 seconds, or even the kind that limp wretchedly round the oval to claim a participant's pin in the "Race for the Cure to Having Your Ankles Banged At With A Ball-Peen Hammer" 24 hour relay. No, I have athlete's feet. I mean foot. Athlete's foot.

I don't know, since I'm not very athletic, where I got such a thing. I'm at the gym four mornings a week, but I keep well away from the obvious lepers, and keep the liver-spotted elderly at bay with occasional light spritzes of cleaning fluid as needed. And most importantly, my feet remain inside my shoes at all times. So even IF I was tackled and subjected to frottage by some gamey pariah, which I'm pretty sure has never happened, my feet would have to be pried out of their protective shells first, shoes AND socks, before any fung would have a chance to get ungus on me. Right?

Four weeks of twice-daily cream rubs is NOT sitting well with me.

On a side note, this is definitely the sort of confession I never would have made before getting married, in fear of hurting my chances with the opposite sex. Not that I don't care now, but, yeah wait, I don't care now. This, plus the computer geek thing and the LIBRARIAN'S DEGREE has guaranteed my place somewhere just behind Giblet, the Radioactive Plague Clown, on the scale of Brad Pitt to Elephant Man in the All Hot Male Revue.

The Minister's Cat is a Crapulent Cat

The office cat just came in, jumped up on my desk, and did his usual lie-down-on-the-keyboard move to get my attention. This normally elicits anything from an annoyed shove to a reluctant "awwwwww" but today, no.

Today the cat has somehow smeared dog poop all over the outside AND INSIDE of his ear.. I can't even begin to imagine how he achieved this. And I only assume it's from a dog. Oh god please, let it be from a dog.

When I get back from scrubbing the fecalized feline with a soapy rag, I will continue to overhaul the Andornot script library. I don't know how I ever get any work done.

Longest Day

Longest day of the year today. Feel that all-natural Vitamin D! I'm bathing in photons right now.

Interesting fact. Or theory, whatever. Photons (smallest possible packets of light) always move at the speed of light: 670 million miles per hour. Zing! Theory goes, everything moves at the speed of light actually, just not in the spatial dimensions. You yourself are moving at the speed of light if you include time, the 4th dimension. You can translate some of that speed to space (start walking) and indeed, relative to an observer, time passes more slowly for you. So photons, already and always at the speed of light spatially, do not and have never aged.

On a COMPLETELY unrelated topic, I am knocked out by the cool factor of find-as-you-type, auto-complete combo boxes for the web, as seen on Google Suggest! I's be downloading the 30 day free trial. I think they use some sort of time-travelling tachyon beam to broadcast the choice I *will* have made back to the search box. Clever. Damnably clever.

Keywords: nifty, photon of youth, tachyon combo box

Blogware

Trying to... [guh] make dasBlog... [nyuh] work with the Andornot... [SPROIING!] website.

Ted Jardine for Presimonk

I would just like to take this opportunity to take my hat off to a very hard-working, knowledgeable, reliable, creative, and above all HUMAN human being. Ted Jardine. Here's his site: ovalsquare. Ted, we'd be in a world of pain if not for your dedication these last couple of weeks.

Now I'd like to put my hat back on. And wonder whether Ted is short for Theodore, or Edward, Thaddeus, or what. My father goes by Ted, though his real name is Edward - go figure. Perhaps it's not short for anything, but is in fact completely and only TED: no more, no less. That would be fine.

I declare this day the Feast of St. Ted of the Garden. Move over, uh... St. Emily de Vialar! Or... Isaurus the Holy Martyr and His Companions of Athens! (If you happen to be Orthodox.) What have they done for me lately?

XSL Transforms: The Tortoise and the Hare

Woe. Woe, I say. Woe! To Thee! If thou wouldst assay to run an XSL transform with the .NET XslTransform object. And a knight recreant would I be to keep my tongue caged within its red and toothy prison over it. As 'twere.

Simply put, the .NET XslTransform class is not MSXML based. MSXML is fast. XslTransform is slow. Particularly with transforms of larger XML docs - performance gets worse the larger the XML input is. Supposedly this will all go away with .NET 2.0.

If you pass WebPublisher an XSL document with a query, you're in no trouble, since WebPublisher is using MSXML.

Keywords: tortoise, hare, woe

Tongue Nailed To Floor

It's hard to rant when words are inadequate. Musing is similarly right out. This is exactly why Hallmark is doing a roaring trade in prefabricated sentiment.

Nathan Mayr, a friend, a fiendishly genius developer, and someone I looked up to (he was taller than me) has died and silence is all that comes out.