John’s Jottings

Miscellaneous stuff, jabberings if you will:

Picked 13 winners in the NFL picks pool this week. Still not enough to get in the money. I hate that.

Added “Up For Poker”:http://www.upforanything.net/poker/ to my bookmarks. I always enjoy reading details from other poker players. I don’t get a chance to play much but I should write more when I do. The last time I played, a few weeks ago, I had one of those streaks where it didn’t matter what my cards were - only my position and my opponent. And it was also one of those nights were the only time someone saw my cards was when I actually did have solid hands. I love that.

Now that I’m dabbling in Perl again I find myself staring smack in the face of Regular expressions, something which when only looked at every once in a while is very difficult for me to gras “The Regulator”:http://www.gotdotnet.com/community/workspaces/workspace.aspx?ID=24289454-7EC7-45B6-82AE-F6A636DC5FEA is a visual Regular expression tool which certainly helps in the understanding of how a regex gets parsed. Needs the 1.1 .NET framework, however. There’s also RegExLib.com, a compendium of example expressions each trying to out obfuscate the other. Still, an interesting idea. The Regulator actually has an integration with regexlib to simplify the posting of new and exciting expressions (tongue firmly planted). “Regular-Expressions.info”:http://www.regular-expressions.info/ bills itself as the “premier web site about Regular expressions” but as with many other sites before it there is a new dog in town and it’s name is Blog - Weblogs @ Regex Advice. You guessed it, a blog about regular expressions. Now there’s a vertical for you.

On “BoingBoing “:http://boingboing.net comes Vanity tinyURLing . Regrettably, inexplicably, http://tinyurl.com/john points to the HP Support & Drivers page. I can think of one or two more boring pages but that might be it.

Jeremy asked for “Web Discussion Board Software That Doesn’t Suck”:http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/001065.html and of the many apps linked via his comments I find “FUDforum”:http://fud.prohost.org/ the most compelling. Easy to setup and configure and extremely flexible. I’ve set up an install to muck about with and like what I see so far.

Noticed tonight that “I’m currently ranked”:http://www.blogstreet.com/bin/profile.cgi?url=www.johnsjottings.com 2823/144454 blogs on BlogStreet. Top 2% baby. However in looking at the Neighborhood and BlogBack sections I am reminded of something I’ve written about before - that some weblog tools like “scraprap”:http://www.scraprap.com/ introduce incorrect results in any tool such as BlogStreet’s or Technorati that doesn’t recognize how they operate, namely that each time an author posts a new article the URL of their blog changes and it is treated as a new blog. In “The Mythical Million”:http://www.johnsjottings.com/archives/2003/10/04/the_mythical_million.html I try to debunk the stat de jour of weblog growth, 24,000 new blogs every minute or whatever the hell the claim is. Bunk. Still, top 2% baby.

Back to the salt mines of Chicago tomorrow, “this time”:http://www.johnsjottings.com/archives/2003/11/14/cab_fight.html I’ll have my eyes out on the cabbies.