Regular Expression Matching can be Ugly and Slow

If you open the first few pages of O'Reilly's Beautiful Code, you will find a well written chapter by Brian Kernighan (Personal motto: "No, I didn't invent C. Who told you that?"). The non-C inventing professor describes how a limited form of regular expressions can be implemented elegantly in only a few lines of C code.

Automatically remove wordiness from your writing

Exploring sound with Wavelets

Here's a program to create scalograms of sound files.

C++: A language for next generation web apps

On Monday, I was pleased to be an uninvited speaker at Waterloo Devhouse, hosted in Postrank's magnificent office. After making some surreptitious alterations to their agile development wall, I gave a tongue-in-cheek talk on how C++ can fit in to a web application.

The PenIsland Problem: Text-to-speech for domain names

Recently, I was contracted to run a list of domain names through the custom-built pronunciation engine that powers my rhyming web site. On the first attempt, I found that the results were embarrassingly bad. A quick inspection revealed the problem: most domain names are severalwordsstucktogether.

Why you should go to the Business of Software Conference Next Year

Most people, having already paid $2000.00 of their hard earned money, and then having flown, driven, or otherwise travelled to Boston to attend a conference, and then having paid an additional $250/night plus $33/night parking and "tourism taxes" to the Seaport Hotel -- most people, after all this, are unlikely to say that it was a waste of time and they should have stayed home watching the remaining salvaged episodes of Doctor Who on Netflix.

In fact, I found it quite useful.

Fun with Colour Difference

Are you looking for a nifty way to choose colours that stand out? Are you the type of person who is not satisfied until you have mathematically proven that your choice is optimal?

My favourite Google Cardboard Apps

I have never been a gamer. The most I've played was Super Mario Bros (the original). I then took a break for a decade or two and spent a few weeks with Simcity 4. All that changed when I got Google Cardboard.

How a programmer reads your resume (comic)

People thought it was a comic, so I never corrected them.

Finding the top K items in a list efficiently

Do you use sort() to find the top results? Here's a simple trick that will make your software run much faster.