Worus

It’s been an interesting day. Most notably, I had some code that I wrote utterly scrutenized for no purpose at all. I was told to use Perl regular expressions instead of POSIX ones, because they ran faster. Of course, Perl regular expressions add another dependency, albeit an easy one, and the number of replacements for these will never be intensive (probably used less than ten times to generate any given e-mail message). I do do things certain ways with a reason.

I was also informed that something that was a regular expression was not. The truth is that it was not a useful regular expression.

I also added complexity to the way that a separate function is called, thereby limiting its potential because it would supposedly make things easier. Never mind that the programmer would be the person using this, and I think a programmer knows what a file extension is and that the ability to use different extensions was a good thing, not limit them to one. It’s really a rather external issue to the software. Hey, though, what do I know?

Get this: I later found other code using POSIX regular expressions instead of Perl ones. Funny that we got on our high horse for this, isn’t it?

I do not mind feedback. However, I also do not appreciate useless feedback masked like it’s actually good feedback. It’s looking for a reason to complain. Whatever, though. In reality, what I wrote was exactly correct and there were only three extremely minor changes. I should probably just be happy about that.

I’ve been sick the last few days with a cold. I’m hoping to be better tomorrow.

Dean took me out for dinner for my birthday tonight. That was cool. I had some really good spaghetti at the Chicago Speakeasy. I decided that since 22 was my golden birthday, I’ve now got platinum.

I’ve done some work on MetaWeblogger this last week. I kind of go on and off of this project. I figure that’s okay, because it’s really only here for my amusement. MetaWeblogger can now open and save posts in RSS 2.0 format. I did opening a while back, but I quick dropped in saving this weekend. I now need to add some state fields to the Editor object to preserve things like the document’s author and the current weblog’s URL. I did start on this this weekend, but Zach called and wanted to go to a movie. We saw Robots.

I had more to write, but I’m thinking that sleep would be best for me right now.

I’m writing an image gallery script in Cold Fusion. It works for any directory with thumbnail files. This is great. This morning, I wasn’t able to determine the height and width of the images for the img tag using standard Cold Fusion. Since the only alternative I could find on the web was to install a custom tag, I decided to use Cold Fusion’s hooks to Java to implement this using CFScript instead. I was having some issues getting the class path set for this to work on the web site, but it would have been no big deal, just ask the Cold Fusion server to look in the current directory for classes. This change to the server would have been generally useful for everyone. At this point I’m told, “Oh, we have a custom tag installed to do that for a different site.”

Damn it all.