Armstrong Day, 40 AT

I've run into this problems several times in the past, in several different languages. I'll be trying to split a string on a delimiter using the language's split() method, but at some point I'll discover that the delimiter occurs within the string to be split, but in an escaped form. So for instance, you might have a string like this:

123, person, Tom Smith\, MD, 45202

And what you want is an array of those values like this:

I've been caught up in a project lately which has left me with little time for blogging. But the dust is settling after the launch of Liberate Domains, and it went great!

while ( suffering >= joy ) {
    meditate();
}

*meditate() function not included.

Ever since I started writing software professionally, I've noticed this bizarre but very widespread tendency to invert strategy and tactics when looking for a developer. What I mean is starting a software development project not by discussing the goals of the software, what is to be invented or how it will make a current task faster, cheaper and/or easier. Instead, the person running the project, often with little or no personal experience with software development, skims the surface of the software development periodicals and Web sites, learning little more than buzzwords and acronyms.

It seems that only a minority of programmers are functionally multilingual, in other words capable of writing useful software in more than one modern language. Most programmers work exclusively with a single language until nobody wants to hire developers specializing in that language any more.

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I work for a company whose primary software product is a Web-based content management system. It's very easy to use for a Web app, so easy that most of our users are secretaries and marketing people. And if you've ever worked on Web content as part of your job, you'll know that's not a disparaging remark. Most software for creating Web content requires understanding of HTML at a minimum, ours just requires some basic familiarity with the Web, like what a URL should look like so you can create links.

I've been interested in calendars and their histories for quite a while, but only recently discovered the Tranquility calendar, which is centered on the first moon landing. I thought it was a fun concept and found an equivalent to the *nix date command written by Scott M Harrison. Here's a perl port of his C implementation: Download tranquility.pl.

Watching the election results tonight, I keep thinking about the differences between Clinton and Obama's policy proposals for space exploration and how they relate to cautionary words from Stephen Hawking. First, here is Hawking's argument: