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Irregular expressions regularly

  • Is RegExLib full of "it"?

    Today I read a comment on Jeffrey Schoolcraft's regex blog from Randal L. Schwartz which I felt that I needed to respond to.  As I started writing the comment I realized that this is probably news that needs to be publicly visible, so I'm posting it to my blog and cross referencing  the original comment.  First, here is Randal's comment:

  • Smart UI agents and inductive UI

    Continuing on from my blog entries last week about automated UI agents, I've started building a small prototype which will hopefully lead to an actual implementation.  In my prototype I have several agents accessing shared context through which they have some access to shared resources - such as logging tool and reporting agents.  As I mentioned, the output from my prototype will be an implementation, but I'm also preparing to cover it with a whitepaper on some of the lower level details.

  • Autonomous Interface Agents

    Web applications that are context aware will be able to make greater use of autonomous agents to directly manipulate graphical objects and affect the users display.  The MIT paper titled "Autonomous Interface Agents" says of autonomous agents:

  • Coaching end-users

    Today I had a conversation with a friend who is a musician.  We were discussing some of the similarities between music and software and even extending many of them to any creative pursuit where the output is consumed by others.  One of the things that we noted was that, as with software, end-users of music do not always share the feelings and experiences envisaged by the architects of the product.  I'm not sure how a musician can give corrective advice to an end-user about such a discrepancy at "runtime" but, in software we are fortunate that we can use context and UI elements to teach a user about the intended usage of a system. 

  • Grokking Information technology

    My days of using handcrafted Access database applications to automate inventory reconcilliation seems to be nothing but a distant blur.  Too soon it seems that I was whisked away from my accounting world of Office applications and surrounded by millions of rows worth of raw data.  There's something about real, raw data that seems to make my nerve edges jingle in a merry way.