Author: gpanther

  • RegEx which matches strings not containing a substring

    This is an interesting problem which can appear in certain cases (although not very often). A little searching around led me to many posts stating that there is no easy solution and the following easy solution: ^((?!my string).)*$ It works as follows: the matching string must contain zero or more characters which are not preceded…

  • Java import statement gotcha

    There is a lot of debate on the intertubes if one should or shouldn’t use wildcard imports. I’m mostly indifferent to the discussion (mainly because all the package references are resolved compile time – so there is no performance overhead – and because today’s IDE’s contain a lot of smarts to help you figure out…

  • delicious/cdman83

    Common shell script mistakes Posted: 18 Jan 2010 04:38 AM PST Invalid techniques of proof Posted: 18 Jan 2010 04:07 AM PST Your Bookmarklets, On Steroids – Quix Posted: 20 Jan 2010 03:38 AM PST DNSCog – DNS reporting and diagnostic tools Posted: 19 Jan 2010 11:26 PM PST From DynDNS – a little slow,…

  • FindersUK review

    Finding relatives was always a topic which interested me marginally, so I was interested in checking out the Finders UK website (which BTW, can also be read in other ways because URLs don’t have the concept of capitalization implicitly – lets just leave at that). They offer different services like tracing heirs. Unfortunately (for me)…

  • BrickHouse Alert review

    After looking at the site of this Medical Alert company I’m left with troubling questions in my mind. Having an ill grand-parent makes me acutely appreciate the need for Medical Alert services, but this company leaves many open questions, especially considering the fact that this is a company which requires a monthly subscription. Their site…

  • Globe Runner review

    The second review for today is also for a SEO Consultant: Globe Runner SEO. From all that I can gather, they are a legitimate company (here is their BBB page – so hard to tell these days 🙁 ), and they also run BabySafe Travel. They also don’t seem to come up in the first…

  • Softline Local Review

    Many say that local online marketing is the “next frontier”. While I have some doubts with regarding this phenomenon (my money is on the ever expanding global economy – even though I’ve got “slapped” a couple of times by companies refusing to deliver to Romania), I’ve looked at softline local. They seem like a company…

  • You go PHD Comics!

    PHD Comics is always great and hilarious (and worth to subscribe to if you are even vaguely related to the academic world – like trough a friend of a friend :-)) but there are those occasions when it is epic, like this one: The media can almost never be trusted to get things right and…

  • Carving out files with Perl

    I’ve had to use this trick a couple of times the last few years, so I decided that I might as well document it: If you have an image of a storage media (like an SD card or CD/DVD) which you can not mount (either because the filesystem is hosed – that’s a technical term…

  • Should I use RoboForm?

    A little background about this post: while I was vaguely aware of RoboForm, I never took a closer look at it until I saw the following post by Derek: Beware of fake shopping sites. What it basically says is that a password manager (such as Roboform) will help you avoid phising sites, because it will…