I think this has to be one of the big reasons why people who love their Mac, love their Mac (or other Apple product). I usually just have cheap PC speakers plugged into my Mac mini, but I didn't bring any with me to Munich and the internal Mac mini speaker isn't very loud, so I'm using headphones to watch movies. My Mac remembers the volume setting when the headphones ore plugged in, and when they're not, so I don't accidentally blow my ears. It's like my iPod pausing when the headphones are unplugged. It's excruciating attention to the smallest, (seemingly) most unimportant detail. I love it, and I'm hooked.

I'm almost half way reading Jeffrey Friedl's book Mastering Regular Expressions and I have to say that for a book on something that could potentially bore you to tears, he really does an excellent job of keeping it interesting. Even though a lot of the examples are contrived (I'm sure out of necessity), he also uses real examples of regexes that he's actually used at Yahoo!.

As someone who has to know how everything works it's also an excellent lesson in patience, as he frequently says "here, take this knowledge and just accept it for now until I can explain why in the next chapter (or in 3 chapters!)". But it's all with good reason and when he does explain he does it well.

Reading about the different NFA and DFA engines and which tools use which made me go "ahhh, /that's/ why I can't do that in grep!" It's not just that I like to know how things work either, he's 100% correct about having to know information like that to wield the power of regexes in all situations. This book made me realize that regex implementations can be wildly different and that you really need to consider the job before jumping into using a specific regex flavour, as he calls them. I'm fascinated by learning why DFA regex implementations would successfully allow ^\w+=.(\\\n.)* to match certain lines, allowing for trailing backslashes to mean continuation but why NFA engines would fail to do the same without tweaking it a bit.

It requires more thinking than the last 2 computer books I read, Programming Ruby (the "pixaxe" book) and Agile Web Development With Rails so it's noticeably slower reading. It's also the kind of book I will read more than once, for sure. There's just no way I can glean everything from it in one reading. If you use regular expressions at all then you need this book. This is starting to sound like an advertisement so I'll say no more.

QOTD, p. 329, about matching nested pairs of parens:

(([^()]|(([^()]|(([^()]|(([^()])))))))) Wow, that's ugly.

(Don't worry, there's a much better solution on the next 2 pages after that quote.)

Nothing personal, but the backtick/tilde is located where the rest of the left shift key should be, and the return key is double-height, forcing the backslash/bar to the right of the dash/underscore (that'd be the apostrophe/double quote for pretty much everyone else who types qwerty). Note that I'm talking about using a German keyboard with an English layout. The German layout is flat out impossible for coding.

For some reason it gets even worse with a German Apple keyboard. Square brackets, where for art though? Through trial and error I found them using Alt/Opt+5/6... non-Apple German keyboards I've seen use Alt Gr+8/9, which is just as bad but at least they were labeled. I know why coders here don't use the German layout! I feel uneasy just talking about it.

Here's a text file with each character of the 4 rows in it, normal and then shifted, in qwerty, qwertz, and dvorak. I personally think that some ways the German keys change must be some sick joke (double quote moved up to shift-2, single quote almost staying put, angle brackets being shoved aside only to put the semi-colon and colon on different keys as well). If you ask me lots of that could be avoided by getting rid of the key that replaced the backtick/tilde, and putting the 3 vowels with the umlaut (ü, ö, and ä) on Alt Gr/Opt+[aou]. But hey, I don't type in German so what do I know.

How's this for an update: I'm working in Munich for the summer at a European search engine called Seekport. The search engine isn't all they do, as right now I'm programming a desktop widget that shows live scores & news from World Cup matches (in English and Arabic). I'm building it on top of the Yahoo! Widget Engine because it needs to run on Windows. Even though I quite like the Y! Engine, I would still prefer to be coding in straight HTML, CSS & JavaScript like Dashboard programmers get to use. The Y! Engine uses XML (it is somewhat HTML-like) and JavaScript.

The place I'm living in is like a dormitory for younger people. I share a bathroom & kitchen with a German guy named Sebastian who is 21 and an artist; a stonecutter actually. I only met him briefly yesterday, but he seems nice. I'm going to teach him English, and he'll teach me German, though his English is much better than my German. It's a pretty quiet place, and we get breakfast included, dinner can be bought for €2,50, and Internet access is included as well. I brought my Mac Mini with me, and as soon as I find an AC adapter I'll be ready to go with the 'net at home. I probably won't blog again until then, since I'm at work right now.

Germany is great so far, and as soon as I get learning some German I'll be a much happier person. I consider it rude of me to expect everyone to converse with me in English, like I have to do right now.

(Oh, and they sell beer by the litre in Germany! They call it a maß.)