Diary: November 2005

Can't Work All The Time

On Friday, at the request of Vas, I wrote a small and simple pattern matching engine to take a plain text reference and turn it into a BibTeX reference. It's a difficult task to do automatically, given that to interpret a plain text reference takes some human intelligence. My script takes simple formats like '%author%, %title% (%year%)', or you can extend it to match regular expressions, like '%/(\d+\. )%%author/.+?(?<!\b.)%. %title%.' Oh, and it does other things too; allows you to insert comments, and also lets you set the type.

It's not perfect; there appear to be some ...

Read full entry

Back To Blue

Back to the old theme. I also decided it was about time to drop my little welcome message, seeing as it's been there for over 5 years.

Anyway, I just saw an advert for Titanic on DVD, with an alternative ending. Please, will somebody buy this and tell me if they all die?

When I'm a multi-millionaire, I'm going to film a new version of Titanic. Involving a hitman cyborg from the future, sent back through time to destroy the Rose before she can be saved and go on to recite her story for 194 minutes.

Damn ...

Read full entry

Using Open Source Code

When it comes to using open source code in my projects, I hesitate. Even though I may find that the code I am about to write might have already been written by someone else and is sitting in front of me, I will often ignore theirs and write mine again from scratch. I am aware that we would never get anywhere without standing on the shoulders of others, but I frequently just can't bring myself to do it.

Part of it is that I enjoy solving problems, but the real issues for me are quality control and future-proofing.

If ...

Read full entry

Open Source Ideas

Following on from the question I asked in my previous entry, today I am wondering where we draw the line between learning from others and stealing from others. To illustrate, I will give you some examples.

Imagine that I produce something that does the same job as another open source project, but has totally different code and was developed without any knowledge of the other project at all. Is that wrong? I would assume that here everyone would say no.

But what if I take an idea from that open source project and use it in mine? Is that wrong ...

Read full entry

Something Good And Something Bad

We all love speed cameras, so I'm sure you'll be as excited as I was when I read this story about how there will soon be license plate recognition at every 400 yards on UK motorways, not to mention sprinkled around town centres and petrol stations. And how your details will then be stored on a database for two years, even if you haven't done anything wrong.

And the much-anticipated Google Base has now opened its doors. Looks interesting, if not slightly scary - Google already currently knows your friends (Orkut), who you talk to (gmail), where you ...

Read full entry