programming
Regular Expressions to the Rescue
Submitted by pirateguillermo on November 29, 2009 - 4:13pmFrom time to time, and increasingly frequently at this time of year, my dear wife has to send out emails to big segments of her company's customer base. That's her job, after all. However, for reasons that are outside the scope of this blog, the list of customers doesn't always have an email for each customer and, for various other reasons, the email addresses are not always well-formed. It takes her several hours each time to go through the list and manually screen them all.
Productive Weekend
Submitted by pirateguillermo on November 23, 2009 - 9:53amOver the weekend I started working on writing a simulation environment. On Saturday morning, I had an empty project. This morning, I have a couple of sample components that I can link together (programmatically, it's true). I can tell them that time is passing and have messages flow and computation occur correctly. And I've got unit tests for all this, so I can tell when I break it in the future. Not bad for a day and a half!
I Wish I Had a Tool
Submitted by pirateguillermo on November 18, 2009 - 1:50pmI keep thinking about the Salamander Simulation Engine (SSE) -- a codebase I worked on in the mid-nineties -- and thinking what a cool tool it was. For that matter, it likely still is, although the company has changed name and direction a bit since 1997. Now it's DecisionPower and they're all about market simulation. Back then they (we) were Salamander Interactive and it was about this general purpose simulation engine.
