sniff.org http://www.sniff.org If you're nosy, then sniff.org is the place for you! Wed, 02 Sep 2009 18:23:54 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 Developer Tools Mega List! http://www.sniff.org/2009/09/02/developer-tools-mega-list/ http://www.sniff.org/2009/09/02/developer-tools-mega-list/#comments Wed, 02 Sep 2009 18:23:54 +0000 Lance http://www.sniff.org/?p=63 Scott Hanselman has updated his list of developer tools for 2009. Check out the list of tools and see if you can improve your productivity!

]]> http://www.sniff.org/2009/09/02/developer-tools-mega-list/feed/ 0 XPath and Regex living together http://www.sniff.org/2009/03/27/xpath-and-regex-living-together/ http://www.sniff.org/2009/03/27/xpath-and-regex-living-together/#comments Sat, 28 Mar 2009 00:50:18 +0000 Lance http://www.sniff.org/?p=59 Today at work, I needed to come up with a regular expression that, given an xpath expression for a node, would return the xpath for that node’s parent. Originally, I wasn’t using regular expressions at all, but was just getting the substring of the xpath up to the index of the last occurrence of /. This works fine, so long as the xpath expression doesn’t contain any conditionals that contain a /, but what if you want to get the parent xpath from something like this:

/a/b[@x='/1/2/3']/c[@y='/4/5/6']

If the substring approach is used, /a/b[@x='/1/2/3']/c[@y='/4/5 is returned instead of /a/b[@x='/1/2/3']! Hence the need for a regular expression.

I did some hacking around (as it turns out I was approaching things from the wrong point of view at first), did a few fruitless google searches, and finally gave up searching on regexlib.com.

Finally, I figured it out all on my own after an “aha!” moment of clarity.

^.+(?=(?<!\[[^\]]*)/)

Behold! What this is doing is a greedy match of any character up to but not including a / that follows a [ without a ] in between. I hope this will help somebody down the road who has a similar problem to solve.

]]> http://www.sniff.org/2009/03/27/xpath-and-regex-living-together/feed/ 0 The truth hurts http://www.sniff.org/2009/01/01/the-truth-hurts/ http://www.sniff.org/2009/01/01/the-truth-hurts/#comments Fri, 02 Jan 2009 03:21:47 +0000 Lance http://www.sniff.org/?p=54 Just got this e-card from my good friend Mike.

e-card from Mike

Thought this card seemed appropriate somehow — Happy New Year, and better luck in Nachos 2009!

–Mike

]]> http://www.sniff.org/2009/01/01/the-truth-hurts/feed/ 1 The most random message ever http://www.sniff.org/2008/12/13/the-most-random-message-ever/ http://www.sniff.org/2008/12/13/the-most-random-message-ever/#comments Sat, 13 Dec 2008 18:34:05 +0000 Lance http://www.sniff.org/?p=47 About 9 months ago I got a pre-paid AT&T GoPhone. Apparently the number that I got was one that belonged to a woman who, for reasons unknown to me, has fallen on what seems to be hard financial times (perhaps the reason why she doens’t have her mobile number any more). Since the time I’ve had the number, I’ve received many messages from bill collectors, schools, car warrantee providers, etc. all trying to reach this woman. I’ve been diligent about calling back these people and letting them know that their contact info is out of date so that they won’t call me back. Well, this morning I got a message from a gentleman that knows this woman, I assume. I wouldn’t do the message justice by trying to describe it, so here it is for your listening pleasure.

Warning: There are some expetives within, so if you are at work, you may want to use your headphones.

The most random message ever

]]> http://www.sniff.org/2008/12/13/the-most-random-message-ever/feed/ 0 Revolution Money Exchange http://www.sniff.org/2008/09/05/revolution-money-exchange/ http://www.sniff.org/2008/09/05/revolution-money-exchange/#comments Fri, 05 Sep 2008 22:40:34 +0000 Lance http://www.sniff.org/?p=43 I know it’s a mouthfull, but it may prove to be a legitimate contender to PayPal. They don’t charge any fees for accepting money which is what attracted me to the service. Also, they are doing a referral program right now to get new users: $10 to both the referrer (up to $500) and the new user. Pretty sweet! Contribute to my referral fund by clicking on the image below and signing up for your own Revolution Money Exchange account.


Refer A Friend using Revolution Money Exchange
]]> http://www.sniff.org/2008/09/05/revolution-money-exchange/feed/ 0 I’m a man of many names http://www.sniff.org/2008/08/15/im-a-man-of-many-names/ http://www.sniff.org/2008/08/15/im-a-man-of-many-names/#comments Sat, 16 Aug 2008 02:19:58 +0000 Lance http://www.sniff.org/?p=40 I go out to eat lunch quite a bit and I’m often asked what my name is when I order. Most of the time the person behind the counter gets my name right, “Lance”. On occasion, however, they hear something different. Here’s a running list of my many names:

  • Lens
  • Lenz
  • Lanz
  • Lence
  • Lents
  • Lars
  • Lons
  • Rants (my personal favorite)
]]> http://www.sniff.org/2008/08/15/im-a-man-of-many-names/feed/ 2 Xoop it! http://www.sniff.org/2008/06/18/xoopit/ http://www.sniff.org/2008/06/18/xoopit/#comments Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:23:06 +0000 Lance http://www.sniff.org/?p=38 XoopItIf you’re one of the many people that uses Firefox and has a ton of pictures, videos, and attachments sitting disorganized in your massive Gmail inbox and/or archive (and don’t mind linking your account with a third party site) then the Xoopit Gmail plugin addon for Firefox is for you! It categorizes all of your media and allows you to search through it by date, sender, media type, etc. I’m finding it quite handy. The XoopIt service is in private beta right now, but I was able to get in using an invite from Mashable. A limited number of invites are also available from Download Squad and Lifehacker.

]]> http://www.sniff.org/2008/06/18/xoopit/feed/ 0 Testing out the N810 http://www.sniff.org/2008/06/13/testing-out-the-n810/ http://www.sniff.org/2008/06/13/testing-out-the-n810/#comments Fri, 13 Jun 2008 09:30:12 +0000 Lance http://www.sniff.org/?p=37 Just a little test blog entry using MaemoWordPy on my new N810. As you may have guessed by the timestamp of this post, it’s pretty hard to stop playing with my new toy! Time for bed!

]]> http://www.sniff.org/2008/06/13/testing-out-the-n810/feed/ 0 Another blast from the past http://www.sniff.org/2008/03/27/another-blast-from-the-past/ http://www.sniff.org/2008/03/27/another-blast-from-the-past/#comments Thu, 27 Mar 2008 21:07:56 +0000 Lance http://www.sniff.org/2008/03/27/another-blast-from-the-past/ Here’s another file on my Nanogen network share that triggered some reminiscing. This was taken during the Nanogen Halloween party my first year working there, 1998! That’s me in the homemade Kenny costume. Chris Valcke is the one behind the Bear mask.

Nanogen Halloween 1998

]]> http://www.sniff.org/2008/03/27/another-blast-from-the-past/feed/ 0 Good times…good times… http://www.sniff.org/2008/03/27/good-timesgood-times/ http://www.sniff.org/2008/03/27/good-timesgood-times/#comments Thu, 27 Mar 2008 20:41:59 +0000 Lance http://www.sniff.org/2008/03/27/good-timesgood-times/ I’m in the middle of cleaning out my network folder here at Nanogen today and I didn’t recognize one of my folders, simply named “fwt”. Hmmm… Upon opening it up, I immediately recognized the contents. It was my “F” With Tim project folder! I decided to do a little desktop wallpaper replacement for our, at the time, Software QA guy. He liked Natalie Portman quite a bit at the time, so I thought I’d jazz her picture up a bit with the likeness of a fellow co-worker using a bit of Flash and the benefits of Active Desktop! Here is the result.

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