Disqus - Latest Comments for LeBleu

Re: Gray Ingress Jedi

Kevin C. — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 12:48:19 -0000

"One side cannot exist without the other."

Huh? How are cheaters required for legit players to exist? Or are you claiming someone is only "light side" if they actively pursue cheaters, and even someone who plays to the letter of the ToS but doesn't pursue cheaters are "gray"?

Re: #IngressFS – December 2015 Results

Kevin C. — Sat, 12 Dec 2015 01:34:23 -0000

I like the new slideshow of individual city rankings at the end. I wish there was a way to share to G+ with my city's image for the post instead of the image at the top. Since there isn't, I just went with sharing that image and putting a link to the article in the text.

Re: MUFG – Capsule Testing

Kevin C. — Sun, 12 Jul 2015 22:31:43 -0000

Over 2 weeks now... when can we expect preliminary results? There are some very good theories out there that you should have enough data by now to at least give an idea of true or not. (Such as whether replication times vary day to day, or agent to agent.)

Re: A Great Color Printer: HP Officejet Pro 8100

Kevin C. — Mon, 28 Apr 2014 22:54:19 -0000

This is my concern as well! I'd like to see a review of the best color printers for infrequent users. I suspect that lasers will fare better than inkjet as they don't have issues with ink drying out, but finding good reviews of color lasers is a challenge.

Re: Why I Stopped Telling Young Girls to Go Into Engineering

Kevin C. — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 15:00:23 -0000

Most of the problems you described sound to me like problems with the culture of that specific workplace, not problems with tech in general.

As a man, I also have definitely noticed an inverse relationship between the number of women and how intellectually rich the workplace is. Even in the same workplace, I have noticed differences as the number of women varied.

I would seriously use number of women, when I can observe it, as a criteria in deciding whether to work someplace. If the team isn't above 10-15% female, it is probably not a good place to work.

I currently work on a development team that is 28% female, at a non-tech company, and your description above sounds nothing like my current workplace. The non-work related discussions are just as likely to be about movies or philosophy as about technical topics like the latest gadget. (We really work in too many different languages to obsess over APIs...)

If your current workplace is unpleasant enough that you no longer wish to encourage young people to join your profession, my guess would be that you should find a job someplace better.

Re: Regular expressions blues

Kevin C. — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 14:44:16 -0000

That email regex is actually somewhat poorly written... there are a lot of cases where it writes like /X|[YZ]|[a-z]/ when it could say /[XYZa-z]/. I've preserved such oddities exactly below. I also put a pretty printed version of it at https://gist.github.com/806489 that I needed to make to translate to below.

{
case_insensitive flag
begin_of_line
(
  (
    once_or_more (any between "a" and "z" or digit or any of "!#\$%&'*+-/=?^_`{|}~" or any between "\u00A0" and "\uD7FF", "\uF900" and "\uFDCF", "\uFDF0" and "\uFFEF")
    zero_or_more ( "." once_or_more (any between "a" and "z" or digit or any of "!#\$%&'*+-/=?^_`{|}~" or any between "\u00A0" and "\uD7FF", "\uF900" and "\uFDCF", "\uFDF0" and "\uFFEF") )
  )
  or
  (
    zero_or_more (
      (double_quote)
      optional (
          optional ( zero_or_more (space or tab) (cr lf) )
          once_or_more (space or tab)
      )
      (
        ([\x01-\x08\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x1f\x7f] or "\x21" or [\x23-\x5b] or [\x5d-\x7e] or [\u00A0-\uD7FF\uF900-\uFDCF\uFDF0-\uFFEF])
        or 
        ( "\\" ([\x01-\x09\x0b\x0c\x0d-\x7f] or [\u00A0-\uD7FF\uF900-\uFDCF\uFDF0-\uFFEF]) )
      )
    )
    optional (
      optional (zero_or_more (space or tab) (cr lf))
      one_or_more (space or tab)
    )
    (double_quote)
  )
)
"@"
once_or_more (
  (
    (any between "a" and "z" or digit or any between "\u00A0" and "\uD7FF", "\uF900" and "\uFDCF", "\uFDF0" and "\uFFEF")
    or
    (
      (any between "a" and "z" or digit or any between "\u00A0" and "\uD7FF", "\uF900" and "\uFDCF", "\uFDF0" and "\uFFEF")
      zero_or_more (any between "a" and "z" or digit or "-" or "." or "_" or "~" or any between "\u00A0" and "\uD7FF", "\uF900" and "\uFDCF", "\uFDF0" and "\uFFEF")
      (any between "a" and "z" or digit or any between "\u00A0" and "\uD7FF", "\uF900" and "\uFDCF", "\uFDF0" and "\uFFEF")
    )
  )
  "."
)
(
  (any between "a" and "z" or any between "\u00A0" and "\uD7FF", "\uF900" and "\uFDCF", "\uFDF0" and "\uFFEF")
  or
  (
    (any between "a" and "z" or any between "\u00A0" and "\uD7FF", "\uF900" and "\uFDCF", "\uFDF0" and "\uFFEF")
    zero_or_more (any between "a" and "z" or digit or "-" or "." or "_" or "~" or any between "\u00A0" and "\uD7FF", "\uF900" and "\uFDCF", "\uFDF0" and "\uFFEF")
    (any between "a" and "z" or any between "\u00A0" and "\uD7FF", "\uF900" and "\uFDCF", "\uFDF0" and "\uFFEF")
  )
)
optional "."
end_of_line
}

Summary of proposed new reg ex language:

* New regex quantifiers are prefixes instead of postfixes

	New regex		Old regex
	("captured")		(captured)
	"literal"		literal
	"\\"			\\
	# Comment to end of line
	any between "X" and "Y"	[X-Y]
	any of "XYZ"		[XYZ]
	begin_of_line		^
	cr			\x0d	\r
	double_quote		\x22	"
	end_of_line		$
	digit			\d
	digits			\d
	lf			\x0a	\n
	no_capture ("not cap")	(?:not cap)
	once_or_more		+
	optional		?
	space			\x20
	tab			\x09	\t
	zero_or_more		*

Probably should add some easy way to define a new term within an expression.

So far everything I've come up with above would allow for automatic translation between plain regular expressions and this new fangled readable syntax.

So what do you think, does this have potential? Or does it just make reg exs long unreadable messes of words instead of short unreadable messes of characters?

Re: Regular expressions blues

Kevin C. — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 13:43:10 -0000

A lot of people are intimidated by the poor readability of Regex, and I'll admit that even as an expert reading those messes above is tough. One way Perl tries to improve on this is the x flag that lets you add whitespace and comments to regular expressions. The x flag would allow your re-arrangement into rows, though keeping the original symbols.

None of your translations appear to keep the original meaning regarding optional characters.

I do wonder if maybe the time has come for a "Pythonization" of reg ex - a new more readable, even if somewhat more verbose, way to write regular expressions, but retaining all the power.

Here is my attempt at a more readable version:

start_of_line optional "(" (3 digits) # I've retained parens for capture groups optional ")" optional no_capture ("-" or space) (3 digits) optional no_capture ("-" or space) (4 digits) end_of_line

A lot more verbose, but a lot more readable I think too... wonder if I should attempt the email one..

Re: Google did something seriously wrong. (Scripting News)

Kevin C. — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:53:59 -0000

I agree it is a geek thing, but disagree why. I think geeks are, if anything, more aware of their privacy. However, geeks also are better at understanding how to use even crappy UIs. From day 1 Buzz had the option to hide your following/followers, it just wasn't entirely obvious where to do it. Your privacy was only violated if *you* chose to enable buzz, enable a public profile, did not disable showing your following/followers, and did not remove private contacts from the auto-suggested list of people to follow. (In addition, the person you were following had to make their profile public. Hint: If you are a political dissident, *don't* make your Google Profile public in the first place.) Now, they should have made step 3 a lot more obvious, and maybe made step 3 or 4 opt-in rather than opt out. Still, this seems to me like a failure to consider how usable the interface was to non-geek brand new users, not like an intentional privacy violation.

Re: Freemium - Shmeemium

Kevin C. — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:48:49 -0000

No, I definitely don't claim that everything should always be free.

Economics says that the prices of things tend towards the marginal costs. Digital content distribution has near-zero marginal costs. If you attempt to make money by fighting that and restricting distribution, your competitors always have a cheap way to undercut you.

The key is figuring out what scarcities are relevant to your particular product, and charging for those. Focus on the marginal costs (additional cost per unit). Anything that is essentially free per unit to provide, you should provide free, because you can use it to undercut your competition.

The part I haven't seen any game winning solutions to is that a lot of software development involves a high up-front fixed cost, and zero or near zero marginal costs. It may be that there will never be a single future business structure that can match the income of pre-internet charging per box for software. Maybe that will be replaced by a wide range of different models, where any one given model only applies to a small market segment.

I'm not so hot on charging for support either, it was just the easiest scarcity I could think of. However, Red Hat isn't a monopoly, Microsoft is. That's not a fair comparison. You can't make Microsoft scale money in a competitive market, even a competitive old style software market.

For other examples, I would search past discussions on how to make money off of open source. A lot of those should apply to web services as well, since both have the same key problem of near zero marginal distribution costs. Unfortunately, many of the options don't involve making money off of open source in any direct fashion. A lot of them depend on other sources of money, but using open source internally makes more efficient use of those other sources of money.

Although I wish you the best of luck, I don't expect you to have much luck finding a way to make money as a pure open source development company, but avoiding support or customization. As a platform vendor, you may be able to do well on training, but it still has the same scaling issues as support.

You might be able to get better scaling out of customization by having a bidding market on new features, instead of relying on single customers. However, I'm not sure how you avoid everyone bidding less than they really would spend, in the hopes others will bid enough to pay for the feature.

Re: Freemium - Shmeemium

Kevin C. — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 14:57:08 -0000

In implying the penny gap can be eliminated, your article fails to account for mental transaction costs. No matter how simple your microbilling service is, there is still a mental transaction cost for deciding whether to pay or not. If my time is worth $20/hour (US average wage), and it takes me 3 seconds to read your microbilling screen and understand what you are charging, it has already cost me a penny. 3 seconds is enough time for the average reader to read 5 words. I would estimate you have about a minute to explain your service and charge for it, if you want the customer to spend a quarter on something that is worth fifty cents (or more) to them. (See http://szabo.best.vwh.net/m... or http://en.wikipedia.org/wik... for more background on mental transaction costs.)

If the price of your freemium service is artificially high, then you are doing it wrong. The freemium model is for services where the price of supporting free users is less than the price of other ways of informing your paying customers that you exist.

The best way to structure the freemium model is such that you only charge for things that are natural scarcities, not things that can be freely replicated. For example, charging for support (human time to solve your problem) is better than charging for features. (Existing features aren't scarce, it costs nothing to roll them out to all users. Implementing new features is scarce.)