Ikke’s blog

Looks like the 2008 edition of LinuxJournal’s ‘Readers’ Choice Survey’ has been published some days ago. The available answers in several questions are rather badly chosen though… I’d think the LinuxJournal editors wouldn’t be this clueless. Some examples:

Question 3 asks about your favorite Desktop Environment, and lists GNOME, KDE, XFCE, Enlightenment and Fluxbox. Whilst the first 3 options can be regarded as DE’s, Enlightenment and Fluxbox are pure Window Managers, not really usable as an all-inclusive desktop.

Question 5, regarding your favorite email client: if you list any web-based client (Gmail, maybe someone should tell me how this is related to Linux?), you should at least list the major free software web-based clients too (thinking of Horde IMP here).

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“We regret Belgium doesn’t strictly adhere to this European standard, but chose a local implementation. As you know, respect for standards is important, especially in the domains of identification and authentication.”

- Phillip Vandervoort, General Manager Microsoft Belgium and Luxembourg

Emphasis is mine. Read in the 16/01 issue of the Belgian “IT Professional” magazine, page 29, included in the ProFOSS goody bag. The article is a response on an earlier published interview with Geert Mareels, manager of the Coordination Unit of Flemish e-Government, claiming one of the reasons e-ID isn’t widely used yet is due to Microsoft not providing any e-ID related solutions.

Original quote: “We betreuren het dan ook dat België deze Europese standaard niet volledig onderschrijft, maar gekozen heeft voor een lokale implementatie. Zoals u weet is het respect voor standaarden belangrijk, in het bijzonder in de domeinen van identificatie en authenticatie.”.

Parsing input is something most developers run into one day. Parsing binary input can be pretty straight-forward, as most of the time you know the format of the input, ie you know what to expect: if you receive a message of 10 bytes, the first byte could be a message ID, the second one the payload length, third one message type ID, and others message content. Pretty easy to handle.

Parsing human-readable text can be harder though, as human beings tend to be less strict when providing input (eg whitespacing), you can’t ask humans to prepend strings with their length, etc.

There are several ways to handle text input. One well-known method is using regular expressions with matches, but writing regular expressions which are able to process not-so-strict input can be pretty though, writing expressions to parse large bodies of text is hard, using sub-expressions can become pretty complicated,… Overall regular expressions usually involve quite a lot of black magic for the average outsider.

Luckily, there are easier methods to parse text input too, of which I’d like to introduct one: a Python module called Pyparsing, which can do BNF-style text parsing.

First of all, let me explain “BNF”. The Backus-Naur Form, aka BNF, is a metasyntax you can use to express the grammar of a formal language. This might make no sense at all, so let’s split it up:

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I was just pointed to this article thanks to the blog of Kris Buytaert. The author writes about his experiences on how to recognize a good programmer as a recruitment person.

As I still am unqualified myself (no degree yet, maybe I won’t ever get one) the article was a relief to read, as in some of the things he mentions I could recognize myself. Hopefully lots of HR people read it too

Some excerpts of particular interest, and my opinion on them (all blockquotes © inter-sections.net):

Update: article blog seems to be down, see the comments for a Google cache link.

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Right, it looks like some still think our little country is still running without a new government since last elections in June:

We then heard from Bruno Braes, a developer who worked on other political Ajax fun over in Flanders, Belgium. This is a touch ironic since Belgium has been running without a new government for how many months now?

I’d like to point out we dó have a government by now (since a couple of weeks), even though it’s an interim-government (we should get at least another prime minister around easter. Well, that’s the plan).

End of public service announcement.