cosmin thinks you'll like dotBoom!

Hi, your usual web developer! Your friend cosmin wanted to tell you about dotBoom. What's dotBoom? It's an online sitcom about a web design company (named dotBoom) in Toronto, Ontario. The twist? They're all puppets, and they're occasionally foul-minded and often foul-mouthed.

In addition to letting you know about the show, cosmin also wanted to tell you this:

Same sh@ everywhere, heh?

dotBoom sounds like a pretty good deal, doesn't it? Won't you check it out? You can find the show at:
www.dotboom.ca/

Thanks for watching dotBoom. We hope you like it!

tamawhat?!

Adobe and The Mozilla Foundation just decided to get together in a joint effort to change the face of the Flash Player. They wanna make it look like this. The new monkey will be an Open Source one and it will implement the final version of the ECMAScript Edition 4 standard language. One huge step closer to the standards and the broad community of web development:

“Now web developers have a high-performance, open source virtual machine for building and deploying interactive applications across both Adobe Flash Player and the Firefox web browser. We’re excited about joining the Adobe and Mozilla communities to advance ECMAScript.”

Brendan Eich, chief technology officer,
Mozilla Corporation

“This is a major milestone in bringing together the broader HTML and Flash development communities around a common language, and empowering the creation of even more innovative applications in the Web 2.0 world,”

Kevin Lynch, senior vice president
and chief software architect at Adobe

But really, tamarin?!?
Who, how, why did start this borrowing of project names from biology?
I wonder, are there any biology labs that offer advice on such matters?
Well I have to admit there are some similarities. Both are lightweight and errr fast. But Flashs are by no means confined to South America's lowlands. I have several of them here. Some really loud ones jumping around all day :D
Well, tamarin, flamarin...
Here is the official project page.

this.remember.bind( this );

Prototype articles (yeah, like you didn't already know these):
Sergio Pereira's manual is cool.
Encytemedia has the desert with a cherry on top.

I love regex

This blog may be idle but things happen. Funny thing when you're into stuff up to your neck is that you lose the taste for writing.
So this is not really news but really ok for a quick post.
I had to get into regular expressions because I needed a perl service that could open a page and grab a chunk knowing a tag name and id and replace it's innerHtml with some new content. Well perl was built for this kind of stuff so I went ahead without fears. And it delivered flawlessly.
The good thing with learning new stuff is that you never know when it'll come in handy.
Few months later I was shopping for a 2 or 3 rooms apt here in Cluj. Now here we have a printed paper and if you have time to read all the ads you'll do fine. They have a site too and you can perform pretty decent search actions. I didn't even have time for that. So I looked into their new and shiny RSS feeds. Bad thing they have one feed for the entire real estate section so that isn't really useful when you know what you're looking for. So I said to myself that I could grab that big xml page and regex should be able to handle all the tabled html chunk ads piled inside it and look for what I needed: "JonDoe|SomeAgency sell|sells a 2|3 rooms apt|apartment located in Cluj-Napoca". This translates into (Romanian words):

"/Cluj\s*-\s*Napoca/i",
"/(apt|apartament)/i",
"/(2|3)\s*cam/i",
"/(vand|vinde)/i"

LastRss came very handy in speeding up development. Regex Coach is also invaluable for well ... regex stuff.
And as it was RSS to begin with I kept the flavor because I also use and LOVE NetVibes: the Cluj 2/3 rooms apartments RSS Feed (in realtime so you can be the first to call and buy them all [insert evil laugh here]). Add it to your favorite feed reader to gasp it's full power.
Must admit that this would only help the local readers of this blog but if it helps someone then it's not wasted time.