I’ve had a ton of time this week when I’ve had to be away from the desk with nothing to do, and in that time, plus a bit of evening reading, I read the brick known as The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. What a week!
I had read a book by Ken Follett years ago, but Pillars of the Earth really made him a household name, at least around our household. It’s a big, solid, book that spans fifty years and nine hundred and eighty three pages and in that time I became very attached to the main characters. Mr. Follett paints a picture of a gritty, dirty England during the civil war of the 1100s, (from just before the reign of Stephen I until just after it), where the King had relatively little power and much of England was effectively controlled by the various lords of the country. The book is the story of the struggle between one of these lords, William, a Bishop, and the Prior of Kingsbridge, a fictional town in England. The book is graphic at times – if you don’t like violence then this may not be for you, but that’s not the whole story, it’s just a small part of it and it gives the story a dirty realism that wouldn’t be there without it.
I really enjoyed The Pillars of the Earth and was slightly disappointed when it ended. After nearly a thousand pages and fifty years it’s easy to get attached to characters. I’m excited to read the sequel, A World Without End, but I might take a bit of a break before attacking it – it’s also a brick.
After my surprisingly fast read of A Christmas Carol I read something very un-Christmaslike: A is for Alibi by Sue Grafton – a whodunnit. I’ve read a few of the Alphabet Mysteries featuring Kinsey Millhone before but not this one. We have a few more around the house too that I can read. Also great is that since this A is for Alibi was published quite a while ago the book we have is a paperback that fits pretty easily in the pocket of my winter coat.
There isn’t a whole lot to say about A is for Alibi that hasn’t been said before, I’m sure, so I’m not going to do any huge analysis of the book or anything. It’s a good detective novel, worth reading, a great escape, and there’s a ton more where it came from.
I had a mod_rewrite problem that was really tough, tough enough that I needed to break down my Regular Expression step by step and see what was matching. I’m not a huge fan of doing this in Terminal, and I work on a Mac so Editpad Pro was out, (it’s good to use on a PC). So, I built a web-based tool to see how my regular expression was matched against a string. It’s available here.
To use it enter a Regular Expression, and a string to match it against. It’ll tell you if the regex matches the string and if so it’ll show you the substring that matches the regex, (if it is a substring), and any parenthetical substring matches.
This little script uses PHP’s native preg_match() function to determine matches, I believe its matching engine is very, very, close to Apache’s engine used in mod_rewrite so it should work well.
So, did this help me solve my problem? Yes it did. It told me that the problem wasn’t in the rewrite rule that I thought it was in.
Try out the Regular Expression Testing Tool.
Update 29 December 2010: I posted a small update to make the input fields larger and corrected some text when the regex does not match.
Christmas is coming, and with that in mind I decided last week that my next book should be a Christmas classic. I was divided between Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, (on which the ballet is based), and Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Originally I wanted to read The Nutcracker, but the used book store didn’t have a copy, and the only copies in the library are in French, (oddly enough, 2 of the 3 were translated first from the original German to English, then from English to French – that’s one too many translations!), however, I was able to find an anthology of four Dickens novels that contains A Christmas Carol.
It turns out that A Christmas Carol is much shorter than I thought it would be. I’ve had to spend some time waiting for things over the past couple of days and was able to read the whole book while waiting. It took me a bit to get used to Dickens’ style of writing, (I don’t read that many older books – although there are some on the bookshelf waiting to be read), but once I got into the flow it was great, especially since it’s starting to look a lot like Christmas here in Montréal. Even though I have seen several film versions of A Christmas Carol I was pleased to see that there were still surprises for me in the book, which made it even more enjoyable, and I realized that last year’s Jim Carrey film is the closest to the original story that I have seen. I was also delighted to see, after reading about the book Punch: The Delights (and Dangers) of the Flowing Bowl a while ago to see that the Ghost of Christmas Present had “seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam” as part of his feast.
A Christmas Carol was a great way to pass a couple of days when I couldn’t be working. Now, I’m back to looking for my next book. Maybe I can find The Nutcracker and the Mouse King in english.
