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.
Remember the film The Hunt for Red October? You’re probably aware it’s based on a Tom Clancy novel of the same name, (if you weren’t there’s your new trivia fact for the day). I’ve seen the film a few times over the years but hadn’t read the book until recently. I wasn’t sure if the book would be that enjoyable since I already knew the outcome, and a lot of the thrill of reading a Tom Clancy novel is wondering what happens next. I had no need to worry the book was great, even though I already knew the ending.
When a book is made into a movie it often has a lot cut out, the plot is condensed, and things are generally “hollywoodized.” This is exactly what happened to Red October. For example in the Film Jack Ryan ends up on the American submarine the USS Dallas for a while. In the book he never gets on the Dallas, but instead spends time on the British carrier HMS Invincible. The British involvement is entirely eliminated from the movie, (surprised? Welcome to hollywood).
No matter how you look at it both the film and the book very entertaining, and interestingly, the film doesn’t disappoint as many film adaptations of books do, (maybe it’s because I saw the film first).
People who know me will know that I have a habit of procrastination. This is something that I would like to change, and when I read a post about The Now Habit on Lifehacker, (probably while procrastinating), the material covered in the post seemed to make sense and last week I went out and bought a copy.
Over the last week I read the whole book and it was as good, and interesting, as I expected. There are great ways to stop procrastinating, and it’s not just getting my but in gear and getting the work done, it’s about figuring out why I procrastinate and putting an end to the reasons for procrastination, instead of simply powering through the reasons. Of course, reading a book about procrastination isn’t going to stop me from procrastinating – I have to actually apply the principles described in the book. Over the next few weeks I’ll be following many, maybe even all, of the techniques in the book and we’ll see how well they work for me.
The Lifehacker post gives a great introduction to the book and I’m not going to rehash their work, but I’d like to add my own voice to say that it’s a great book.
