In praise of Regexp::Assemble

…and of the Perl modules in general. I had the following problem:

Given a list of 16 character alphanumeric IDs, find all the lines from a large-ish (\~6GB) logfile which contain at least one of the IDs.

The naive approach was to construct a big regular expression like \W(\QID1 ...

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Java import statement gotcha

190774444_2687512fb9_o There is a lot of debate on the intertubes if one should or shouldn’t use wildcard imports. I’m mostly indifferent to the discussion (mainly because all the package references are resolved compile time – so there is no performance overhead – and because today’s IDE’s contain a lot ...

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FindersUK review

Finding relatives was always a topic which interested me marginally, so I was interested in checking out the Finders UK website (which BTW, can also be read in other ways because URLs don’t have the concept of capitalization implicitly – lets just leave at that). They offer different services like ...

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BrickHouse Alert review

After looking at the site of this Medical Alert company I’m left with troubling questions in my mind. Having an ill grand-parent makes me acutely appreciate the need for Medical Alert services, but this company leaves many open questions, especially considering the fact that this is a company which ...

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Softline Local Review

Many say that local online marketing is the “next frontier”. While I have some doubts with regarding this phenomenon (my money is on the ever expanding global economy – even though I’ve got “slapped” a couple of times by companies refusing to deliver to Romania), I’ve looked at softline ...

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You go PHD Comics!

PHD Comics is always great and hilarious (and worth to subscribe to if you are even vaguely related to the academic world - like trough a friend of a friend :-)) but there are those occasions when it is epic, like this one:

![](http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd012010s.gif)

The ...

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Carving out files with Perl

I’ve had to use this trick a couple of times the last few years, so I decided that I might as well document it:

If you have an image of a storage media (like an SD card or CD/DVD) which you can not mount (either because the filesystem ...

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