What follows is a repost of my first article on nulldigital.net, on the 10th of May 2006. A long time ago, when I was all innocent! Good times. The original article as been modified slightly as I sounded like such a git back then. I know it's slightly simple for this site but since nulldigital.net is closing I want to repost the articles from there to neverfear.org. So lets get started..

Regular expressions are very useful. If you have to deal with text at all, you will find them indispensable. In programming, they can be used to verify user input (e.g check an email is valid), sanitize input (make sure the user only used allowed characters), remove sections of the string (remove all non-alpha-numeric characters). And not just for programming! You can use regular expressions in many text editors to edit the current file. You can use them in the grep command to find very specific lines, or in the sed "stream editor" to edit out bits of a file..

There is a lot of news around about Anonymous lately. I can't say I've ever paid them much attention. I thought what they were doing was mildly amusing. I never expected it would actually have a real world impact.

I fear I underestimated them. Today, a Scientology protest, organised and credited to Anonymous has made the front page news of NEWS.com.au with this story titled Scientology protests start across Australia, which documents protests in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide.

This article is a brief tutorial in how to make your own ascii internet TV station. I say brief, its pretty simple - that's why its brief.

The inspiration for such an article comes from having a telnet link posted in a channel to a server which was showing a World Cup game live via ascii and sockets. I pasted this around to a couple other people and some folk didn't understand how it worked, so I wanted to share some knowledge.

Incase some of you aren't following me, the link I was shown was

Introduction

The scenario is you are without Internet connectivity anywhere. You have found either an open wireless access pointed or perhaps you're staying in a hotel which permits rented Internet via services like

Spectrum Interactive (previously known as UKExplorer). You make the connection, whether its physically connecting the Ethernet cables, or instructing you're wireless adapter to lock onto the radio signal. You are prompted with some sort of authorisation page when you open a browser. You don't have access to it, so what do you do?

Perian?

Perian, the Quicktime "all-in-one" codec pack, which allows Quicktime Player (And Quicktime based applications, including Front Row) to play various extra formats, including DivX/Xvid, .mkv etc etc.

The problem

One problem - well, more of an annoyance than a problem.. With version v1.0, it started being released as a Preference Pane icon - I never have to change it's settings, so it doesn't need to be in the preferences..

I always found reading about others computer setup interesting, in a slightly strange way. Since I enjoy reading such things, it makes sense for me to write such a thing. Hopefully other neverfear members will write similar descriptions too.

There are many things tech'y people argue about online, from vim vs emacs, Python vs Ruby, imperative vs functional languages. The list is nearly endless.

One of the most common is "Which is the most secure OS". Typically it goes that Windows is the most ridiculously insecure OS, and Linux the far more secure. Mac OS X users then point out that they don't get viruses. Then a Windows user points out that he's run Windows for years without getting any viruses, and that there are lots of exploits for Linux applications.

These arguments are all pretty much right. Windows is insecure. Linux is more secure. Mac OS X doesn't get many viruses.. But you can make Windows secure, and Linux insecure..

The video

Note: the times are GMT+0

Disclaimer: This post is a post about my opinions and experiences with the pipeline portal application, Cocoon. This disclaimer is included to disclaim any possibility that I may be wrong about this. Period. :-P

What is Apache Cocoon?

On paper its an impressive framework to construct a web application around practically any source medium, dynamic or otherwise. Cocoon is largely based on the XML philosophy (that everything has to be extremely complex and difficult to use to store simple information ([citation][1])).