What is "parsing"? Parsing is processing a series of symbols to extract their meaning. Typically, this means reading the words of a sentence and drawing information from them. When application programs need to process data that is provided as text, they must use some form of parsing logic. This logic scans the text characters and character groups (words) and recognizes patterns of groups to extract the underlying commands or information.

On September 9, 2009, Arcanum Productions launches the AMERIKA WANTS YOKO video-blog and online petition. This project rallies support for its film AMERIKA: a notebook in three parts, which is searching for resources to assuage its production costs. Kat, the fictional character of AMERIKA, makes a public plea to artist Yoko Ono asking for her support and endorsement to promote the film.

Web app developers spend most of our time not thinking about how data is actually transmitted through the bowels of the network stack. Abstractions at the application layer let us pretend that networks read and write whole messages as smooth streams of bytes. Generally this is a good thing. But knowing what's going underneath is crucial to performance tuning and application design. The character of our users' internet connections is changing and some of the rules of thumb we rely on may need to be revised.

This is (EF BB BF) C3 B6 3D 22 21 22 loaded into browsers under various labels. That happens to be properly formed ECMAScript code for all the encodings used. The bogus results for Opera9 can easily be reproduced in context of the testing script, but probably not individually from a clean cache; what's going on there is unknown. I also noted in running these tests that Opera claims "Opera supports the entire ECMA-262 2nd and 3rd standards with no exceptions" while in fact their implementation does not, the parser rejects code that follows the IdentifierStart :: UnicodeEscapeSequence production of ECMA-262 section 7.6. Instead it implements Opera-only extensions, like comma-free arrays ala [ 1 2 3 ]. Other fun facts include: IE does not implement onload for iframes and cannot modify the innerHTML or tr elements; Firefox ignores "tags" when setting the innerHTML of dynamically created tr elements with no ownerElement... Oh and Opera again needs /th "tags" so it won't nest adjacent th elements when setting innerHTML.

Tokyo Cabinet is a library of routines for managing a database. The database is a simple data file containing records, each is a pair of a key and a value. Every key and value is serial bytes with variable length. Both binary data and character string can be used as a key and a value. There is neither concept of data tables nor data types. Records are organized in hash table, B tree, or fixed-length array.

urban detritus, peeling paint and filthy concrete structures. I find the ugly and mundane to be beautiful, its character and stories inspiring.

xchat-inputcount.pl: add a character count next to xchat's input box. # (useful when twittering, to see if you are within 140 characters)

Wile working with the GPS track data of the UrbanDiary project, in connection with the series of interviews I am conducting, I suddenly recognized the different shapes and patterns that are being produced by the participants. Really funny shapes and forms, but always with a number of strong fix points. The shape is determined by a number of factors such as the spatial relationship of destinations, the distances traveled, the amount of travel and the intensity of repetition. The first point, relationship of destinations makes for the overall shape and the last point, the intensity of repetition makes for the character of the shape.

The images are all generated from participants that have a track record of two month and are the same scale.