Have a Rockin' Christmas Day!

Where is Santa? NORAD tracks Santa every Christmas eve, following his trek around the world for children everywhere.

Salon Entertainment: Editors' Pick. The year's best (and funniest) articles. If you haven't figured it out by now, Salon is one of my favorite news site.

Nomad Portable Jukebox MP3 Player Reviewed. I've been thinking about getting some king of MP3 jukebox player, but I'll probably wait a little while longer for newer/cheaper models.

Vintage Computer Ads. Brings back some memories.

OS Showdown: Windows 2000 vs. Linux. Not quite your usual comprehensive review.

S. Koreans Clash on Internet Sex Video. Apparently the Koreans have their own Pamela Anderson Lee.

Catherine Zeta Jones to be next Bond girl. If the role is anything like her head-strong performance in Entrapment, she'll get this avid Bond fan stamp of approval.

Merry Christmas!	Joyeux Noël!
Feliz Navidad!	Frohe Weihnachten!
Buon Natale!	Merii Kurisumasu!

We went to see Miss Congeniality yesterday. I was expecting somewhat of a dud, but we actually had a pretty good time. I gave it 3 ^1/2 stars.

A sneak peek at the new season of La Femme Nikita. When I heard the show was coming back after being canceled last season, I became a little worried they had gone too far with the series finale. Looks like they've done a pretty nice job putting the story line back on track. Should definitely make for an interesting new season.

Real new millennium approaches. Someone had to set the record straight. BTW, the New Orleans' river cruise mentioned in the article is what Vicki and I went on last year for New Year's Eve.

The World Wide $#@%@$ing Web. As far as search engines are concerned Google rules in my book, but is also far from being perfect; especially when searching for sample code.

We saw Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon yesterday nite. The afternoon showing we were going for was sold out. It was well worth the wait. I gave it 4 ^1/2 stars.

Hackers crack Egghead.com. Talk about having eggs on your face.

FileMaker Pro Mobile Reviews. I haven't had a chance to install the Palm conduit yet.

Are you ready for Mac OS X? The final chapter of MacWeek series on moving to Mac OS X.

Christmas Songs of the Week: Vicki really likes Little Drummer Boy by Jars Of Clay. I'm pretty partial to All I Want for Christmas is You by Mariah Carey.

The year the hype died and The Floppies.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is finally playing locally. We're planning on going to see it this afternoon.

Apple Computer's Shares Aren't Flying Like Jobs. Yada, yada… not funny… blah, blah… yadi, yadi.

Ich bin Mac OS X.

Red Hat 6.2:

• python-1.5.2-27.6
• python-xmlrpc-1.2.1-0.6
• up2date-2.1.7-0.6
• up2date-gnome-2.1.7-0.6.x.i386

Sun: Server-Side Up. Forte is indeed a great tool. Win2k not supported? I don't think so! Get your facts straight, people.

I just discovered a nitfy set of Java tools:

• JODE: Java Optimize and Decomplile Environment
• Jopt: The Java Class Optimizer

Gates, Allen lose billions in market. I wonder how Larry's fairing?

Another update to my IE bookmarks to OPML script is now available. It specifically deals with inconsistencies between Windows and Mac OS exported bookmarks. Thanks to Nat Irons for pointing out some of my Perl idiocrasies.

While dealing with the update, I've been faced with an interesting problem involving Perl's regular expressions. As I have yet to find an elegant solution, I'll try to summarize the problem below. Hopefully someone will be able to provide some assistance.

Here we go…

Regular Expressions Dilemma

Given the following example string:

"Tango & Cash, Batman & Robin, First & Last , AT&T"

The goal is to create a matching regular expression which replaces all occurrences of "&" with it's HTML entity, "&". Other valid HTML entities, such as "&", ">", "&", etc., must also remain untouched. Of course using the standard "s/&/&/g" would fail miserably.

Please share you thoughts. Join now if you're not already a member and/or click the discuss link below.

[Update]

Aaron Straup Cope sent me the following matching pattern:

s/&(?!(#[0-9]+|#x[0-9a-fA-F]+|w+);)/&/g

He found it at:

http://xmlhack.com/read.php?item=638

I've updated my script accordingly.

Thanks Aaron.

I've released a new version of my IE bookmarks to OPML script. The link/url expression matching has been seriously improved. Thanks to Gary Young for helping with testing.

JDBC 2.0 Fundamentals Tutorial. A short course by jGuru.

New-to-Java Programming Center. Newly updated site for developers learning Java programming.

Beginning Java 2: JDK 1.3 Version. Two chapters from Ivor Horton's book.

Java API for XML Processing. Version 1.1, Early Access 2.

Yahoo says France can't regulate its auctions. Stick it to the French, the deserve it. But then again, I am biased. I'm French. ;)

Britney Spears most searched for subject on Lycos. Ooops, she did it again!

Time for Change: 13 months calendar. It'll never fly, but is interesting to say the least.

VisorPhone Released. Hmmm… I'll wait, thank you.

Mac OS: Solitaire Till Dawn 4.0. Once I have it installed on her machine, Vicki will be very happy.

Windows: McAfee VirusScan Definition Update.

RedHat 6.2: gnupg and slocate updates.

Microsoft buys Great Plains Software for $1.1bn. Can you say Oracle envy?

I've released a new version of my IE bookmarks to OPML script. The link/url expression matching has been seriously improved. Thanks to Gary Young for helping with testing.

I've posted a new version of my IE bookmarks to OPML script. I've added a function which automatically encodes characters that may cause problems in Radio UserLand and various other XML editors. So far your feedback has been very positive.

All I want for Christmas is … an e-mail program that works. That's exactly why I use fetchmail and IMAP exclusively. I gotta have my Virtual Bandwidth.

Next-generation XHTML stripped down for handhelds. Yet another mobile access standard. When will it ever stop?

Half of U.S. teens to own cell phones by 2004. How long before they start shoving the Barney, Barbie and Pokémon cell phones down our kids throats?

Multiprocessing under OS X. Too little, too late. I seriously doubt it'll help sales throughout consumer channels.

The Director Who's Giving Martial Arts A New Kick. I don't know when it'll hit the Seattle market, hopefully soon. I really want to see it on the big screen.

FTC wants feedback on changes to the Fair Credit Reporting Act. I want to open source my credit. ;)

Will failed startups sue their VCs? It's payback time!

Point. Click. Flush. When you gotta go, you gotta go.

A reminder from the USPS: If your packages are not in the mail by 5pm today, they most definitely will not get lost by Christmas.

Non-banner Ads Coming to the Web. Porn sites have employed both the superstitials and pop-up windows method for a long time. It's probably more annoying than effective. I personally like the targeted banners, such as the one used by most search engines, where the ads are often related to your search query.

New XML parser for Perl. Sounds interesting, I'll have to play with it.

My Perl script which automatically converts IE's bookmarks or favorites to OPML is now available for testing. The code is fully commented, but there is no formal documentation, yet. If you're using MacPerl, you should turn the script into a droplet. Let me know if you encounter problems.

What Women Want is on top.

Salon on Apple. The cover story is right on the money as far as OS X is concerned. As it currently stands, OS X is a far cry from being the kind of high impact innovation people have come to except from Apple. OS X is a revolution for us, geeks, but is not much more than a candy looking OS for the rest of the world.

CDFinder also does Windows. I'll upgrade soon, I might even try the PC version.

Security Holes in MRJ 2.2.3. Not good.

Judge says Port Scanning is Legal. Also see the related Slashdot discussion.

Do cell phones cause brain cancer? If they don't, they definitely should when driving. ;-)

Gates calls on FCC to examine AIM. Sometimes Billy boy fights the good fight.

Oscars Get Martin-ized!. I'll still watch… the last 5 minutes. ;-)

Corel gets out of Linux business. They sold it for dirt-cheap too.

Sun's flawed tests delay Java certification process. You can't avoid becoming bug certified.

Applets: Still essential to Java. I've always been a believer of Java on the server-side, I'm not so sure about the client-side.

Even Dubya laughs at SNLís jokes. Will Ferrell is hilarious as Bush.