It’s 2:56 AM and I’m writing log entries on my web site. I have to start going to bed earlier.

Today’s doings:

• Yet more reg exp stuff… this time supporting names for sub expressions. To give you some idea of just how ugly and weird these things can be, here is an expression for doing a case insensitive search for any word except ‘the’ which is contained 3 or more times in a sentence. When such a word is found, only the first word will be hilighted.
  (?I)\b(?!the)(?P\w+)(?=(([, ]+\w+)*?[, ]+(?P=word)){2,}\b)
  Not exactly pretty is it?
• Just adding psuedo multi window support for , so that user will be able to Ctrl-Tab between JujuEdit windows. Yawn.

Donning my entrepreneurial hat today, sort of… I’ve been looking into various payment and registration systems… Ugh! Too many options! Fees and conditions vary quite wildly. seems pretty good so far, as long as people dont mind using it to pay for software. But then isn’t that the big question: Will people mind paying for software? I hope not, because otherwise I’m screwed. It is surprisingly hard to find evidence of successful shareware vendors online, because no one is exactly going to post "I made $X last year!".

I have actually toyed with the idea of posting such information myself, if I ever get the financial side of things worked out (and make some software available of course). Of course I probably won’t [post such information], for probably the same reason that other people don’t: I’m guessing that if you’re doing well you dont want to draw unnecessary attention to yourself, and if you’re doing badly you’re too embarrassed to tell anyone.

BTW, if you’re interested in signing up for you may be eligible for a $5 bonus, and if you sign up using then I will also be eligible for that bonus. Sound good? Well, it’s not a bad deal, but it should be noted that to get the bonus you have to spend $250 at some point, so the whole referral thing may be a bit of a scam.

Programming

I’ve been bringing my regular expression syntax back into line with Perl style… I had some wierd stuff in there for ease of use. To be honest I don’t think it’s that important to stick to the Perl style, what with it’s ugly mix of reserved and special characters. I’m considering supporting a totally unambiguous syntax which clearly delineates control characters and literal characters. Most people dont know any regexp stuff anyway, not least because it is so damn ugly and complicated looking.

Finally added a manual time stamp feature to my HTML editor, so that I can more easily journalise things. Seems like a small thing but sometimes small things make all the difference.

The web site move has gone well. I have no complaints thus far about ICDSoft . I get bonuses like free sub-domains, mailing lists, and a very large number of mailboxes.

Added a and pages to the site so that when I eventually do get some software up I will be able to receive feedback from all those happy/disgruntled users. Took the time to add Javascript validation to the forms, which was fun since I haven’t done much Javascript stuff since a few years ago.

Things I’m currently working on:

• Improving and enhancing regular expression support in , as well as fine tuning its new remarkably large file support (want to open a 1G file instantly?)
• Building a new framework for all my applications, which should improve registration and version control. (as well as error logging, heaven forbid)
• Tooling around with this website, making ridiculous small changes when I should be finishing JujuEdit and . I’m having a bugger of a time deciding what color everything should be! (I am also red-green color blind which probably doesn’t help too much)
• Exploring utterly frivolous hexagonal pixel rendering technique… virtually no practical value in it but it’s just sticking in my head and I’m finding myself wishing that hardware could support hexagonal pixels and triangular shading rather than the more convential square bilinear approach.

One more thing I’d like to mention is that SmartFTP is by far the best ever FTP client I have ever seen! It’s very slick and very functional. Me love it!