In the summer of 2009 I revisited my 2004 summer apprenticeship at Object Mentor. What follows is the original 2004 post and then some 2009 commentary.

Well, I didn’t drive today, but I did make some progress toward figuring out what was going on. We built a few custom widgets that would translate wiki text that was problematic. For instance: Putting three single quotes around something

’'’something’’’

makes it appear in bold, and two are italics, so 5 should be both italics and bold, right? Not exactly, the FitNesse wiki was only catching the first 3 single quotes. So we used a regular expression (what’s a regular expression? A bunch of symbols, which kinda look like swearing

”’’’’’(.+?)’’’’’” or ^#[^\r\n]*(?:(?:\r\n)|\n|\r)?

that look for patterns: like a word or words surrounded by five single quotes) to build a custom widget to catch just such a case.

Susan’s computer started making this squeaking noise about a week ago. Now it makes a pretty constant background variable squeak/whine. And the parts aren’t due in until next week (It’s the fan on the processor that’s making the noise, so we’re a little hesitant to douse it with WD40). Paul sez ignoring it is an exercise in concentration, but I read somewhere that periodic high pitched noises are the hardest to ignore (easiest are low pitch, constant noises).

“I didn’t drive today” – read that as I spent all day watching someone type. Which is not a fun day. Chalk that up to the fact that we were doing regular expressions and I had never seen one before. I’m decent at RegEx’s now but I think I avoided them for years because of my first experience. Nothing like resolving to get more involved and then falling out of the frying pan and into the fire to dampen the old spirits. And then a whining computer in the background for extra torment. I’m surprised I didn’t just type a single four letter word to sum up June 29th 2004.