Don Tai (Canada) Blog

Regex is an acquired taste: initially bewildering and bitter, but given time it grows on you. Eventually you begin to appreciate its bouquet. Small, efficient, and powerful, Regex epitomizes good code. This is an advanced discussion of Regex I have found useful in Pipes. If you are new to either, then read up and play.

Other reference material includes Regular Expressions in Yahoo Pipes, but is a tad dated. Similarly. The Pipes forum is very helpful, especially hapdaniel.

Solar power has always been enticing idea. You point a panel to the lovely sun and it returns usable power. With few exceptions the sun rises each and every day, so theoretically you have unlimited access to power. Unfortunately the reality of economics creeps into the equation, initially taking the shine off solar power. Wanting to play with the technology, a Canadian Tire sale on small solar panels allowed me to try it out.

Should not an internet feature with the label “Really Simple” in its name, be in fact really simple? After working with Really Simple Syndication (RSS), unfortunately this is not or is no longer true. In fact wider variations of this very useful tool threaten to reduce the effectiveness of this useful tool.

Wikipedia has a great definition of RSS:

On Dontai.com I scan the world for RSS (Really Simple Syndication) blog and news feeds that deal with China and Japan. These RSS feeds are funneled into categories for me to read. Sometimes certain RSS feeds misbehave and therefore need to be deleted. One particularly annoying issue is an RSS feed that continues to show up as “most recent”, even when the article is obviously older. When these feeds show up as most recent they clog the news feed, pushing down more recent articles to a lower ranking. This is most annoying.

Our local Toronto Public Library branch has been closed for renovations for a couple of months but reopened on Wednesday. The main change was the absence of the checkout counters, as well as the people that worked behind them. Like at Home Despot they now have a self-serve touch screen checkout system, which gave me a lot of trouble.

The transfer of domain names from one registrar to another seems like a pretty common event, but I still had difficulty getting it done. The old registrar will throw up roadblocks to try to prevent you from leaving, while the new registrar just wants you to register with them, regardless of if you complete the transfer registration process. Since I am not either registrar and am not asking you for money, I can give you the straight goods on what you need to do.

DotEasy has been my web hosting company for 7 years. Due to a lack of features I wanted to move web host providers from Doteasy. Various ploys and excuses were used, in the end resulting in DotEasy freezing my account for 2 months and thus blocking my web site move. Other issues with Doteasy include their technical staff trying to retain you as a customer instead of doing what I asked them, wasting time and prolonging the time required to move. Finally there is the negative option billing, where if you do not cancel your hosting account and do not pay, they will continue hoisting and bill you anyway. This is an unethical business practice masqueraded as better security. Due to these three issues I strongly recommend to not use Doteasy as a web host provider. DotEasy adheres to rigid policies that do not allow for good customer service, and can hold you hostage so you cannot move to another host provider.