And now it’s all this

I just said what I said and it was wrong
Or was taken wrong

Don’t fear the regex

January 9, 2019 at 8:17 AM by Dr. Drang

If you saw Jason Snell’s recent article on reviving an old podcast feed and skimmed past it because you don’t expect to ever need to revive an old podcast feed, you missed some excellent generally applicable advice within the specifics.

The real purpose of Jason’s article is to show you how to use simple software tools we all know—a text editor and a spreadsheet—to accomplish what would normally thought of as a “programming” task. Listeners of The Talk Show may remember an episode in which Jason and John Gruber discussed how both of them have done this many many times over the years.¹²

Although I do often write short programs for text munging, I typically resort to that only if the problem requires more than just large-scale text editing or if I expect to be repeating the process several times. And even then, I usually start out by playing around in BBEdit³ to see what searches, replacements, and rearrangements need to be done. It’s a convenient environment for getting immediate feedback on each transformation step.

(And if you expect to do a series of text transformations often and really don’t want to get into writing scripts in Perl or Python or Ruby or whatever, BBEdit’s Text Factories allow you to string together any number of individual munging steps.)

I will say, though, that one bit of “programming” you’ll find really helpful—and which Jason uses in his podcast feed example—is the building of regular expressions for searching and replacing. Simply put, regular expressions allow you to find patterns of text instead of specific text. For example, if you need to find all the US zip codes in a long chunk of text, you can’t go searching for a specific zip code, like “60606.” You have to look for a pattern: five digits, optionally followed by a hyphen and four more digits.

Regular expressions allow you to build these patterns by using placeholders for generic character types (like digits), repetitions, and options. Unfortunately, for historical reasons, these placeholders consist of normal ASCII character strings like \d, *, and ?. This has the unfortunate effect of terrifying newcomers when they see something like

^\d{5}(-\d{4})?$

described as a simple regex, something I have probably done dozens of times.

Even worse, people who are thinking they should start using regular expressions often hear about this great book on the topic and have a natural reaction when they see it: A 500+ page book to learn how to search for text? No thanks.

This is too bad, because while Friedl’s book is great, it’s called Mastering Regular Expressions for a reason, and that reason is not because it’s a tutorial. My recommendation for a tutorial is the one I learned from over 20 years ago: the “Searching with Grep” chapter⁴ in the BBEdit User Manual. I believe it was largely written by a young guy named John Gruber.

The nice thing about regular expression syntax is that it can be learned a little bit at a time. You can be productive right away knowing only a few regex constructs. Even people who have been using regexes for ages tend to use just a dozen or so patterns, bringing out the more obscure ones only when they have a particularly tricky problem to solve. A good way to pick up new regex knowledge in small portions is to follow John D. Cook’s @RegexTip Twitter feed.

You may have heard that there are regular expression “flavors,” different regex syntaxes used by different programs, and been put off by the potential for confusion. Don’t be. There are different flavors, but that won’t have any practical effect on your learning until you’re an expert. Every program you run into nowadays uses the “Perl-Compatible Regular Expression,” or PCRE, syntax. Only very old programs use different flavors, and by the time you find yourself using them—if ever—you will be well-equipped to handle the variation.

And before anyone on Twitter can do it, I’ll bring out the obligatory Jamie Zawinski bon mot:

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.

Don’t be led astray by this, either. Only a person who’s used regexes a lot, and successfully, would make this kind of joke.

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Dates with Siri

January 7, 2019 at 11:25 PM by Dr. Drang

This morning, Casey Liss tweeted out a complaint about a typical Siri stupidity:

This was a bit of a shock to me, not because I thought Siri was smarter than this, but because I had been collecting similar Siri screenshots concerning dates and times for a few days and was planning to write a post about it. This post.

Before I get any further, let me tell you that some of what I’m going to say here was already covered by David Sparks in this post from almost six years ago. This was just a year and a half after the “beta” introduction of Siri with the iPhone 4S, and David was pleased with what Siri could do. I like a lot of what Siri can do with dates, too, but there are still some frustrating blind spots and inconsistencies. In fact, with one of David’s examples, Siri isn’t as convenient as it was six years ago.

Context has always been one of Siri’s weaknesses, and that’s where it failed Casey. Any normal human being would understand immediately that a question asked in January about days since a day in December is talking about the December of the previous year. But Siri ignores (or doesn’t understand) the word “since” and calculates the days until the next December 18.

If you take care to give Siri the full date, it gives the right answer:¹

You might think—which is to say, I originally thought—that Siri defaults to the current year when the year isn’t given in the question. You would be wrong. Take a look at this, a question I asked today:

Apple would argue that Siri is forward-looking technology.

One bit of date math on which Siri has never failed me is getting the day of the week for a given date. I use this quite often at work, especially when the date in question is years in the past and flipping backward through a calendar app would take too long.

For dates well in the past, I would never think of not including the date, but for dates later in the current year, I would. Siri handles them well:

What about a day earlier this year?

That’s good. But it’ll screw up a date last year, right? Wrong.

And what if I change the tense of the question?

Suddenly, Siri is a master of context. I am at a loss to explain why.

In my experience, Siri is good at figuring out dates some interval away from a given date:

I can’t really blame Siri for thinking I mean this year when I ask about a date after December 17:

Here’s the question for which Siri has lost some of its intelligence:

Six years ago, Siri answered this kind of question correctly for David Sparks. Interestingly, it gave its answer in the form of a Wolfram Alpha page:

Steve Moser suggested using the “Wolfram Alpha trick” to answer Casey’s question:

Personally, I think it’s easier to just include the year for that type of question, but the Wolfram Alpha trick is the only way I know of to get the number of days between two dates.

Similarly, Siri can’t give you elapsed time within a day by itself,

but it can through the Wolfram Alpha trick:

Take care how you phrase this question, or you’ll get the dreaded “here’s what I found on the web” answer:

The upshot is that Siri can be good at date and time math, but it needs the right syntax. Not surprising for a computer program, but not how Siri has been promoted by Apple.

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Z key followup

January 6, 2019 at 10:43 AM by Dr. Drang

As long as I’m following up on the condition of Apple hardware I’ve broken, I should mention the broken Z key on my Magic Keyboard. This is the keyboard I use with my 9.7″ iPad Pro, and it travels, unprotected, in a narrow compartment of my backpack next to the iPad itself.

Back in the summer, I returned from a business trip and found this damage when I pulled the keyboard out of the backpack:

I don’t know whether it broke as I slid it into the compartment or as I slid it out, but it obviously caught on something and got pried off.

I ordered a replacement key from LaptopKey.com. It cost about $7.50 with shipping and arrived a few days later. I popped it in place and it worked.

(Why did I use the illiterate construction “Not az zpringy than…” instead of “Not az zpringy az…”? Probably because the sentence started life as “Less springy than…”, and I didn’t read it carefully after the rewrite. It’s a fine line between clever and stupid.)

If this weren’t the Z key, I’d be more careful about saying it works. It doesn’t have nearly the snap as the original key and feels distinctly different (worse) than all the other keys. If it were a key I used a lot, I’d be disappointed in its behavior and would have gone hunting for another replacement. But being one of the least-used keys, it’s fine.

I’ve been more careful with the keyboard since then. Eventually, I’l get a Studio Neat Canopy or this less expensive Fintie Carrying Case that Federico Viticci mentioned in his magnum opus on the new iPad Pros.

The springiness of the Magic Keyboard keys, by the way, comes from a rubber dome that holds the key up at rest and undergoes snap-through buckling when you press down on it. Snap-through buckling—with diagrams, equations, and charts—is discussed in my favorite blog post.

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AirPod update

January 2, 2019 at 9:13 PM by Dr. Drang

Back in November, I had a little problem with my AirPods:

Because they worked before they needed to be charged, I had some hope that the problem was just with the case and that the earbuds themselves were OK. I made a Genius Bar appointment in early December, had them checked out, and my hopes were fulfilled. Instead of having to shell out $150 for a whole new setup, I walked out of the store with my old earbuds, a new case, and a charge of “only” $70 on my credit card. An expensive mistake on my part, but not as expensive as it could have been.

(A month later, I see that Apple’s lost chance for another $80 of my money has had dire consequences. Sorry, Tim.)

In other AirPod news, my daughter gave me a leather cover for Christmas.

You might not think a case needs a cover, but I do. I keep my AirPods in my right front pocket, along with my keys, a pen, and anything else I need to carry temporarily.¹ My old case had picked up stains, and the cover is a good way to keep my new one clean.

The one problem with the cover was that the leather on the back side, which folds over when you flip the top of the case open, was too stiff and would close the top when I took my fingers off it to pull out the pods. The solution was a slight modification of the technique I learned as a kid to break in a new baseball glove: I folded the top of the cover back on itself and held it that way with a rubber band for a day. Worked like a charm.

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