Israel sticks up for itself

Via lgf, the full text of Ariel Sharon's recent speech. Finally Israel is sticking up for itself against Bush's "demands" that Israel pull back and is calling the administration on its double standard:

From here, I address the leaders of the Free World. You must remember that leniency toward terrorists is the same as a green light to terrorists, who have already proven that they do not distinguish between blood and blood, between a Jewish victim and any other victim. You cannot fight terrorism on the one hand, and condemn the victims of terrorism on the other. There is absolutely no equivalence between those who send teenage suicide bombers to kill and maim, and those who take self-defense actions and try to uproot the infrastructure of terrorism. Only your stand against terrorism and actual sanctions against its perpetrators in the Palestinian Authority, and primarily Arafat, will enable you to make a real contribution to the advancement of peace in the Middle East.

Do whatcha gotta do, Israel.

oops

After adding StructuredText blogging to my site, I forgot to update the output of my rss feed to match, so my formatting commands are showing up in my feed on NewsIsFree (and any other place that reads my rss file). Something else for me to do...

Regular Expressions problems

help!

I'm having regular expressions problems!

I just can't get my "inline styles" - like bold italic bold italic underline bold italic and underline, all of that with monospace, etc., to work right. All of this appears to work so far, right?

Well, the problem is that I can't get it exactly right. Probably the hardest problem I'm having now is how to get this to work:

the case where you have *italics and **bold inside***

Getting monospaced text to not screw up URLs (I use an '=' for monospace, which appears in URLs) is also a problem.

If anyone out there is an expert in regular expressions who'd be willing to help me I'd really appreciate it.

Visual REGEXP

Check out Visual REGEXP, "a graphical explorer for your regexps".

It runs in Tcl\Tk, so it's cross platform. The entire thing is in one TCL file! It really works great, though unfortunately it's limited to the regular expression support in Tcl, which isn't that great compared to Perl (or "Perl compatible" languages like Python or PHP).

I had no idea there was something prior to ActiveState's Komodo that allowed you to do this. This isn't as involved as Komodo's Rx debugger, but this is fast and free, and it helped me solve the problem I was having!

Also, if you're interested, check out the regular expressions tutorial the author recommends.

Mastering regular expressions

I may have to pick up a copy of O'Reilly's Mastering Regular Expressions. I just wonder if the book will be able to teach me much (probably). I've been agonizing over a ton of regexes over the past few days, and if I was just a little bit better at them I probably could have saved some time.

Ok, well I just bought the book from buy.com.

Oops, I realized I always buy my technical books from Bookpool, so I've cancelled the buy.com order and put in one at Bookpool. Bookpool is awesome.