Latest Posts

• Formal Languages, part 2: Regular Expressions and Regular Languages

  Before I start in on this entry, I need to give credit where credit is due and note that my main reference source for these blog posts on formal languages is my grad school textbook, An Introduction to Formal Languages and Automata, Third Edition by Peter Linz (the 5th edition is linked). If you’re out there, Peter, thanks for writing an awesome intro to this nerdy topic, and congratulations on having a great first name. :)

• Formal Languages, Part 1: Basic Concepts

  Last week, there was a link posted on Hacker News that described a regular expression that only matches non-prime numbers (expressed as a string of “1”s, i.e. in so-called “unary” notation):

• I'm an uncle!

  Please welcome Wesley Ryan Fergus into the world. Born this morning at 5:48, clocking in at 6 pounds, 9 ounces, and 20 1/4 inches long.

• The Joy of Se... er, WoW

  So, I’ve been pretty heavily into World of Warcraft for a while now. It certainly didn’t start out that way, despite how cool the game looked at first. Back in August 2004, I got my first exposure to the game when I participated in an open stress-test beta. I knew absolutely nothing about the game at the time, and yet was able to pretty painlessly level up a Tauren druid up to 16 by the end of the weekend. I spent most of my time in the Barrens, so I didn’t see too much of the game, and there were some aspects of the game that hadn’t been tweaked, including a confusing “skill point” system where you accumulated points at seemingly random intervals that you used to “purchase” weapon skills and crafting skills; this was greatly simplified to the current system.