Regular Expressions

Regular expressions can be remarkably useful, but they can also be quite fickle. I use regular expressions in my code that scrapes the John Pizzarelli site to produce the Radio Deluxe RSS feed. There was one extra space in the HTML for the current episode that my pattern wasn't expecting, so that's why the 7 January episode hasn't been in the feed. It's fixed now.

Blacklisted

Holy crap. I was writing an email to some colleagues earlier today about a filter feature in our application. I wrote something like, "Should we use a blacklist or a whitelist?" These are common terms in application development. Filters in various contexts are often implemented as either a blacklist (a list of "bad" values, which are then blocked) or a whitelist (only the permissible values are in the list, and all others values are blocked).

Then it hit me like a frozen fish on the side of my head. These terms are really, fantastically, politically incorrect. Black is bad, white is good. Holy crap. It had never occurred to me.

I changed the email to read "'good' list" and "'bad' list". I'll go with those terms until I find a better alternative. Unfortunately, blacklist is pervasive today.

Am I overreacting? I was well into adulthood when I discovered that the phrase "that sucks" was once vulgar. In my youth, it may have had some spice, but it was never vulgar to me. By adulthood it was bland. I say it all the time and I'll keep saying it. I'm confident that most IT professionals use the term blacklist without the slightest thought of its potential for offensiveness, as did I before today.

Le Freak

My favorite present at Christmas this year was the Nile Rodgers bio Le Freak. I tore through it, and I'm usually a very slow reader. Any fan of pop music from the late 70's - early 80's will be interested in the details behind the production of several landmark recordings of the time: Bowie's Let's Dance, Madonna's Like a Virgin, and of course Chic. While I read, I listened to some of these albums with a fresh understanding. What I found even more interesting was the story of Rodgers' childhood and early career. It reminded me of the story of George Washington Carver -- there were any number of points at which one could not expect this person to survive at all, much less succeed.

The details become more sparse after the mid 80's -- has the statute of limitations not yet run out on those transgressions? -- but there is a moving account of Bernard Edwards' tragic demise. Meanwhile, Rodgers continues the story in real time on his blog, which is also fascinating.

2012

Resolution #1: Write more.

If you're wondering why the Radio Deluxe feed hasn't been updated in a while, it's because they haven't updated the Radio Deluxe page since the Thanksgiving show.

I really hope they haven't stopped updating it because of the feed. I love the show, and they don't air it on any Chicago stations. I'd like to listen to it at work, and I can't stream it there. I buy the music of artists that I hear on the show.

We were in Germany in November. I listened to the show on the flight back home and I loved being able to do that. Someday, perhaps soon, streaming one's entertainment of choice on a trans-Atlantic flight will be commonplace, but not yet.