Between Skype and Ventrilo, I talk on through the computer almost as much as I talk on the phone. I need a headset that provides exceptional voice quality, and I prefer the headset to rock in the audio-out department as well. I lug all my computer stuff everywhere -- headset included -- and as it turns out, life on the road is pretty rough on headsets.

We just had an impromptu conversation over here about validating phone numbers that morphed into validating email addresses and more.

Adam brought up the fact there are a lot of email addresses that don't pass the basic regex validation that a lot of sites use. In fact, there was a good discussion of this very issue on Slashdot in a larger article on regexes. One comment:

It's super annoying when you're looking for a string in your code, so you do a recursive grep, only to get a ton of matches within svn's ".svn" directories.

Here's a solution:

Inside your ~/.bash_profile, insert this line:


alias rgrep="find . -follow \( -name ".svn" \) -prune -o -print | xargs grep -Hn"


Save it, then log out and back in. Now instead of

grep -ir "sprintf" *

do

rgrep sprintf


Cake!

When I was in high-school, I worked at an office supply chain in the "Business Machines" department. I sold computers, adding machines, Palm Pilots (the first revision!), printers, cables, you name it. Aside from helping customers, I had to stock those items on the floor, take daily inventory, complete cleaning/organizing projects, set up new displays to specs (Planograms) and take on whatever other tasks my managers wanted me to finish. Eventually, I was promoted to "Business Machines Lead" -- which came with a sweet $0.75/hr raise.