I've written before about the advantages of scripts ,but my own recent experiences have reminded me of another one, whichI can snappily phrase as automation promotes action . Or in otherwords: when you've scripted something so that it's easy to do, you do itmore often.

I build Firefox from CVS myself, for various reasons, but I run it ona different machine than I build on. Bringing up a new build up on theright machine involves about three or four steps;

In the spirit of earlier entrants , but not as bad, here's some stupid webspider tricks.

The first stupid trick: crawling 'Add Comment' pages. Not only are the'Add Comment' links marked nofollow (so good little spiders shouldn'tbe going there), but it's also a great way to make me wonder if you'rea would-be comment spammer and pay close attention to every CSpace pageyou hit. CSpace gets sufficiently few pages views at the moment that

Part of the fun of performance tuning is all of the unexpectedthings you find out. Since I spent some of yesterday doing work in the guts of DWiki 's DWikiText toHTML conversion, what I've been finding is some regular expressionperformance surprises.

My big surprise was the relative performance of ' [A-Z] ',' [A-Z][A-Z]* ', and ' [A-Z]+ ' for scanning text where they didn'tmatch (the