Follow-ups and a question

Last week Gearhead wrote about the Linksys Etherfast Cable/DSL Router and received two pieces of mail. The first was from Linksys which tells me that the one- and four-port devices are the "first routers to outsell Cisco's [low-end router products]," . . . sounds like a significant market niche.

On the flip side, Loren Willis wrote in to tell us: "While [the Linksys router] is as capable as you say, it is not without its problems. It would not give out [Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol] addresses to either an Intel 10/100 [network interface card] or even a Linksys 10/100 NIC in my home network. It has some problems with a pretty extensive list of NICs. Check out www.timhiggins.com for a complete list. Maybe it should only have gotten a nine out of 10."

Hmm. Gearhead has both types of NICs in use and so far no problems, although according to Loren, "Version 2 of the Linksys NIC works, but I have Version 4 and it did not."

The www.timhiggins.com site notes the router is a "popular, fast router, but with nagging data corruption problems for some users." On the site's bulletin board, the ratio of positive comments to negative is running at around 4-to-1 with a lot of complaints about Linksys support. Gearhead will let you know if Linksys has anything to say about this.

Further back in time, Gearhead wrote about the Rebol language. Rebol is an elegant, cross-platform scripting language that boasts versions for 41 platforms as well as 90 experimental versions including one for BeOS and Windows CE. Alas, still no NetWare version.

Gearhead recently received a copy of the first book on Rebol, Rebol: The Official Guide, a hefty 752-page tome by Elan Goldman and John Blanton. This is a really interesting book and does a soup-to-nuts job of explaining the Rebol language. It also manages to elucidate some of the more complex concepts including something called "dialecting" that lets you create application-oriented languages (that is, languages under Rebol that are specific to a context such as handling a database designed for a video store).

While we are on things algorithmic, someone foolishly asked Gearhead the other day "What is a regular expression?" While there are many humorous answers to this question the truth is regular expressions are used to specify string-matching specifications.

If you have ever wrestled with vi or Emacs or fooled with egrep you might have bumped into regular expressions as you might if you have ever programmed in Perl, Python or Tcl. Regular expressions are so much a part of computer languages and tools because they are very powerful and easily implemented.

When you learn to use regular expressions, you'll find yourself tossing out constructs (under Unix) such as egrep '[Qq][^u]' words.list to find all words that start with upper or lower case "q" followed by anything that isn't a "u." Thus, the regular expression will find Qantas, Iraqi and Iraq.

The example used above was borrowed from the book, Mastering Regular Expressions, by Jeffrey Friedl.

Now it's up to you: Do you want more on regular expressions? If so, string Gearhead along at gh@gibbs.com.