Upgrading to a Dedicated Server

The virtual dedicated server this site is on hasn't really been working out for me. The site can be sporadically and inexplicably slow at times. I mean, inexcusably slow. A virtual dedicated server is supposed to be designed for someone like me -- a control freak who doesn't want to break the bank. But when the other customers on the host machine are calculating the next largest prime number while simultaneously rendering Avatar 2, then no amount of virtual separation will eliminate those slowdowns.

So for a little more than twice the price, I ordered a dedicated server from Liquid Web last night. And they finished setting it up this morning. The server has a dual-core AMD processor, 2GB RAM, two 250GB SATA hard drives w/ RAID 1, one 250GB SATA secondary drive, Windows Server 2008, and SQL Server 2008 Web Edition. It's in a facility with a ridiculous amount of network and power redundancy. So it should be good.

This weekend I'll be migrating the sites over and all of the speed problems should be solved.

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Regex Hero for Windows 10 is Underway

Awhile back I began working on an HTML5 / JavaScript version of Regex Hero . However, it was a huge undertaking essentially requiring a complete rewrite of the entire application. I have not had enough time to dedicate to this lately. So I've begun again, this time rewriting Regex Hero to work in WPF. It'll be usable in Windows 10 and downloadable from the Microsoft Store. This is a much easier task that also has the advantage of running the .NET regex library from the application itself. This will allow for the same speedy experience of testing your regular expressions and getting instant feedback that Regex Hero users have always enjoyed. I expect the first release to be ready in Q4 of 2019.

Optimizing Your Regular Expressions

Regular expressions will backtrack. That's an unfortunate thing about them because backtracking can be slow. And in certain (rare) cases the performance can become so awful that executing the regular expression against a relatively short string could take over a minute. There's a good article about catastrophic backtracking over at regular-expressions.info . And today I created a video about all of this called Regex Lesson 5: Optimization . In the video I start with a very poorly written regular expression and make several improvements to it, using the benchmarking feature along the way. By the end of the video I make the regular expression over 3 million times faster. In addition, today's update to Regex Hero provides a little message in the event that you encounter a regular expression that takes over 10 seconds to evaluate... And then last of all, I changed the benchmarking feature a bit. In the past it would simply test your regular expression against

Regex Analysis Bug Fixes

All of these updates relate to the analyzer, so if you're not a Regex Hero Professional user, then this won't affect you. I received a report of an analysis bug related to character classes. The regex analyzer wouldn't handle opening brackets inside a character class properly. It's one of the finer details of the regular expression syntax. You wouldn't think that [[abc] would be valid, but it is. You don't have to escape the opening bracket inside the character class. So now the analyzer interprets this as it should. I've also fixed bugs around interpreting the \x00 (hex), \u0000 (unicode), and \k<group> (backreference) expressions. P.S. The major updates I mentioned recently are still in the works. So the price for Regex Hero Professional is still $20 for now.

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