Regex Hero Blog

So the server migration is complete. I ran into a couple problems along the way that were all related to server configuration. But this new dedicated server seems pretty nice. And it should completely resolve the performance problems the site has been experiencing the past few weeks. While I was at it I also moved the blog to blog.regexhero.net so it can be hosted by Blogger. I did that because Blogger will soon be canceling their FTP service that I was using. Apparently there's only a small percentage of Blogger users who used that service. Anyway, making the switch does mean that I'm able to use some nice features I wasn't able to before. For example, you'll now see a list of categories in the right-hand navigation. It's such a simple thing but that's something I've wanted for a long time.

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 ...

Silverlight 3 was a substantial upgrade over Silverlight 2. The biggest feature, by far, was the introduction of Silverlight's out-of-browser capabilities, essentially allowing you to install a Silverlight app on your desktop. A beauty part of this feature is that since it's still running in Silverlight, it'll work on both a PC and a Mac. Cross-platform development has never been so easy. This has allowed me to create a new version which can be installed on your desktop in two clicks. This desktop version is available only to licensed users. So if you've already bought Regex Hero you should now see a link on the right hand side of the screen: Click that and you'll get this dialog box: And then once you click OK, you're done. Shortcut icons will be placed appropriately. And the desktop version looks like this: If after installing you want to uninstall you can do so by right-clicking inside the application and simply clicking "Remove this ...

In my opinion this is the coolest feature since Regex Hero first launched. Soon this will be making its way into the paid version. I still have some more work to do to perfect it. I want to make it a little more intelligent. And of course I need to provide tool tips for everything. Once that's done this should be a very helpful addition.

Apparently I introduced a bug with the last major update to Regex Hero. The multi-threading I put in place had a few problems. On rare occasions you'd see highlighting that made no sense at all. I'm doing multi-threaded auto-saving, multi-threaded benchmarking, and even multi-threaded initialization in Regex Hero. But I need to set aside more time to figure out a way to do multi-threading for the real-time highlighting more reliably. For now I had to revert back to the old way of doing things. It may not be fast when dealing with massive amounts of text. But at least it's reliable.

I made some improvements to the login system this weekend. The biggest improvement is the new ability to recover an account when you can't login through your primary OpenID provider. I asked a question on StackOverflow a couple months ago about how this should be implemented. This is something I've been meaning to do for awhile but on Friday there was a sense of urgency as there were some peculiar issues with MyOpenID.com occasionally preventing you from authenticating. So I made a video to explain OpenID as well as the new account recovery feature: I am pretty happy with the way things turned out at this point. I've been using OpenID logins on Regex Hero for several months now. The excellent DotNetOpenAuth project has simplified things from my end tremendously. And now that this account recovery feature is in place I can sleep a little easier.

Videos After I created the new library section which allows voting and comments I now have some very useful pieces to build upon. So this weekend I created a new videos section to complement the library. To start off with I created a video to demonstrate the process of writing a Strong Password Regular Expression . I decided to host the videos myself and use a Silverlight video player . The player I used is open-source and very slick. I made a few modifications to it for my own use. I primarily worked on the media controls auto-hiding behavior and I think I finally have it the way I want it. Improved Responsiveness While that would ordinarily be a productive weekend, I've been meaning to make a couple technical improvements to the tester for some time now. The first issue is a general slowness when you're dealing with a huge target string with real-time highlighting on. The trouble is that the application has to run the regular expression, calculate the positions...