On searching for substrings.

I was reading over some Blog’s today, Lesley (my wife) had told me that Kevin (see Finding the Dream on the Blog Roll at right) had made a number of allusions to me. On closer inspection I could only find one direct reference to me, so I used Internet Explorer’s ‘Find (on this page)’ feature. Now I’d like to point out, that the Find tool is really just a pattern matching algorithm, probably Boyer-Moore or the Knuth-Morris-Pratt (KMP) algorithm.

Now I want to stress, both Boyer-Moore and KMP are very old, very well studied algorithms and they work, they work really reliably, in fact, they have been mathematically proven to work every single time. So I want someone to explain to me why when I type ‘Michael Cole’ in ‘Find (on this page)’ Internet Explorer comes back blank, yet I know for a fact that there is at least one instance of ‘Michael Cole’ on the page, heck I even put the cursor a couple words in front of my name and ran the blasted search. Good work Microsoft, bang up job there, sort of like Edlin, you guys never fail to disappoint.

Why do we nurse expectations of greatness from Microsoft? Lets face it, they are never going to deliver. Unless you want to call Vista "delivery".

Thanks to Eric (see EGCSkates on the right) I may decide to start swimming again. Second thought, hauling home from the pool with wet hair in the winter... nah, but I may take up cycling in the spring and summer. One thing I always liked about riding, almost every street in the city is safe for a cyclist - well car drivers are still criminally insane, but hills and rough road surface is not a problem, street car tracks, can be a problem, but not as much. Best of all, when I skate full out I can crack out 30 km/h, maybe 40~45km/h with a really strong tail wind. But when I ride, 30 km/h is a moderate resting speed.

Well enough of dreaming of an open road. I have cat litter to clean and exercises to perform. To all my friends at TISC, I will not be at Scooters this weekend, a friend of mine is coming from out of town and spending the weekend. But like General MacArthur said, I shall return.