4:30 p.m. You are two paragraphs from the end of a two-week translation job, due the following morning, when a chime from your e-mail program alerts you to a new message from your client:

"You are using European format for the dates, right?"

You check the purchase order and all of your correspondence: this is the first you have heard of this request. You find this especially frustrating because you have already made dinner plans for the evening. Your options…

Using a good IDE for regular expressions provides many advantages over MS Word.  For those who don’t know, an IDE is an Integrated Development Environment—a program that enables programmers to write their code better and more quickly.  There are several good IDEs with regular expression support that are free, like Eclipse (what I use to program) and NetBeans.  I have used Dreamweaver as an example because my assumption is that most readers use some version of Windows, and many may…

I’ve just launched another site that will be host for a number of text processing utilities for translators, http://termwormsoftware.com.  I had originally planned on putting them up here, but this would have been a hassle from a programming standpoint, since they are or will be written in Python, my new favorite language, and this site is all PHP.  Thus, I built a new site using a Python web framework called Django.  The first utility is up and running,…

It’s been nearly four years since I last worked in an office.  This is the first time that my commute has been three minutes on foot.  It is also the first time that I have been able to make it home for lunch every day.  I am setting my own hours as usual and no one is bothered by me constantly jabbering into a microphone.

That’s right.  I finally decided to stop being a skinflint.  Last weekend I moved my…

Here are five quick and easy regular expressions that I have used at work in the past week.  If you want to do the same, just open up a Word document that you want to edit, press Ctrl+F, click the “More >>” button, and select the “Use wildcards” checkbox.

Important:  Don’t use regular expressions while tracking changes.  Word does some strange things with captured text when Track Changes is on.  Instead, finish up your regex edits and then merge and…