"In my first "real" job after college, I got an assigment to create a new graphics processing language to compile into commands for a graphics coprocessor. I started with a freshly composed grammar and prepared to launch into the multiweek project of putting together a compiler. Then a friend showed me the Unix utilities lex and yacc. Lex built lexical analyzers from regular expressions, and yacc reduced a grammar specification into a table-driven compiler that could produce code when it had successfully parsed productions from that grammar. I used lex and yacc, and in less than a week my compiler was up and running! Later, the Free Software Foundation's GNU project produced "improved" versions of lex and yacc -- named flex and bison -- for use on platforms that did not run a derivative of the Unix operating system."
"Getting Groovy with XML Jack Herrington just wants to access nodes in an XSL document by id and pull out values. With the typical Java DOM-parsing approach, it takes dozens of lines, complete with annoying casts. But by letting Groovy manage the ugly XML details, he shows how your Java code can be much prettier. Aug. 12, 2004"
"Jack walked into the office one Monday morning. Underneath his arm, he carried a rolled-up piece of poster paper. He walked to the back of the building, where a group of couches and tables made up the "Engineering Conference Room," and used masking tape to stick his homemade poster to the wall. On it, Jack had carefully written in block letters, "KEEP CHANGES SMALL." Satisfied, he went to the cube the company let him use and waited for the developers to get there."
"j1-2k7-mtH05: Managing Player Awareness in Darkstar A common problem with most online games is making players aware of other players that are near them. In this mini-talk, Jack Strohm offers one idea of how to implement this efficiently within Darkstar. Jun. 6, 2007"
