I use Snapchat. It’s an app where you can take a photo or short (< 10 second) video and send it to your friends who use the service; they’ll then be able to see it, once, before it disappears forever.

Ostensibly, the app is for sexting, because there’s no fear that your photo will get spread around (no forwarding/etc.) or retained for longer than you’d like, but it seems like it’s not as much a sexter’s hangout as the media might want you to think.

My circle of friends use it basically as an extension of weird Twitter – most snaps I send and receive are strange angles of weird objects; the completely mundane but somehow therapeutic (7 seconds of the camera pointed outside the window of a tram, pointed at the ground moving below); or just closeups of Curtis Stone’s face, wherever we see him.

Of course, the promise that they won’t get retained is just that: a promise. Since your phone receives this image and shows it to you at some point, it must be downloaded by your phone. If it can be downladed by the phone, it can be downloaded by something else. We decided to find out how.

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Here’s Contrigraph, a “data visualisation” (?) created by generating commits to match the Contribution Graph Shirt from GitHub.

It was pretty much a hack; first, I read the colours straight off the shirt, producing a big block of data like

0002342
2223322
2323241
2224333
3322122
2242231
...

Then we read that in one digit at a time, work out what day to start on so everything aligns correctly, and how many commits on a given day produce each gradient of colour. The result isn’t pretty:

start = Time.new 2012, 4, 23, 12, 0, 0, 0

tbl = {"0" => 0, "1" => 0, "2" => 1, "3" => 9, "4" => 14, "5" => 23}

3.times do 
  dbd.each do |n|
    tbl[n].times do
      `echo 1 >> graafik`
      `git commit -a -m 'contrigraph' --date='#{start.to_s[0..9]}T12:00:00'`
    end
    start += 86400
  end
end

Three times so this thing will scroll on for the next few years. Other values for tbl would work too; I just didn’t bother to do anything better. I’ve written clearer code, but that wasn’t really the point either.

I actually screwed this up twice: first I didn’t remember to treat the 0 entries correctly (i.e. I should have skipped those days, whereas I ignored them entirely); second, it seemed like I was getting hit by timezone issues where everything was shifted up a block.

In retrospect, I should have first produced a mini-contributions graph generator (i.e. one that takes a Git repository and produces what GitHub would do), validate that against an existing user/repo, then use that to ensure it’d work the first time. I did a similar thing to ensure I had the data correct, by producing a graph directly from the data:

This has come up a few times recently, so a little note:

/./ will match any character—except a newline.

/[\s\S]/, /[\w\W]/ and so forth are the only way to portably match every character including newlines.

what about /./m?

/./m does not match a newline (usually—see below).

The m modifier does not alter . in any way (usually—see below).

m changes what ^ and $ match—normally they’ll match only the start and end of the string, but m alters them to also match the start and end of any line, i.e. immediately after and prior a newline.

Mnemonic: m for “multiline”.

what about /./s?

Yes, that will do what you want—unless you’re using Ruby or JavaScript.

In Ruby, the s modifier is inexplicably unused—in 1.8, it stays on the Regexp object, but in no way affects matching, and in 1.9, it doesn’t even stay on the object, it just disappears. Note that these behaviours are different to using a complete nonsense modifier, like f, which causes a SyntaxError¹.

Even more inexplicable, this feature has been rolled into m instead! So in Ruby, you can use /./m to match a newline, and you can also use /^a/m to match an a at the beginning of the string, or after any newline in the string.

In JavaScript, the s modifier is absent entirely, and it’s not rolled into anything else. Use /[\s\S]/.

Mnemonic: s for “single line” (the string is treated as one line, in a twisted sense).

conclusion

Yay, regular expressions. Be sure what you mean.

To match any character including newlines:

• In JavaScript or any other language lacking the s modifier, use /[\s\S]/.
• In Ruby, use /./m, but be aware that this also modifies ^ and $. If unsure, use /[\s\S]/.
• If you have true PCREs, you may safely use /./s.

Note that this is often what you really want—rarely do you want to explicitly match every character except newlines. If you do that on purpose, at least leave a comment to that effect, otherwise your coworkers will just assume you didn’t know what you were doing.

1. Or just gets thrown away if you use Regexp.new directly. ↩

Writers of all stripes enjoy engaging in the most cynical readings of human behavior because they think it makes them appear hyper-rational. But in fact here is a perfect example of how trying to achieve that makes you irrational. Human emotion is real. It is an observable phenomenon. It observably influences behavior. Therefore to fail to account for it when discussing coupling and relationships is the opposite of cold rationality; it is in fact a failure of empiricism.

L’Hote on Kate Bolick’s “All the Single Ladies”.

As programmers, we spend a lot of time just carting data from one place to another. Sometimes that’s the entire purpose of a program or library (data conversion whatevers), but more often it’s just something that needs to happen in the course of getting a certain task done. When we’re sending a request, using a library, executing templates or whatever, it’s important to be 100% clear on the format of the data, which is a fancy way of saying how the data is encoded.

Let’s do the tacky dictionary thing:

encoding (plural encodings)

1. (computing) The way in which symbols are mapped onto bytes, e.g. in the rendering of a particular font, or in the mapping from keyboard input into visual text.

2. A conversion of plain text into a code or cypher form (for decoding by the recipient).

I think these senses are a bit too specific—if your data is in a computer in any form, then it’s already encoded. The keyboard doesn’t even have to come into it.

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