Online regular expression validators

a quick note on two useful on line tools allowing test and validate regular expressions.

First one is

https://regex101.com

that allows tests in multiple dialects (php, javascript, python...) and gives a verbose but useful explanation of the steps.

Last but not least it allows to share links to tests prepared like this one:

https://regex101.com/r/9y9n85/20

also useful is:
https://regexper.com/


that comes with the comforting subtitle
You thought you only had two problems…
and allows crreating diagrams about how a given regexp works

example:

 





https://regexper.com/#Results%20%3D%20%28%5Cd%2B%29 

IPtools: a compilation of tools for IP data treatment

At web address https://ip-tools.org/ is possible now to find a compilation of open source tools and resources in the field of patent information, filed from Andreas Motl (https://github.com/amotl).

It is a list of programs in R, Python and Ruby allowing to interface with existing data providers (mainly LENS, USPTO and EPO) or to easily process patent data.

The portal aims to be collaborative thus any contribution from other sources are welcome.

Alternative coordinates systems

Geohash is a public domain geocoding system invented by Gustavo Niemeyer; it encodes a geographic location into a short string of letters and digits. It is hierarchical thus is possible to have arbitrary precision and the possibility of gradually removing characters from the end of the code to reduce its size (and gradually lose precision). As a consequence of the gradual precision degradation, nearby places will often (but not always) present similar prefixes. The longer a shared prefix is, the closer the two places are.

http://geohash.org/

query example:
http://geohash.org/?q=45.37,-121.7&format=url&redirect=0


What3words is a geocoding system that encodes geographic coordinates into three dictionary words with a resolution of three metres.  For example, the torch of the Statue of Liberty is located at "toned.melt.ship".
the idea behind is that a triple of words is easier to remember than a long sequence of numbers that is the usual lat-long coordinates system.
What3words has a website, apps for iOS and Android, and an API that enables bidirectional conversion of what3words address and latitude/longitude coordinates.
The grid is two-dimensional, so the addressing scheme does not distinguish between floors in a building. The system supports 14 languages, although each language covers the world's entire land areas.

This website
https://www.geocachingtoolbox.com/index.php?lang=en&page=w3w
allows to test conversion between lat-long and w3w.

Splitting huge dump files

When importing a very big sql dump, it is possible that some configurations do not allow a correct upload in one's db (ie myisam vs innodb) or you may need to import only part of the tables.
If the dump is big enough to make any edit impossible, you may need to split it.

I found a very handy tool SQLdumpsplitter.

It has a very simple inteface and it allows to chose the size of split files and if to skip comment lines;
it also creates a separate file for the create tbales statements.
Then you can reassemble the parts you need with a dos line:
copy *.sql new.sql

Kimono: an easy tool for webscraping

Kimono is a free tool developed by Kimonolabs that allows to build an API in seconds with kimono, models and visualizations with live data without writing any code.
The kimono smart extractor recognizes patterns in web content allowing you get the data you want quickly and visually;
They also host your APIs and data in the cloud and run them on the schedule that's right for you
and serve up cached data even if the source URL is down or the extractor fails.
App builder lets you create responsive web apps on top of your APIs without writing any code

the tool is available at:
https://www.kimonolabs.com/

TreeTagger - a language tagger / stemmer

 The TreeTagger is a tool for annotating text with part-of-speech and lemma information. It was developed by Helmut Schmid in the TC project at the Institute for Computational Linguistics of the University of Stuttgart. The TreeTagger has been successfully used to tag German, English, French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Bulgarian, Russian, Portuguese, Galician, Chinese, Swahili, Slovak, Slovenian, Latin, Estonian, Polish and old French texts and is adaptable to other languages if a lexicon and a manually tagged training corpus are available.

Sample output:
word                pos      lemma
The                   DT       the
TreeTagger      NP      TreeTagger
is                      VBZ      be
easy                    JJ      easy
to                     TO      to
use                   VB      use
.                       SENT      .

The TreeTagger can also be used as a chunker for English, German, French, and Spanish.

Executable code for Linux and Windows PCs as well as Intel-Macs, and parameter files for various languages can be downloaded via the links below.

This software is freely available for research, education and evaluation.

website: http://www.cis.uni-muenchen.de/~schmid/tools/TreeTagger/

A text editor for huge files

PilotEdit Lite is a free text editor, html editor, php editor, java editor and hex editor that can edit huge files larger than 4GB. It offers customizable syntax and keyword highlighting, advanced search and replace operations, HEX mode, column mode, and more. In addition, a built-in FTP client lets you open, edit, download and upload large files directly to/from an FTP server.
PilotEdit Lite works on both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows Operating Systems.

I testedit with 4gb txt and Xml files and it worked perfectly!

download free version from: http://www.pilotedit.com/

breaking my disk

ok
this week special is about bad luck!
what if my file system would corrupt and I forgot (or even worse did not schedule) a back up of my beloved data?
A good tool in such a case may be Testdisk, freeware able to recover lost partitions or file systems.
After downloading and running the program, by choosing Analyze you may select the partition no more recognized by the file system; then with the commands Proceed, Intel, Advanced, Boot and BackUp BS you will be able to recover the backup boot sector.
If also the Backup BS is corrupted you may try the command Rebuild Bs.
If also this case fails, well this other site offers a good choice of talismans against bad luck!

Other uses of TestDisk are described at this link: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Data_Recovery_Examples

Losing my password

Raise your hand if it never happened to you to forget a password.
If this password is the one of your PC Admin or of your user this is going to become a big problem...
There is also a chance that, if your machine has no UPS, a power cut may lock you user.

If you do not want to 'refresh' your PC/server by reinstalling the OS a solution may be Offline NT Password & Registry Editor, a tool that may be downloaded from the site http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/.
There you can download the image of a bootable cd that, inserted in the machine where you lost the password / have a user locked, allows you to reset the password or unlock the user.
Obviously it works only on local accounts; no network accounts or active directories.

A piece to have in house, hopefully without using it.