I feel bad. I worked out three different regexes, when technically there is one that will do it, and...I'm gonna forget that shit. But I recorded it, so at least that's not last.

And you want to know what it was for? To extract every link to a JPG in the SPN thread, because I needed to find the right one, and paging through was just not working, and search was fruitless.

So...great power.

But I must practice. Good text editors will encourage that.

Bwah.

Make that into a sellable product, and you will have millions.

Assuming you've saved the thread in a file called "Supernatural.html", this will work:

$ perl -0777 -ne '@x = /href=.(.*?\\.jpg)/g; print join("\\n", @x)' Supernatural.html

That's not precisely what I did--I didn't just grab the http string, I grabbed the entire <a href=" link so it would be clickable html in the output (I did a regexp find all, copy then paste), I just didn't realise that some people used single quotes and some used none at all, so I ended up going back for more. And then the resulting file was pretty illegible onscreen, so I had to insert t li in there tidy it up and make it followable.

But your command line is a good example of the one liners I've been avoiding paying enough attention to in order to remember--it's not like it's a physical pain, or anything.

The Apple v Samsung verdict is being read now: [link]

Given the complexity of the task, a verdict back this soon is shocking. Some 700 individual decisions needed to be made for the jury to finish its job.

To recap, this jury hasn't asked a single question since Wednesday. It hasn't asked for clarification on a single element of jury instructions, it hasn't asked to have any testimony re-read.... nothing.

So basically Apple won everything.

All right.

I'd love it if this inspires Samsung to do some more serious innovation (like the Note! I kind of want one, but haven't been impressed by the software available for it yet) but I hope we don't see Apple pursuing more battles against Android entire. I'll admit that Android borrows a lot of interface elements from iOS, but Apple has taken their fair share back at this point and I hope they decide to let it go.

Though honestly...my next phone might be a Windows phone? I'll have to look into the apps store when the time comes, but if they do a good job attracting developers post-Windows-8, it has some serious potential in my eyes. Especially as I use a traditional tablet PC at work and would love some solid integration. And nobody can say that interface looks anything like iOS.

after I saw some of the exhibits online, I was wondering why Samsung thought they could win (or not lose). It seemed so blatant to me.

I have a Samsung Exhibit! I figured all Android phones were like that. I'm confused about Apple's claims. No one else is allowed to double-tap zoom or one-finger scroll? Those seem like basic functionalities.

Apple might argue that they only seem like basic functionality now because they were invented by Apple and were so brilliant as to seem obvious in hindsight.

I don't particularly believe it for those two examples, but there are definitely cases where that's true. I think many of the things Apple came up with for iOS would have been come up by anybody developing for an all-touch-screen device (which only became possible right at the time of the iPhone's release, due to the rise of affordable capacitive touchscreens) but they did do it first, and it's very hard, in hindsight, for me to fairly say what they came up with that was obvious and what wasn't.

I still think the whole fight should be invalidated, however, because there are plenty of examples of competition inspiring better design in both directions. iOS's notification drawer is many times better than the notification system they had before and comes straight from Android, as an obvious example. Siri is a more powerful (and admittedly way better packaged and marketed) version of Google Voice Actions, which had already been improved by both HTC and Samsung, and came on the heels of advertisements by those companies pointing out the power of voice control. You even launch Siri in essentially the same way you launch Voice Actions on most Android phones: press and hole on of the bottom buttons. Going back in time, the Apple icon grid is basically a prettier version of the Palm icon grid that had been the standard of smartphones for years before Apple came along.

So far, software patent battles haven't destroyed this type of back-and-forth innovation-and-improvement, thank goodness, but they certainly stifle it.