I get the vibe that RSS is still a little too new for the powers that be to accept. Once you start using it however, RSS is one of those things that you'd come to miss REAL quick. I bet one year from now, most people will be finding interesting content from a website's feed than from visiting it's homepage.

Two and a half years ago, when I first dove into web development, I wasn't very familiar with regular expressions. They certainly didn't look regular to me, looked more like someone's keyboard exploded. Now, having figured out a thing or two about them, I came across the following lines:

       $pos = strpos ( $this->user->privs, 'del');
     if ($pos===FALSE)
     { // edit not found in string privs
           return FALSE;
     } else {
      // figure out where the string ends by looking for a comma, return that substring
         $next_comma = strpos( $this->user->privs, "," , $pos);
            if ($next_comma===FALSE) $next_comma=strlen($this->user->privs);
            $len = $next_comma-$pos;
          $epriv = substr ($this->user->privs, $pos, $len);
           return $epriv;

Which I was able to boil down into the following:

    if ( preg_match("/del_[a-z]+/", $privString, $match) )
    {
        return $match[0];
    } else {
        return false;
    }

Trying to saddle a software product with DRM/copy protection that is just going to piss off your customers doesn't make you rich. Intuit learned this lesson the hard way.

When Intuit launched the copy-control program, it predicted that revenue would increase, since customers who had previously purchased only one TurboTax program would have to buy a separate copy for each computer in the house. That assumption was dead wrong. Instead, the move triggered a consumer backlash the likes of which Intuit had never seen.