The problem with targetted advertising is that you can't ever buy things for other people.

Amazon is convinced that I'm a patchworker and recommends the latest titles accordingly. Thanks Mum!

A few weeks back I tracked down and ordered a patch for my gi. It's a replica of the official patch iven to navy pilots who graduate from Fighter Weapons School, better known as Top Gun.

Anyone who knows me can attest, I'm quite a fan of the mid-80's homo-erotic love story between Maverick and Goose. I'd go as far as to say it's my favourite movie of all time.

For the record it should be noted that I did not actually graduate from the Top Gun academy, and that I am in fact only pretending.

One day Tomcats will be on eBay. One day.

I've moved away from OpenOffice.org's Writer application and started using Apple's Pages for word processing. One of the great things with the Mac is that PDF has been tightly integrated from the begining, with (from memory) the display output being based on PDF rendering... but I might be making that up. (No wait, I am right).

So, you'd expect PDF output to work faily well? Kinda.

I used Pages' "export" option to deliver a crisp PDF document for my viewing pleasure, only to find that each page was actually about 2/3 the size it should be, and in the bottom right corner. It looked like the document had been reduced on a photocopier and printed to the bottom right. Make sense?

I searched for a reason why, assuming my paper size was set wrong but Pages knew I was on A4. Then I found an article that suggested printing to PDF-X. Sure enough, instead of exporting I needed to print to the PDF driver.

And now my PDFs look tastylicious.

I locked in two tickets for the October 13th show at the Burswood dome. Thanks to Simone for the heads-up.

Stop laughing, Fitzy's coming too :)

We'll be up close to the action in row F.

Adam had an interesting problem to solve earlier that I helped him with. In Copper, each module has its own template directory. The problem is that there are templates that are no longer being used, but are still in the code. I used this shell script to find the number of times the template appears in the code:

ls -1 | grep html | cut -d"." -f1 | \\
while read line; \\
do \\
  echo -n "$line "; \\
  grep $line ../index.php | wc -l; \\
done;

It can easily be modified to list the zero counts only. We ended up using something more like this, because we can't be certain that just because a template is listed in the code it's actually being used. For example, it might be a variable name, or in an unrelated string, or in code that's commented out.

ls -1 | grep html | cut -d"." -f1 | \\
while read line; \\
do \\
  echo -n "$line "; \\
  grep $line ../index.php; \\
  echo; \\
done | more

They're the longest strings of bash I've had to staple together before. All hail the pipe.