Latest diary entries

Ramblings about cats, games and miscellanea.

Can't Work All The Time

On Friday, at the request of Vas, I wrote a small and simple pattern matching engine to take a plain text reference and turn it into a BibTeX reference. It's a difficult task to do automatically, given that to interpret a plain text reference takes some human intelligence. My script takes simple formats like '%author%, %title% (%year%)', or you can extend it to match regular expressions, like '%/(\d+\. )%%author/.+?(?<!\b.)%. %title%.' Oh, and it does other things too; allows you to insert comments, and also lets you set the type.

It's not perfect; there appear to be some ...

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Talker and Work

After TR and honeycomb closed ages ago, I've got out of touch with people. So I've started a quiet talker for us semi-retired spods to idle in peace - anyone interested should contact me for the address. Haven't decided whether it's going to be permanent or not, it depends on how popular it is; if nobody ever logs on, ever, then there's not really much point keeping it going. But it would be nice to have somewhere to keep in touch, so I probably will keep it running. If I do, it will move addresses, which ...

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Mac Mini

Here's a question for all you Apple-lovers out there.

When I initially mentioned I was thinking about getting an apple mac mini for development purposes, people suggested I wait until it goes to intel architecture. That's sensible, I can see the theory behind waiting so that I won't have to upgrade in the future - I don't particularly want one mac, let alone two. But here's a question - when I have my new intel-based mac mini, how can I be sure that what I develop will work on pre-intel macs?

I don't know anything about ...

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