Problem: Sufficiently long regular expressions start to look like line noise and become unmaintainable

Solution: Use perl regular expressions with the /x modifier

perlre manpage reads:

/x
Extend your pattern's legibility by permitting whitespace and comments.
These are usually written as ``the /x modifier''...

The /x modifier itself needs a little more explanation. It tells the
regular expression parser to ignore whitespace that is neither
backslashed nor within a character class. You can use this to break up
your regular expression into (slightly) more readable parts.

The # character is also treated as a metacharacter introducing a

Going to SCALE 8x today - I'll be in the LOPSA booth, PostgreSQL booth and doing FOSS tours. Do I know how to overcommit or what?

If you have multiple vias in your rsync path (e.g. a -> b -> c) you
can use an rsync filter rule to tell rsync: don't transfer files that
have . in the beginning of the filename!

--filter '- .*'

This way you won't have rsync temp files (named something like
.filename.xxyyzz) from the a -> b transfer ending up on c.

http://sysadvent.blogspot.com/

Just submitted an article on Cfengine 3 to http://sysadvent.blogspot.com/ - I guess it'll be a few days before it's posted.

After much tearing out of hair, learned to use dblatex (not passivetex) to generate PDF's from my DocBook XML. Runs faster and smoother - that is to say it actually generates the PDF instead of just spewing out LaTeX errors.

I'm trying AsciiDoc to obviate the XML "tag soup" I am eating with my DocBook docs.

There were two things I had to tweak to get the asciidoc .TXT -> DocBook XML -> PDF pipeline working on CentOS 5.3:

1. Remove or comment out every mention of the "--nonet" switch in my xmlto (v0.0.23) (xmlto is the wrapper script for the DocBook XML -> PDF process). AsciiDoc generates DocBook XML 4.5, and the CentOS docbook-dtds package only goes up to 4.4, so we need to be able to access the DocBook XML 4.5 DTD over the net.

2. Do NOT put any author info into the AsciiDoc file, as leaving it in would break the LaTeX leg of the process. (DocBook XML -> XHTML would work fine, but DocBook XML -> PDF (or DVI) would break.) Once I took that out, I was able to generate PDF files.