I should go back to bed.

Ok. If you attempted to create a headspace user recently and were not successful, I apologize. The URLs the script was sending out were wrong. You need to insert http://loophole.morpheus.net/cgi-bin/ at the beginning to make it work. The script should now be sending out working URLs. I am going to give it a few days and then clear all of the unconfirmed users. I should have noticed this problem earlier.

I have also made a lot of fairly sweeping changes to the code. I am trying to go through and test it as I can. If you notice any glaring bugs please let me know.

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Hours later...

I wrote a script to fix some of the annoying little problems in the headspace and thouroughly hosed the comments. That should be fixed now, hopefully. I think I might switch to mt after all. That was a nightmare.

One positive side effect is that I learned a new perl trick. If you do a pattern match where the pattern is a variable, perl expands the variable before compiling the pattern... which is what you want in most cases. That let's you do things like:

 $doi = ".*";
 s/$doi//g;
 

(which would remove all characters). This is a real pain in the ass if your variable contains .* (or some other looks-like-a-regexp garbage) and that's really what you want to match (instead of all characters). The solution is to do this:

 $doi = ".*";
 s/\\Q$doi\\E//g;
 

(which would remove any instances of .* instead of all characters.) Ugh.

Clearly, if you know what your variable contains it's easy to manually escape the metacharacters. However, when you are pulling data from a database with the intent of munging it a bit and putting it right back, it's much bigger pain in the ass. That's where this \\Q\\E trick comes in. It saves having to use a bunch of temporary variables.

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Meant to link these ages ago:

Pics from my OR/WA trip this summer

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If you've ever wondered why I don't use the links section much anymore (please tell me you haven't), it's simple: it's broken. Originally, I was hand-typing a bunch of html with every link. This has made it very hard to unravel. That's next on the agenda.