Oddly Specific

This is probably not going to be very helpful for the vast majority of my modest readership. But, I would like to put it out there on the internewts so that it can help some academics overcome a rather annoying problem with a literature search tool. Scopus doesn't export to BibTeX very well. And then when I try to keep my bibliography straight by using a tool called BibDesk, it explodes with complaints everywhere. I have put together this little sed script which gets rid of, for me at least, all thing errors and warnings in an exported scopus BibTeX bibliography.

#!/usr/bin/sed -f

# change comma separated author list to "and" separated

/^author/ {

s/[a-z] *\([a-z] *\)*,/ and /g

s/[a-z] *\([a-z] *\)*}/}/g

s/\([A-Z]\.\),/\1 and/g

}

# fix keys with accents and spaces in them

/@[A-Z][A-Z]*{/ {

s/[àáâãäå]/a/g

s/ç/c/g

s/[èéêë]/e/g

s/[ìíîï]/i/g

s/ñ/n/g

s/[òóôõöø]/o/g

s/[ùúûü]/u/g

s/[ýÿ]/y/g

s/[ź]/z/g

s/ //g

}

# fix quotation marks (there are other

# ways to do this, I just like this one)

s/"\([^"]*\)"/``\1''/g

# escape percent signs

s/%/\\%/g

# escape dollar signs (this could cause

# problems if there are math sections

# in abstracts or titles)

s/\$/\\\$/g

Oh, Grow Up.

Two posts in one day, I know, unheard of. But I just couldn't not share this.

I used to be into woodworking, when I lived in Waterloo and had a lot of space. There is a store in Cambridge called A&M Wood Specialty. For some reason, they thought it would be a good idea to register the domain ForLoversOfWood.com. It used to be the banner on the website. They've since replaced that with pictures of hardwoods. I had a moment once where I was looking at mahogany and came across an item whose detailed description was "African Crotch Swirl". Doesn't anyone proofread these things? Maybe I'm just less mature than your average woodworker.

I'm in kind of a pissy mood this morning because our eaves trough is blocked and it rained pretty hard last night and the water poured in a heavy stream right down onto the air conditioner in our bedroom window. We were awakened at 4AM by what sounded like WW III occurring in our bedroom window.

So I was looking for an extension ladder on a tool rental price list today when I came across another doozy: "Concrete Vibrator 1.5'' with 10ft shaft". Which makes sense, when you think about it: I can see wanting to stand at least 10ft away from anyone who was willing to use a concrete vibrator.