mkphlog v0.3 and bug wrangling
       Wednesday, Jan 18 04:34:03 pm, 2012
       
       This weekend, chals emailed me with a bug in the new mkphlog. For some 
       odd reason, it would only automatically add 7 posts to the main phlog 
       listing before failing miserably to write the new posts to the listing.
       
       Now, the the easy thing would be to disable that function with the handy 
       boolean variable provided in the new version of mkphlog. But I wanted to 
       fix the script, so I had to do some light debugging. However, what I 
       found was interesting.
       
       [Skip the next 3 paragraphs if you don't want to hear the gory, 
       slightly dramatized details]
       
       The mistake I made is that I made an assumption in writing the original 
       script. For those not really into programming, _never_ make 
       assumptions. Sometimes you're right, but when you're wrong, you're left 
       scratching your head in confusion. The assumption I made was that the 
       output of `wc -l` is always the same. It isn't, especially on NetBSD 
       (SDF's operating system), but what's worse is that it isn't standardized 
       across platform. (The wc on Slackware doesn't output the same thing as 
       the wc on NetBSD).
       
       The problem with this is that the program would work fine on NetBSD 
       until a certain line number was reached (10, or anything above one 
       digit). Then cut, when trying to split the output into a set number
       of fields with a space character as a deliminator, would be one 
       field off and extract sweet nothing from the `wc -l` output.
       
       It didn't even work at all on Slackware where there is no odd 
       formatting at the beginning. Which led me to fix the whole issue
       with a few simple sed substitutions; just get rid of everything
       that I don't want until there is nothing left but the line count.
       
       Let this be a lesson. Be careful how you program :) and don't make any 
       assumptions. That would be a good start. And above all else, have fun 
       coding.
       
 (DIR) Download mkphlog v0.3 here