So nablopomo (informal) success: 34 posts over the last 30 days, including at least one each day. Since I didn't sign up at the website it probably doesn't count, but given that I'm writing this for me not others that's basically irrelevant. (November seems to be the most special nablopomo month, because nanowrimo is a November thing, but they appear to have turned it into an every-month thing. Movember is also a November thing, and definitely made its presence felt at Kiwicon; I didn't do Movember either.)

Tonight was also the last night of Film Society screening for the (calendar) year. The final film was "Brick" (IMDB), a film noir from 2005. It was written and directed by Rian Johnson (who is approximately the same age as me), who unfortunately doesn't seem to have done anything else yet. "Unfortunately" because "Brick" was an awesome movie that I'd highly recommend to anyone who likes Film Noir -- defintely one of the top 5 movies I've seen all year. Before I saw it I was worried about the "set around a schoolground" premise, but it works very well. The lead actor, Joesph Gordon-Levitt did an amazing job as the "detective" lead, and his many years as a child actor show in his experience. The female lead, Nora Zehtner also did an excellent job, and has nearly as extensive acting career already despite only being in her early 20s. I hope both actors, and the director, get a bunch more film work.

And now for something completely different: TeTeX (wikipedia) can be configured via the TEXINPUTS variable with a path of directories to search for include files (including EPS figures), viz:

TEXINPUTS=.:../logos:

but the key thing is that the list must end with a ":" (at least on Unix-like systems), otherwise LaTeX is unable to find some of its built in items. (This seems a most unfortunate design, but appears to be the way that it is.)

TeTeX development has been discountined, recommending TeX Live from TUG (the TeX Users Group) instead. There's a Mac Distribution of Tex Live which bundles in various things; I installed TeTeX from MacPorts and if I were replacing it would probably install the replacement from MacPorts too. (TeTeX does the things I need so I'll probably just keep using it for now.)

(I needed to figure this out, because my business invoices have been generated from LaTeX "letter" files for the last decade, and they all had hard coded fully qualified paths to the letter head EPS files because I hadn't got TeX search paths working previously. But while most other unixes use /home/foo for the home directories -- which was what I'd hard coded -- OS X uses /Users/foo for home directories, and has an autofs mounted on /home (doing nothing but getting in the way, by default, from what I can see). Which means that it's not possible to, eg, create a symlink to make the pathnames match. In theory it might be able to add to the /etc/auto_home to mount /Users/USERNAME at /home/USERNAME when the user logged in or the directory was accessed, but I couldn't easily find a way to do so that didn't involve generally enabling file sharing.)