Does anyone know where I can get a script (either Perl or PHP) that will parse .doc or .rtf files? I’ve tried using RTF::Parser and RTF::TEXT::Converter, but they just return a bunch of blank lines. Win32::OLE would work nicely, but it relies on the underlying win32 architecture to run, i.e. it needs to run on a Windows box.

Basically a client has a site that we maintain, and the content that changes regularly is provided in a standard Word document, which would make it very simple to automate the updates if I could just figure out how to parse the document.

Sally’s given birth to her & Darren’s new son, Micah James, and 2 & 1/2 weeks early no less.

Congratulations to Sally for obvious reasons & to Darren for not fainting .

Unless you’ve been living under a rock somewhere on Mars, you’ll know that former Crowded House & Split Enz drummer Paul Hester killed himself on the 26^th of March. This is truly tragic news. If you grew up with Crowded House then I don’t need to explain just how important & influential their music was. And if you didn’t, I don’t know if I adequately can.

But I’ll give it a shot.

Their music was beautiful. Heart-aching or joyous, but beautiful. Their songs stretched the whole expanse of human emotion. From the fun of Sister Madly to the melancholy of Nails in my Feet, Neil Finn’s amazing voice combined with Nick Seymour’s bass & Paul’s brilliant rhythm (and later Mark Hart’s keyboard & guitar) created a group that was greater than the sum of it’s parts. This is not to say that individually they were not great musicians, but while I love Neil’s individual offerings (and those with his brother) nothing he’s produced since comes close to the musical poetry that was Crowded House.

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A few web-related things happening around locally in the last few days:

• .net.au & .com.au registrations hit 500,000
• Sydney Web score the contract to design the website for the Sydney MyResturantRules entry PinkSalt.
• I finally moved this site off our local dev server & onto an actual hosting server. Now hosted by MCGOOHQ, who I recommend wholeheartedly. Their pricing is great (AU$15) & their support (live chat and email) is actually helpful. When I first setup there was a problem with the .htaccess file not working. I used their live support chat & within 5 minutes I’d spoken (or, typed) to the tech in charge who fixed the problem on the spot. Kudos to them.
• Also, Liquorice announces the arrival of my third child with our usual seriousness & sobriety.

Photo of my new baby. Awwww:

2 days old, look at all that hair!

The Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem is back on the air, NZ Bear having finished his debugging.

As far as I can see, the plugin for pulling your status has just picked up where it left off, there should be no need for you to do anything, within 24 hours of the functionality coming back up, you should have seen the status re-appear on your site.

If you’re using this plugin & it hasn’t come back, please leave a comment here to let me know.