A wasted day
Monday January 02, 2006; part of: Nerdery

Yea, even as it is written: "Nerds working with Nerds that which is unseemly, and receiving within themselves the messages of their error which was meet." I have spent all bloody afternoon trying to reproduce what felt like a perfectly trivial python macro for OOo into MS Word. All it does is to scoop up the contents of a post and send it to this blog, formatted as suits me.

But you can’t, it turns out, communicate at all easily with an MT blog using Word. For why? Because the IDE autocapitalises method names. So if the blog is expecting a request like "getUsersBlogs()" it won’t – being software – understand when Word’s Basic sends it a request to "GetUsersBlogs()". Would you believe there is no way to turn off or change this behaviour? Me neither. But we’d both be wrong. However often I type "getUsersBlogs", Word changes it as soon as I move the cursor off the line, or run the program.

All that remains to make this perfect is for the comments page to fill up with linux weenies saying "I told you so". To which the answer would involve GUI toolkits for python, all lovely and open source, which simply don’t bloody well work at all. Thank you. I feel better now.

Posted by andrewb at January 02, 2006 06:45 PM
Comments

I was playing with writing a toy multilingual text-editor as an exercise in learning the gtk+ toolkit for Python (under Linux), and it worked very nicely for me.

Posted by: des von bladet on January 2, 2006 07:12 PM

That's not even "I told you so".

Posted by: acb on January 3, 2006 01:19 PM

Well, I did once leave a job largely because of Visual Basic (for Applications and otherwise), but given that I write raw HTML and cut and paste it to diaryland, I'm not really in a position to throw stones.

Posted by: des von bladet on January 3, 2006 04:27 PM

Post a comment
Textile formatting works here. Double hyphens are automatically converted to en dashes, quotes are automatically smartened. You can put dashes and asterisks around text to make italics bold and other silly effects easily.
  • Text wrapped in Asterisks which * will be bold. The asterisks must touch each end of the bold text. There must a space before the first and after the last.
  • Text wrapped in underscores - _ - will be italicised. The underscores must touch each end of the italics. There must a space before the first and after the last.
  • Paragraphs starting bq. will be block quoted. There must be no space before the "b" and one space after the full stop.
  • A hyperlink is made by wrapping the link text in double quotes, followed immediately by a colon, then the URL. If there is a question mark in the URL, wrap the whole lot in square brackets.
  • I use two classes to mark up text that deserves it. sane text looks like this. loony text looks like that. The syntax for those is %(sane)[space] sane text %; loony is left as an exercise to the reader.
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