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code logs -> 2008 -> Sat, 07 Jun 2008< code.20080606.log - code.20080608.log >
--- Log opened Sat Jun 07 00:00:47 2008
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10:25 * Vornicus beats Excel. Let me make a pivottable that skips columns that don't meet your nazitastic criteria.
11:02
<@Raif>
What's the issue?
11:03
< Vornicus>
I have a pile of columns way over on the left, a bunch of hidden processing columns, and then a pile of columns on the right
11:03
< Vornicus>
And I want the ones on the left and the ones on the right, and I don't want the ones in the middle.
11:04
< Vornicus>
And the , trick that works with graph ranges doesn't work with pivottables.
11:04
< Vornicus>
(also the ones in the middle don't really have names)
11:04
<@Raif>
, trick?
11:05
< Vornicus>
Yeah. You can go, for instance: Sheet1!$A$1:$B$60,Sheet1!$Q$1:$X$60 and it will act like a single table.
11:06
< Vornicus>
when you put that into the Source Data dialog.
11:06
<@Raif>
Oh, right.
11:06
<@Raif>
This will be fixed next version.
11:07
< Vornicus>
Which will be, what, 2012?
11:07 * Vornicus is impatient. Also hasn't upgraded from plain old Office X, so
11:07
<@Raif>
we're cutting our cycles in half.
11:08
<@Raif>
For Mac Excel, 14 is the one you want (yeah, we skipped 13, because the winoffice guys are whiny bitches)
11:08
< Vornicus>
Which will be the next one after 2008, yes?
11:08
<@Raif>
Indeed.
11:08 * Vornicus still wants Visio.
11:09
<@Raif>
Never gonna happen.
11:09
< Vornicus>
Why not, anyway?
11:09
<@McMartin>
Visio is at the same uncomfortable utility level as Visual Basic.
11:09
<@McMartin>
Not-that-useful simple stuff is easy, but it's completely unacceptable for professionals, who are the only taregt.
11:09
<@McMartin>
s/taregt/marketing target/
11:09
<@Raif>
Not a lot of market for it really... well, not enough to justify porting an entirely new product.
11:10 * Vornicus will be so glad when the goddamn office document standards war is over, too.
11:11
<@McMartin>
 Given that even MS can't implement OOXML...
11:11
< Vornicus>
heh
11:11
<@Raif>
Not that I have much control over the standard (Mac is mostly downstream), but I'm not sure what you mean there.
11:12
< Vornicus>
MS announced that ODF compliance will show up in a service pack, but its OOXML won't be right until at least the next version.
11:13
<@McMartin>
By "document standards war" he meant ODF vs OOXML
11:13
< Vornicus>
But it's been going on longer than that.
11:13
<@Raif>
Yeah, I think that's a pretty silly comparison though... because ODF isn't as comprehensive.
11:14
< Vornicus>
I remember, one time, trying to get a document from FrameMaker into Word.
11:14
<@Raif>
I'm not even sure what FrameMaker is.
11:14
<@McMartin>
An old desktop publishing application.
11:14
< Vornicus>
Adobe FrameMaker; a "desktop publishing" app. Does amazing things with formatting.
11:14
<@Raif>
Neat.
11:15
< Vornicus>
Don't use it to type your paper, copy the text in once you're done.
11:15
< Vornicus>
Anyway
11:15
<@Raif>
Yeah, if you're referring to 10 or prior, we didn't really have great WYSIWYG.
11:15
< Vornicus>
The images wouldn't paste into Word or Visio.
11:15
<@Raif>
(Even now it's a bit touchy cross-plat)
11:15
< Vornicus>
They /would/ paste into Canvas...
11:16
<@McMartin>
(This is why ODF has been popular. Users don't want "comprehensive" if it means that they can't read anyone else's documents, or their own from four years ago)
11:16
<@Raif>
Funny.
11:16
< Vornicus>
but each letter in the diagram would get its own shape; each rectangle and line would be broken into five pieces.
11:16
<@Raif>
McM: Still a silly argument. What do you mean by "can't read someone else's documents"?
11:17
< Vornicus>
(Canvas is a drawing program. Its best feature imo is its custom raster crosshatches)
11:17
<@Raif>
and MSXML didn't even exist 4 years ago, so how is that even in the picture?
11:17
<@McMartin>
Raif: ... are you taking as baseline that everyone owns office?
11:17
< Vornicus>
And at that the latest office?
11:17
<@Raif>
If you're in publishing of any kind, you can read a word doc.
11:18
<@Raif>
So in the sense that the old formats are ubiquitous (sp?)...
11:18
< Vornicus>
Well, except that I don't think you can properly read stuff from Word 95 or so any more.
11:18
<@McMartin>
... see, even when they were, people would still email Word documents to email systems that were ancient Solaris boxes.
11:19
<@McMartin>
Yes, now that Google has mostly reverse-engineered it enough that it can do a more-or-less conversion, but then "collaborating on a Word document" means your first step is to get it *out* of it.
11:19
< Vornicus>
Not in MS office, anyway; OpenOffice seems to be okay with it, which I find hilarious.
11:19
<@Raif>
Also, MSXML *is* an open standard. You can feel free to read up on it... so the fact that only MSOffice reads it is more an indictment of other apps to implement anything that isn't their own standard than it is one against the format.
11:19
<@McMartin>
Um
11:19
<@McMartin>
MSXML was a source of great comedy amongst implementors because of its vagueness and reference to proprietary applications, especially in backcompat sections.
11:20
<@Raif>
Unless you're talking about old formats that aren't NFF, (2004 or prior), in which case you're talking about an entirely different format, which was closed and binary.
11:20
<@McMartin>
Most of those are "this is an encoding of a binary structure dump from Word 95" and the like, which Does Not Help.
11:20
< Vornicus>
"page break like word 95"
11:20
<@McMartin>
It is my understanding that MSXML is defined in part in terms of the old closed binary formats.
11:20
<@Raif>
Which are now public.
11:21
<@Raif>
I've ready through significant portions of the new spec and I haven't encountered anything like that.
11:21
<@McMartin>
When you say "new spec" is the pre-or-post ISO Fast Track?
11:22
< Vornicus>
And if you've see the post- version, I'd like to know where you got it. it does not appear to otherwise exist.
11:22
<@Raif>
The one thing I did find in that vein was Excel's page size descriptor, which is defined as a finite list of known paper sizes, which I'm told will be fixed (I filed a spec bug).
11:22
<@Raif>
Both. I just tend to snag whatever the latest revision is.
11:23
< Vornicus>
Which nobody outside of Microsoft has seen, apparently.
11:23 * Raif shrugs.
11:23
<@Raif>
You can have it perfect or you can have it now. Pick one.
11:23
< Vornicus>
I can't.
11:23
<@McMartin>
"If you don't make it available, you cannot attack people for not implementing it"
11:23
< ASCIISkull>
from microsoft? Are you sure those two are options?
11:23 * jerith is quite happy that his standards body is appealing the ratification.
11:24
< Vornicus>
I get neither.
11:24
<@Raif>
:P
11:24
<@jerith>
I'd rather have it later than broken, actually.
11:24
< Vornicus>
Well, yes, but having /something/ now would be helpful.
11:24
<@jerith>
And if "later" in this case is "not at all", there's always ODF.
11:24
<@Raif>
All I'm saying is that most of the "ODF is awesom, MS sucks" rhetoric comes from anti-MS hysteria as opposed to actual research.
11:25
< ASCIISkull>
Ah, well, I was always given to understand that 'open' implied some manner of openess.
11:25
<@jerith>
Raif: I don't claim OXML sucks, I claim that there is a vast list of technical issues that was not considered in the standards process.
11:25
<@Raif>
It's great to have a simple open standard, except that when you hit that 20% that it doesn't cover, suddenly everyone jumps back to proprietary formats.
11:26
<@Raif>
That I can agree with.
11:26
<@McMartin>
OK. ODF (in fact, ODP, the weakest one) is to date the only presentation format I have ever found that lets me move the file between home and work without garbling the fuck out of it.
11:26
<@Raif>
Speaking as someone who has to implement it, there's always room for work. :P
11:26
<@McMartin>
Thus, I have by necessity used it exclusively for the past three years.
11:26
<@jerith>
Much as I'd love to continue this discussion (and seriously, I would) I am late for a breakfast appointment.
11:26
<@jerith>
Cheers all.
11:27
<@Raif>
You have to keep in mind that, while it sounds shitty (and may well be shitty), MS primarily serves businesses.
11:27
<@Raif>
On the consumer front, yeah, simpler is probably better, unless you're a power-user of some kind and you REALLY want one of the more advanced features that other suites can't do.
11:28 * McMartin was nevertheless Extremely Surprised to find that diagrams did not port between Windows and Mac Powerpoint. =P
11:28
<@McMartin>
What looked right on one became an explosion in a Bezier Curve Factory on the other.
11:28
<@Raif>
Yeah, well, that's another problem entirely. See, WinOffice is a much larger business than we are (I think we're around 350-400 million in revenue).
11:29
< Vornicus>
At the other end of course there is still the question of whether GPL-licensed applications can implement OXML without getting sued for patent stuff, to which the answer currently appears to be "no"
11:29
<@Raif>
Because of that, and because of some bad upper management choices, they decided they were going to do what they were going to do and fuck putting effort in for the mac guys.
11:29
<@Raif>
Now we have businesses (and customers) who have mixed environments who can't port their documents, so management realized "oh shit, we just fucked the mac business."
11:30
<@Raif>
It's being fixed, partly because the mac side got an awesome new GM who's good enough at corperate politics to twist WinOffice's arm.
11:30
<@McMartin>
Yeah, pretty much. The fact that I have to work in a mixed environment is the primary reason I've been using ODF exclusively. It's well-defined and consistently-implemented well enough to actually work.
11:31
<@McMartin>
Incidentally, who is Visio nominally actually targeting?
11:31
<@Raif>
So like I said, there's history, and then there's the way things are now (interop is now pretty good, except for Excel... it'll be fucking awesome in next version)
11:31
<@Raif>
Beats the hell out of me.
11:31
<@McMartin>
I ran into it primarily in an... unusual situation and where it was being used as a particularly horrifying brand X.
11:31
< Vornicus>
Visio does a lot of absurdly wacky stuff.
11:32
<@McMartin>
Which is to say, intelligence analysis. It's apparently the fallback for intelligence/law enforcement investigation when they don't have the funding for Real Correlation Turns.
11:32
<@McMartin>
s/Turns/Tools/
11:32
< Vornicus>
You can flowchart with it, build programs using UML (though I don't know anyone who'd want to do that), floorplan, orgchart.
11:32
< Vornicus>
It does /everything/, but it sucks at most of it.
11:33
< Vornicus>
on the other hand, it /does/ let you label objects, which is rather helpful. (I'm looking at /you/, Illustrator)
11:33
<@Raif>
As is true of anything that tries to do everything.
11:33
<@McMartin>
Machine code!
11:33
<@McMartin>
>_>
11:33
<@Raif>
Yeah, I don't know what Visio is supposed to be, or who it's supposedly written for.
11:33
<@Raif>
I always liked it for electronics diagrams, but even for those there are better applications.
11:34
< Vornicus>
I am Most Pleased with the Ribbon, by the way, I've been using it on my brother's machine. It makes it pretty clear where there are separations of workflow.
11:34
<@Raif>
You are the first person I've ever met who liked the ribbon.
11:34
< Vornicus>
I remember some years ago I was helping a colleague put together an outline.
11:35
<@Raif>
Personally I hate it... I think most of the benefits it provided involved the menu reorganization, which we could have accomplished just as easily without changing the entire way the UI works.
11:35
< Vornicus>
He would start typing the outline and it would apply formatting to the outline, and then he'd try to fix the formatting one line at a time.
11:35
< Vornicus>
And then he would get mad.
11:36
<@Raif>
Yeah, I hate that about Word too.
11:36
<@Raif>
"You typed struct. Clearly you mean Struct"
11:36
< Vornicus>
So I had to explain to him that it was easier to either set up the formatting first and then type, or type first and then select the whole thing and apply formatting.
11:37
< Vornicus>
...reminds me, I should check in on the Outline Formatting thingy, it used to blow with extra blow sauce.
11:39
<@Raif>
Not sure what that is.
11:40
< Vornicus>
in Word
11:40
<@Raif>
Unless you mean notebook view, but I think that's new in 12.
11:40
< Vornicus>
With hierarchical lists.
11:40
< Vornicus>
You could set the formatting for each level of the hierarchy.
11:41 * Vornicus hunts it down.
11:41
< Vornicus>
Format -> Bullets and Numbering -> Outline Numbered -> Customize...
11:43
< Vornicus>
it took me rather a while to figure out how to use it.
11:43
<@Raif>
Oh, right.
11:45
< ASCIISkull>
Illustrator lets you label items
11:45
< ASCIISkull>
albeit not gracefully
11:46
< Vornicus>
ASCIISkull: what I mean is, I have a rectangle, I want text centered horizonally and vertically in it. I couldn't figure out how to do that without manual alignment fiddling.
11:46
< ASCIISkull>
you select the two of them, hit the align both axis button?
11:47
<@McMartin>
Oh god, X-Fig flashbacks.
11:47
< Vornicus>
part of the problem is I can't get text boxes to, uh. shrink-wrap.
11:47
< ASCIISkull>
shrink wrap?
11:47
< Vornicus>
Change its size according to the amount of text in it.
11:48
< ASCIISkull>
for that you'd have a couple ways to do it, the easiest being to just use a text field, which should conform
11:48
< ASCIISkull>
(as opposed to a normal text object, which is based on lines)
11:49 * Vornicus has a lot of little beefs with Illustrator, mostly discovered while he was trying to make a faaaancy diagram.
11:49
< Vornicus>
Image with transparency? Isn't transparent when I paste it into Illustrator.
11:50
< ASCIISkull>
you can thank postscript for that
11:50
< Vornicus>
Yeah, I know. :(
11:51
< ASCIISkull>
however, there are ways around it
11:51
< ASCIISkull>
(and quark is even worse)
11:51
<@McMartin>
As in Quark XPress?
11:52
< ASCIISkull>
yes
11:52
<@McMartin>
That is a name I have not heard in a very long time.
11:52
<@McMartin>
... since I beta-tested some In Nomine supplements, in fact.
11:53
< ASCIISkull>
there's a reason for that
11:55 * Vornicus ponders: McM is QuarkXPress?
11:55
< ASCIISkull>
he's our only hope
11:56 * Vornicus eyes Excel. what?
11:56
< Vornicus>
It won't let me sort this thing with merged cells in the header.
11:56
< ASCIISkull>
by the way, playing around with this program celtx has impressed me; it's a very simple, targetted formatting interface for screenplays
11:57
< ASCIISkull>
it's very nice
11:57
<@McMartin>
"Definition: A room is gguarded if it encloses henchmen."
11:58
< ASCIISkull>
i'd suggest, besides fixing the typo, to check that the henchmen aren't incapacitated
11:59
< ASCIISkull>
or the closet will be well guarded by a stack of knocked out guards
11:59
< ASCIISkull>
¬_¬
11:59
<@McMartin>
I'm still working out the full logic of tthat.
11:59
<@McMartin>
I may have to distinguish between guarded and merely "henched".
12:00
< ASCIISkull>
perhaps every turn have all 'active' henchman make a guarding action?
12:01
<@McMartin>
This section is actually Merciful, so areas where there's a full contingent of guards you simply won't even try to enter.
12:01
<@McMartin>
The goal is to get them split up or weakened enough that you can take them.
12:02
<@McMartin>
I'm debating whether or not to make decaffeinating their coffee a valid solution~
12:02
< Vornicus>
pff
12:02
< ASCIISkull>
how about feeding them after midnight?
12:03
<@McMartin>
They're henchmen, not henchmogwai.
12:04
< Vornicus>
"you've secretly replaced the guards' coffee with Folger's Crystals. Let's see if they notice..."
12:09 * Vornicus fiddles again with Dragon Dice.
12:09 * Vornicus figures if he's actually going to /do/ anything with it, he needs to make his own art instead of ganking theirs.
12:10 * Vornicus also fiddles, more importantly, with his SoldierModel class. Should probably figure out how to make it cleaner.
12:10 * McMartin should fiddle with GWT.
12:11
< Vornicus>
GWT?
12:11
<@McMartin>
Google Web Toolkit.
12:11
<@EvilDarkLord>
Is it any good?
12:12
<@EvilDarkLord>
I didn't get around to actually writing code with it.
12:12
<@McMartin>
Yeah, that's why I need to fiddle with it - to find out.
12:12
<@McMartin>
There's also some Evil Stunts I wanted to try pulling with it.
12:12
<@EvilDarkLord>
Do tell when you know. I have a certain site that could use some well-structured JS development.
12:12
<@McMartin>
Nod
12:13
<@McMartin>
My primary interest is the fact that it has a Java->JS cross-compiler component.
12:13
<@McMartin>
And I'm wondering if it will still work in the presence of mechanically transformed Java binaries.
12:16
<@McMartin>
In other news, it looks like I do want it to be that a room is guarded if it encloses full-strength henchmen.
12:16
<@McMartin>
Though I could really have it just be "contains" as the area includes no enterable supporters or containers that would make the two be different.
12:19
< ASCIISkull>
never hurts to make sure
12:20
<@McMartin>
My thoughts exactly.
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12:26 * Vornicus eyes the daily wtf
12:27
< Vornicus>
Mug, US shipping: $15. Mug, International shipping: $23. Mug, personally delivered by Alex (the person who runs the thing): $5000
12:29
<@Attilla>
Hey, what else is an idle billionaire going to do except see how much people will do for money.
12:31
< ASCIISkull>
If I were to do that I's find somewhere that transport would be prohibitively expensive to
12:31
< ASCIISkull>
to make it worth the money^_^
12:35
<@EvilDarkLord>
Or prohibitively dangerous. Only +20 % for warzones, after all.
12:36
<@EvilDarkLord>
Oops. 10 %, that is.
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22:32
<@C_tiger>
is there a printf for "use 1 d.p. if it isn't an integer but nothing if it is."
22:33
<@C_tiger>
i.e. 12.345 becomes "12.3" but 12 becomes "12"?
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23:10
<@MyCatVerbs>
C_tiger: I don't believe there is any.
23:15
<@MyCatVerbs>
You *could* do something like: int n = snprintf(string,length,"foo bar %.1f"; if (string[n-1] == '0') n -= 2; if (n>length) HARIKARI("Ohnoes, truncation!\n"); else snprintf(string+n,length-n," the rest of the string.\n"); // but that is utterly disgusting and probably contains at least one fencepost error.
23:18
<@MyCatVerbs>
Unless... give it a go and see if it does that by default? Maybe I'm misreading the spec here, but it sounds like it might just.
23:19
<@MyCatVerbs>
Ah, no. No it doesn't.
--- Log closed Sun Jun 08 00:00:54 2008
code logs -> 2008 -> Sat, 07 Jun 2008< code.20080606.log - code.20080608.log >
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