venta: (Default)
[personal profile] venta
They say a picture is worth a thousand words; sometimes a single image can tell an entire story.

Walking through Woodley this lunchtime, I saw a late-teenage girl. Written on her forehead in purplish letters: MUPPET.

:)

Not at all relevant to that, I have a couple of enquiries if anyone's willing to help.

I've been challenged by one of my rapper team to produce a small application to avoid her head exploding as she tries to work some stuff out. Basically, I need to create an app into which she can enter the names of the team members present, and it'll create a nice little list of who should dance which dance, where, in what order.

So, basically I need to work out a bunch of logic to determine who does what dancing, and put a pretty front end on to it. Now I'm perfectly capable of doing this - sadly, though, I'd write it in the proprietary language peculiar to my company, and I'd have to distribute copies of our OS to anyone who wanted to run it. Which kind of rules that out.

So - if you were required to do such a thing, how would you go about it ? The finished app is to be sent to a person who's computer literate, but no more than that, so shouldn't require them to download lots of stuff in order to be able to run it. I feel that writing a standalone app which someone else could run is something which I ought to be able to do - so look on this as a general query, as well as me wanting a particular problem solved.

In this specific case, given that it might need updating from time to time, as new people join the team or others leave, it might be most sensible to write some kind of Javascript/CGI thing and plonk it on a website somewhere. Suggestions on this would also be appreciated.

(For reference, I'm used to writing in a language which is the bastard offspring of C and assembler. I know a bit of C/C++, and I'm familiar with the basic concept of shell scripts. And that's about it :)

I've just been setting up some more message filters in Outlook, and I've set up a couple of rules that say "when I send a mail to person X, move the message from 'sent items' to Folder Y". What I would like to add is "and don't then mark it as 'unread', you daft bugger". Worse I've just realised that it doesn't move it and mark it unread. It copies it, and marks the copy as unread. So I'm ending up with two copies of each mail I send to X.

Yes, yes, Outlook is awful, yada yada. I have perfectly happy little rules set up in Eudora at home that do exactly the right thing. But Outlook is what I use at work.

Date: 2004-05-14 05:48 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] dmh.livejournal.com
If you can do it in Perl, you'll be able to do it in Python, with the added bonus that you'll actually be able to understand the code when you look at it in 6 months time! :o) (Python in a Nutshell rocks, BTW.)

Date: 2004-05-14 05:50 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] venta.livejournal.com
I did go so far as to acquire (some time ago) the O'Really book on Python (not in a nutshell).

Apparently, though, this book doesn't seem to work like some kind of talisman. Having it on the shelf isn't enough, it seems I'd actually have to, like, read it to learn the language.

Date: 2004-05-14 06:03 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] dmh.livejournal.com
Heh. I started off here.

Date: 2004-05-14 06:09 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] phlebas.livejournal.com
You could also look here.

Date: 2004-05-14 06:05 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] phlebas.livejournal.com
On the shelf? Nonono, you have to sleep with it under your pillow.

Date: 2004-05-14 06:06 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] venta.livejournal.com
Oh, I see!
Well, I wish they'd bother writing that on the cover. Think of all the time I've wasted.

Date: 2004-05-14 06:08 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] phlebas.livejournal.com
Well, if you will insist on going for the proper reference rather than the dummies' version...

Date: 2004-05-14 06:10 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] wimble.livejournal.com
Python for Dummies

Is that in the same vein as LART for Lusers?

Date: 2004-05-14 06:17 am (UTC)
diffrentcolours: (Default)
From: [personal profile] diffrentcolours
Yes, six months later Python code still looks like it was written by an anal retentive on Nazi code inspection day.

Date: 2004-05-14 07:08 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] dmh.livejournal.com
Ignore those greasy shell-scripters, Liz, with their awful wannabe languages!

Choose Python! Prove yourself a real man!

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