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.RTF, WTF?
Friday, December 30 2016
I took the fancy new camera with me on the morning walk with the dogs up the Farm Road. This was how I managed to take this photograph of Neville:
(Click to enlarge.)
I was pretty much done with some changes I'd needed to make to a mission-critical mass-emailing system though I didn't have enough nerve to deploy the code quite yet, especially given all the end-of-year emailing that was underway. So I turned my attention to a more interesting one (for me): a way to produce snailmail documents (think Word documents, though they're actually in the .RTF format) from the reporting system I've been obsessively elaborating. I'd already determined that such a system would need a second block of SQL to produce the data for the actual documents to be produced, but only today did I realize that the documents needed in this case contained a list of items of arbitrary length. This meant I was going to have to figure out how to parse-out a piece of RTF code representing its presentation of tabular data, embed data from a series of records into copies of tht micro-template, and insert it back into the RTF document template. All of this required me to become a bit more familiar with the .RTF format than I wanted to be. According to the Wikipedia article, .RTF was designed by Microsoft (something I did not know) and its specifications were never published, meaning it's just another data spec it uses to jank around its customers. All I know is that the overabundance of backslashes tend to give me a headache. I made a table in Microsoft Word, exported it in .RTF, and then looked at it in a text editor in hopes of finding the blocks that might be looped through. But, for me at least, it was like looking for patterns in Chinese. It turns out, though, that .RTF table-creating codes aren't that complicated if they aren't diluted in a sea of the sort of probably-unnecessary control codes that a program like Microsoft Word tends to insert. Eventually I managed to find a good reference for table building in .RTF.
Periodically throughout the day I'd take breaks from my work to shovel snow out of the driveway, wash dishes, or vacuum. Gretchen would be coming home this afternoon, and she'd be bringing a guest. The house had to look good. I'd taken a 150 milligram dose of pseudoephedrine to help me power through all the dull grunt work. It's particularly good at providing motivation when the work is largely physical in nature (amphetamines and kratom, I've discovered, aren't as good).
At around 4:00pm Gretchen returned with J, one of her old prisoner-students from when she worked in the Bard Prison Initiative. I can't give his full name because he got out a year ago, is still on parole, and traveling this far might have been a parole violation. Gretchen and J stopped for supplies in New Paltz on the way here. I hung out with them briefly when they arrived, but I was still in my remote workplace and was obsessing about how best to loop through a block of .RTF control characters.
Eventually Gretchen made a lasagna, which turned out unusually good. After that, we sat around the fire talking about various things, most of it prison and post-prison related. Inevitably, we got around to the topic of Donald Trump, though we didn't dwell on the horror for as long as we normally do among our upstate friends. For a large black man who has spent a decade or two in prison, the threat of Donald Trump might just be a rounding error in the horror that is life itself.
[REDACTED]
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