Wednesday 17 March 2010

Ladder and St. Paddy's day parade, rugby-catch in St. Paddy's park, ... and MyFairLady docs finishing

We brought our ladder to Paddy's day parade in Dublin.
 
 
Parked by canal. Bagsed a location near tree and I minded it while Fionn and kids played in park. Ladder leaning on tree proved optimum for getting amount of kids on (as well of course for height) and there were nice branches in tree to hang on to.

After parade played rugby-catch in park. Very appropriate park. St. Patrick's park with St. Patrick's well and St. Patrick's cathedral. Played catch with Daire and Jaliath and Kate and Maeve and another kid. Didn't squish any small passers-by thankfully! It was more or less catch with passing of rugby ball to anyone included.

Day of sleep in and rest for James.
Though *ahem* I've just done a few hours of Intune work.
oops.
Did finish (more or less) of My Fair Lady programme last night. Printer version ended up as 160M in size. Here is a smaller 7.7M version: http://www.dspsrv.com/~jamesc/music/MyFairLady_Prog_019_Smaller.pdf  I've been up a few late nights doing that. Also scenes for figuring out when to change costume and get ready sent to everyone: http://www.dspsrv.com/~jamesc/music/MyFairLady_Scenes.pdf
 
MyFairLady_Scenes.sla Scribus file.

 

Thursday 11 March 2010

scribus usage notes

In middle of getting everything together for My Fair Lady programme.

Make it easier to convert whole document from A4 to A5 would be nice.
Use document settings and change to A5.
But then need to manually select all on page (click on page and ctrl-A)
and resize.
 Would be very useful:
  Command to select all on each page and fit/scale into page.
 Command to fix errors on page where stuff go outside page would be nice.

Resized to A5 and margins 40 40 40 40 stayed same.
 In view don't see that you'r eusing margins.

Resized to A5, then resized pages manually (difficult, move and  snap to grid/guidelines, but quite  manual). Then PDF generation has artifacts from adjoining pages, I think where a page goes outside it's own border or margin.

Progress from day before:
http://www.dspsrv.com/~jamesc/music/MyFairLady_Prog_009.pdf
http://www.dspsrv.com/~jamesc/music/MyFairLady_Prog_009.sla
http://www.dspsrv.com/~jamesc/music/MyFairLady_Prog_011.pdf
http://www.dspsrv.com/~jamesc/music/MyFairLady_Prog_011.sla



Import in PDF/image good.
Someone sent an image in word doc :-7
Could print to image writer and printed greyscale tiff, then converted to jpeg.


Editing text is painful.
In-situ or in text editor.
Ctrl-I to italicize and other shortcuts would be nice.


Flow of content from page to page would be nice.


Adds coming in now and being added.
TODO: last few bios, all mugshots, get pictures right (caption etc also)
 copyright requirements

Maeve and Kate do some turtle programming

Maeve wanted a job (at about 7:45 (past time for bed) so I asked would she like a financial position, an engineering job, ... We fired up kturtle and discovered foreward (fw ), turnleft/turnright (tl/tr ). She liked typing in the commands.






maeve_1.turtle

forward 2
tl 90
fw 100
tl 90
fw 100
fw 10
fw 100
tr 90
tr 100

THEN we discovered with a center at the end of a sequence of moves that it's real easy to make spiral patterns! Just hit Run again and again and again.

Adding a space after commands wasn't intuitive. Kate joined in and was quite adventurous "pencolor 234444432,333" "fw 1110". Using keyboard arrows for editing text was new to Kate.


#clear
pencolor 0,255,0
forward 27
tl 90
fw 100
tl 90
fw 100
tl 33
fw 10
tr 77
fw 100
tr 90
fw 10
tr 100
fw 100
center

Past bedtime! Maeve gets ready herself completely. Then we make a repeat 675 loop to run Kate's sequence while she gets ready for bed.





kate_and_maeve_turt_wheel3.turtle

#clear
pencolor 255,255,0
repeat 675 {
forward 27
tl 90
fw 100
tl 10
fw 100
tl 33
fw 10
tr 66
fw 1110
tr 90
fw 10
tr 100
fw 100
center
}

We read Maeve's story which is mixed-up fairy tales. Then Kate's from library.

Monday 8 March 2010

recover text from docx

A friend got into trouble with a broken usb stick and sole copy of notes in a now unopenable .docx file. Oh dear.

If you google for apps to recover corrupt .docx files there are a phletora of tools! Yeesh! Make backups people. You have to get burned once I suppose before you learn to make backups properly. I remember in the good old days, (well, the old days, (well, 1993ish, (not so old))) when I got a bit overconfident and put tons of content into a .doc for my final year project ... AND then discovered that the files I had worked on for hours were unopenable despite a few backups along the way. Argh!

So the winner of this impromptu recover text from .docx file IS:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/docx2txt/

 Tadahhhhh!




 Congrats to Sandeep Kumar.

Extra especially pleased I am that it is a perl script :) Heh heh :)
ANd actually looking inside it's nice and straightforward. Open up internals of docx as xml and parse out text

I initially tried xxd |less   
Then had a look with emacs. Murghh not good :-7
Then some .exe shareware tools, docXConvertor.exe  Damaged-DOCX2TXT.exe meh meh