![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
1) I do really well when I stop thinking about what I can or can't do, what I do or don't know, and just jump in and focus on finding a way to do something.
2) I do even better when someone tells me the thing I want to do can't be done, when I damn well know it can be and is actually not that hard.
3) Awk is a very simple and nice language to program in when you're dealing with parsing a text file full of fields of different information into a more easily understandable format or auditing various data points within such a file.
4) Awk does, however, have two main weak points I've found: a) its support for multidimensional arrays sucks ass; concatenating subscripts into a single subscript is an ass-backwards way to provide (pseudo)multidimensionality. b) It doesn't seem to iterate through arrays in a logical order when using the "for (x in array) {do}" syntax, going neither numerically nor in the order they were originally created.
5) It's not hard to port a simple shell script using awk over to Windows.
6) The ability to do this does, however, suddenly make you a computer expert in the eyes of Windows users, to the point that immediately after demonstrating the script people will start saying they need to get you to their house to take a look at their virus-infected Windows machine for them.
7) IT staff at my job apparently prefer to tell my boss something can't be done if they can't do it using the tools they are most comfortable with rather than seeking out ways to do it.
8) People in office jobs seem very confused by technology, even things they use on a daily basis. My boss was not aware you could paste multiple email addresses into a groupwise email in one go. (It just requires semicolon delimitation.) By providing a script that collates a pdf full of email fields amidst other information into multiple semicolon-delimited lists of email addresses, I've made it so we can just copy and paste an entire events worth of participants into a single email in a couple quick motions, rather than needing to transcribe them by hand from a printout. This vastly increases our productivity, decreases our error rate, and the script even counts them for us so we don't have to go back and do it by hand to record on our logs. Oh, and it picks out those accounts who don't have email addresses but have asked us to mail them, so we can research them quickly and easily rather than needing to spot them on our own.
Have I mentioned that if they gave this project to anyone but me, they'd probably still be counting the 2478 participants in the first pdf report we received by hand? My script, even in its more basic original form, allowed me to count all of the participants for each event, separate them into four categories for the four kinds of packets we are mailing, and start fulfillment for them about five minutes after I got the report rather than sitting around counting all of them by hand while already in a major time-crunch to start mailing.
Geeks rule. ;-)
Edited because I just realized that I forgot to include the thing that made me start writing this post in the first place:
5.5) When porting an awk script to run on windows from a Mac, one finds that tab formatting is not universal, and an entirely different number of tabs is required on Windows in order to make it display the same way it does on the Mac with the original number of tabs. Also, every quotation mark needs to be filled out in triplicate. ;-)
2) I do even better when someone tells me the thing I want to do can't be done, when I damn well know it can be and is actually not that hard.
3) Awk is a very simple and nice language to program in when you're dealing with parsing a text file full of fields of different information into a more easily understandable format or auditing various data points within such a file.
4) Awk does, however, have two main weak points I've found: a) its support for multidimensional arrays sucks ass; concatenating subscripts into a single subscript is an ass-backwards way to provide (pseudo)multidimensionality. b) It doesn't seem to iterate through arrays in a logical order when using the "for (x in array) {do}" syntax, going neither numerically nor in the order they were originally created.
5) It's not hard to port a simple shell script using awk over to Windows.
6) The ability to do this does, however, suddenly make you a computer expert in the eyes of Windows users, to the point that immediately after demonstrating the script people will start saying they need to get you to their house to take a look at their virus-infected Windows machine for them.
7) IT staff at my job apparently prefer to tell my boss something can't be done if they can't do it using the tools they are most comfortable with rather than seeking out ways to do it.
8) People in office jobs seem very confused by technology, even things they use on a daily basis. My boss was not aware you could paste multiple email addresses into a groupwise email in one go. (It just requires semicolon delimitation.) By providing a script that collates a pdf full of email fields amidst other information into multiple semicolon-delimited lists of email addresses, I've made it so we can just copy and paste an entire events worth of participants into a single email in a couple quick motions, rather than needing to transcribe them by hand from a printout. This vastly increases our productivity, decreases our error rate, and the script even counts them for us so we don't have to go back and do it by hand to record on our logs. Oh, and it picks out those accounts who don't have email addresses but have asked us to mail them, so we can research them quickly and easily rather than needing to spot them on our own.
Have I mentioned that if they gave this project to anyone but me, they'd probably still be counting the 2478 participants in the first pdf report we received by hand? My script, even in its more basic original form, allowed me to count all of the participants for each event, separate them into four categories for the four kinds of packets we are mailing, and start fulfillment for them about five minutes after I got the report rather than sitting around counting all of them by hand while already in a major time-crunch to start mailing.
Geeks rule. ;-)
Edited because I just realized that I forgot to include the thing that made me start writing this post in the first place:
5.5) When porting an awk script to run on windows from a Mac, one finds that tab formatting is not universal, and an entirely different number of tabs is required on Windows in order to make it display the same way it does on the Mac with the original number of tabs. Also, every quotation mark needs to be filled out in triplicate. ;-)
Tags: