Word

Getting back into some Word and Excel automation for a programming task, and it has once again become painfully obvious that the state of automation of Office software is incredibly antiquated.

So: a real Perl OO wrapper for Word (and for Excel, but of course I know Excel in far less detail) would be a valuable thing, and could easily be factored out of my earlier Decl work with Word.  (And of course used by it, once I figure out that bug.)

This could easily be generalized to an OLE wrapper class as well that could be done in a more declarative way, but compiled.

This sort of thing would be incredibly useful in my daily life, and it's clear now that coming at it from the Decl end was a diversion.  I got excited about Decl and wanted to do all my programming there, but I should have been working directly in Perl.

Honestly - just a good documentation of the Word object model that didn't depend on Word's own help system would be a step forward.  (It's just that it's huge.)

Decisions:

1. Call the class Win32::Word.
2. I'm chickening out and not using Moose.  I still feel uncomfortable about the overhead, which is probably just me being old.
3. I will, however, use the same declarative approach for OLE wrapping that Moose does, with the same syntactic sugar function trick.

Here's a neat idea I thought of, incidentally - search Github (and other sources of code) for instances of function/method/variable names (come to think of it, the constants would be a good thing to search on!) unique to the Word API.  That should net me a nice library of use cases, both for unit testing and for a nice cookbook.

Let's face it - Word automation sucks incredibly, it really does.  But it wouldn't have to.

Win32::OLE::Word should be the thin API, but I think something like Win32::OLE::Word::Sugar could include some significant simplifications and extensions to deal with common use cases (like searching for things in multiple stories).

Graphical generation

Just a note for my later amusement: I've been thinking of the automatic generation of graphical forms - specifically, 19th-century masonry.  I want a city generator that does for me what London or Richmond, Indiana give me - shivers down my spine that I don't even understand.

Asteroids in LISP?!?

Yes.

Machine learning books

Some books and things on machine learning.

• Foundations of Machine Learning (MIT Press 2012): Mohri, Rostamizadeh, and Talkawar - expensive and new.
• Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Persistence, and Prediction (2009) - free online: Hastie, Tibshirani, Friedman.
• Mohri's class at NYU.
• Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (2007): Bishop.

Tips for cleaning up crufty codebases

Refactoring and cleanup of old code is perilously close to code understanding.

Programming language social mores

The ever-entertaining Zed Shaw writes about the realization that what are often called programming language "idioms" are actually social mores used as community membership signifiers.

AMP Camp

AMP Camp was a Berkeley thing about big data that I didn't have time for.  Maybe soon.

Data mining astronomical literature

NASA has been working hard since the 90's to ensure open access to the astronomical literature.  Here is one man's data mining response.

Anic

Another neat experimental language, Anic.

Backing up data on paper

I have utterly fallen in love with PaperBack.

Take a set of files.  Turn them into a graphic.  Print them and stick them in a drawer.  Later, scan them and restore the files.  Dear Lord, is that beautiful or what?

Adapting price points for SaaS

Patrick Mackenzie again, this time with an article about adapting price points in software as a service.  He's all about the autostartup.

Steve Yegge on "conservative/liberal"

Yegge weighs in on mental habits in programming, making the analogy to political conservatism/liberalism by noting that risk-averseness is the key insight.  (And not hexapodia, as previously believed.)

Grok

Here's a fascinating little article about a Google project called Grok - led by Steve Yegge, who's been doing some equally interesting bloviation about programmer mentality lately (of which more in a separate post).

Grok is still close to the vest, but it's presumably about code analysis as expressed in an improved and unified build system.  It has subsumed the no-longer-public Google Code (durnit).  In short, it's making me salivate.

DataNitro?

A snippet about options pricing in Excel with Python and DataNitro.

Syntactic

Syntactic is an open source, unsupervised lexical categorization project.

HNN muses about failure

So some guys did some video games on the AppStore, and it turned out they were doing it wrong when it came to the actual part where you make enough money to survive.  HNN talks about it.

Musing article about ORM vs. ... not ORM

This is a good article about aspects of the philosophy of ORMs.

• ORM or not, you still need separation between the model and the persistence layer.  Keep all the SQL together or you'll end up with a maintenance nightmare.
• ORM is a quick out-of-the-box solution for lightweight systems.
• ORM isn't too great for complex data models or database-specific functionality (PostgreSQL) or if you need performance.

Essential C

For those learning C, you could do worse than this convenient page at Stanford.

Twilio hacking

I'm not even "hacking" yet - just trying to find the time to get off the ground.  Here are a couple of bookmarks along the way.

• Client browser soft phone
• Scheduled reminder app
• A little Perl script hitting Twilio
• A second number service for testing (since I'm not currently in the States)

Claws mail

Another possibility for a mail client front end.  I can't tell how automatable it is, but at least it provides a nice list of features to strive for should I want to come up with a reasonable Perl-based mail client.