Powered by glolg
Display Preferences Most Recent Entries Chatterbox Blog Links Site Statistics Category Tags About Me, Myself and Gilbert XML RSS Feed
Friday, June 06, 2008 - 02:34 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

RTF Not WTF

Blogging a teeny bit less than I had expected to during the hols. After skimming through my previous writings, I realise how often I have forgotten to mention something that I had mentally filed away - for instance finding out that Andy was a Chelsea fan at the class gathering, or expounding (again?) on how chilled drinks after exercise must be one of my favourite experiences in life.

Was going to plop down a few reviews on recently read library books - beginning with Mario Puzo's The Sicilian, based loosly upon the actual story of one Salvatore Giuliano. Most gripping was the book's description of Sicily - island, battleground, and birthplace of the Mafia; A land where honour was paramount, a life could be lost for a word, a vendetta decimate entire families. Where men painted their houses as their fathers, and their fathers before them did, but who would kill any who (correctly) pointed out their ancestry as indicated by the ancient colours used. Where a Madonna stood in every household, but to show weakness was a sin.

The passage that most stuck in my mind was concerning a worldly abbot in cahoots with the Mafia:

"...Except for the wine, which was swilled down by the monks themselves. At night there was a great deal of gambling and drunkenness, and even women were smuggled in, but to all this the Abbot closed his eyes. 'These are hard times,' he said to Guiliano. 'The promised reward of heaven is too far away, men must have some pleasure now. God will forgive them.'

 Always wondered if celibacy is a natural state of being - I lean towards what Suzie Wong expressed, that it makes whatever Creator God there is extremely unhappy. Here You go, producing Man in Your image, and the lazy buggers refuse to continue Your Work. To each his own, at least until they find fulfilment in unacceptable ways.

Also ran through a few books in The Sword of Truth series (recently concluded), and a couple of potboilers by Ludlum, Cry of the Halidon (written originally under a pen name) and The Bancroft Strategy (ghostwritten). The latter is striking as it expands upon the moral themes I touched on a year ago, with some of the examples, such as the famous trolley one, stated in full. The main thrust of the story is on whether it is acceptable to undertake narrowly immoral actions, if it has been calculated with high enough probability, and in good faith, that it would bring about the greater good (myself, I have always been confused by the utilitarian proclamation of "the greatest good for the greatest number", since it often appears the case where options lead to a great good for a few or a small good for many).

To use a relevant example, take the Myanmar junta who have been less than forthcoming in allowing desperately needed aid into their borders after Cyclone Nargis, and hiding the actual source of aid. In mitigation, one can never be sure if there are actually any strings attached, but on balance it seems that the junta are more interested in saving their own faces considering the dire situation. Would it then be acceptable, if possible, to assassinate the entire top leadership of a dozen or so, to allow aid that would save tens of thousands? This sort of thing is exactly what the Bancroft Foundation does in the book, but of course cost-benefit calculations, on such a scale, are a tricky matter.

Another thing I realised is that decisions taken in real-life are almost never as clear-cut as when stated as a judgment call - when faced with a runaway trolley, an onlooker might be aware of the possibility of the five people having a hidden escape route while the single person does not, or of the track being damaged, or of the five people being able to survive... in very few situations can the outcome be known perfectly.

Watched Prince Caspian (chosen by occ) with a bunch of the 4O guys. Though the Telmarines are no angels, it sort of pains me to see a well-organized force defeated upon the whim of a talking lion, whom by all accounts could have saved a lot of bloodshed had he made an appearance earlier, but had to drag it out until he could make a suitably dramatic entrance after spouting some drivel about things never happening the same way twice. Reepicheep is definitely cute, as a scant consolation.

So, what's with the RTF not WTF title of this post? Essentially RTF stands for Rich Text Format, which I believe those who have used Wordpad are well acquainted with. My current job will probably require a web application that allows the user to edit and save RTF documents online. Not terribly hard, but the WYSIWYG interface would be troublesome. I saved myself that bother by searching for some copyleft freeware that would do at least part of the work, and soon came across the FreeRichTextEditor. Unfortunately, it outputs in HTML instead of RTF, but at least the problem is now reduced to hacking out a HTML-to-RTF parser.

Thankfully RTF isn't very complex, simply using control codes to set formatting, and braces to set scope. The full specification by Microsoft is a 11.9MB, 281 page document (giving RTFM a whole new meaning), and the RTF generated by Word is correspondingly obtuse, but there is no need for all that for what I am doing. Hint: Create a RTF document in Wordpad and open it in Notepad to see how clean the code usually is. Spent some time trying to chop away unneeded buttons from the interface, only to discover that the original author had a config file just for that purpose. Duh. Some extra editing was needed in the end, so it wasn't all wasted. Here's the beta:





comments (0) - email - share - print - direct link
trackbacks (0) - trackback url


Next: Ham Can Cook


Related Posts:
Logic's Swansong
Mega Bonus Post
Halfway Through The Moonlight
Change Increasing
Final Push
Back to top

Copyright © 2006-2025 GLYS. All Rights Reserved.