Hey WwF players, WordFeud is free and it has other languages besides for English. Go Dutch!

But is it available for Windows Phone ;P

@mootinator You have a Windows Phone?

Someone from the WP7 team has not replied to my email... :-(

I do...

I'd like to develop for it, but I lack a phone to test with. The WinPhone evangelists kind left me hanging in the middle of an email thread.

Hmm

I have a phone, but no motivation to develop anything for it.

:-( I'm overmotivated. I have like six or seven open projects right now.

Except work stuff, which we're evidently developing for Playbook.

Aside from the little things, like maintaining my websites.

Playbook? Why?

I guess rig pigs would rather carry one around than an iPad.

"It's open, unlike iOS, which is closed. Aaand, it lets me do X, which Apple would never let." </whiney-voice> When it runs without hanging or stalling or crashing or burninating.

rig pigs?

en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rig_pig

Oh, as in, people for whom an iPad is too delicate.

Lol, more or less.

I'm not sure how much more rugged a playbook would be though TBH.

I know. :-)

It's a tablet.

So, who wants to clean up this text file for me, pretty please?

It's the undergrad schedule which was converted from PDF to TXT.

Any tips?

The text file can be found here.

I need in in CSV format, but there's lots of garbage in there and I'd need a regex to filter it, but I don't know how.

Should I post on SU or SO?

Sounds fun. I'd probably lean ever so slightly SO.

Okay, thanks, I'll post in a moment.

What's a good title? I've started with "please help clean up this data for an app".

Though you might get a good answer involving sed or awk for SU?

shrugs.

what do you need from it?

I need almost all of the data but its in the wrong structure.

The course name, time, room, building letter, professor and number of credits.

There is also degree and course name

But those are only written at the top of each group

I need it in CSV.

The most important part is the name/number/prof/location/time though.

Ever used awk at all?

I can't remember how to use it.

lol

I'm going to wget your file and play with it anyway.

@mootinator No, never heard of it.

@mootinator thank you!

Yeah, I had totally forgotten that the default field separator was whitespace. That's convenient.

Huh?

Just that eg: awk '{print $2}' fall2011_undergrad.txt prints the second blob of text without whitespeace in each row.

I made a lot of one line command line programs in college :P

heh

second blob of text?

so I can strip out whitespace and convert that into what? Blobs of text? what happens to delimiters?

The general theory behind awk is:

match some line to a regular expression and do stuff with it.

So you can do things like when you match a line with a degree name, save that to a variable and use it in the output of the next set of lines which don't have one.

In theory.

Save "that" - as in everything before or after it?

Soo

An example

/^[A-Z]+/ {FOO=$1; print $1","$2;}
{print FOO","$1;}

That will find lines which begin with one or more capital letters (course name) , save the course name to FOO and print the second field on that line.

Then the second line prints the most recently saved course name and the first field.

Of course that doesn't only give you a comma separated list of name,number (because there are lines which don't fit the general format) but should give a general idea.

My Dad took a look at the file just now.

He says that there are two types of fields that matter.

Course headers and course sections.

Right...

He says that I can write a C++ program to do the conversion to CSV.

But I'm interested to hear what you were working towards too. Although, I have no clue how to use awk.

The first line on that script matches course headers, you'd just have to match course sections properly.

I got the theory, but what is awk?

Is it a command line program?

Yes.

Ok...

And you just write programs for it which take the form /regular expression/ {commands}

The /regular expression/ is to match types of records

The commands you use to perform variable assignments and print statements.

Anyhow, the tricky thing with your file which makes awk helpful for it is that the different fields are separated by variable amounts of whitespace.

Ah, right.

I wonder if I could solve this with C++ though...

My course book is called "Problem solving with C++"

I want to try it that way, I think.

So with awk you just refer to each non whitespace with $1, etc.

Yeah, go for it.

Time to learn about strings and array, stupid intro course...

:-)

If this were 2007 I'd finish here by saying "Follow my adventure on Twitter!"

I wonder if I could use LINQ ;P

My script had some weird first lines of output.

ACCT,2001
ACCT,ACCT
ACCT,0003
ACCT,0002
ACCT,0004
ACCT,INSTRUCTION
ACCT,0005

Oh I see, it was processing the line beginning with ACCT twice there.

Ah, ok.

:-)

goes back to not worrying about GNU command line tools.

Nope, not gonna happen.

@mootinator What, LINQ?

No, me not messing around with awk

Oh, haha, suppose so.

There, got it to output something sensible lol

/^[A-Z]+/ {NAME=$1; NUMBER=$2;}
/^[[:space:]]+[0-9]{4}/ {print NAME","NUMBER","$1;}
/^[[:space:]]+\*[[:space:]]+[0-9]{4}/ {print NAME","NUMBER","$2;}

Probably a dumb way of doing it but whatever.

@mootinator - still around?

Anyone here?

We're in the C++ lounge messing with c++11 and Regex

Momentarily.

Have you gotten as far as I did yet? ;P

@mootinator Apparently I'm an idiot for choosing C++ but here's what we're struggling with: ideone.com/rlhmF

Mind popping in and helping with the regex, please?

Yeah, perl and awk are very native regexy.

@MarcGravell Did you (partially) fix this, by the way? My duplicates seem to have disappeared.. :o Also, Chat Feedback on chat.SE is frozen. I blame you guys for not introducing enough bugs in your code. ;)

replied

@TimStone ...did you really just report "bug: insufficient bugs"?

That, or I haven't been meddling enough.

Although I posted two mundane bugs in the Chat Feedback room, I think that fulfills my quota.

@TimStone So what was that thing about domain name again?

I guess we either give @RebeccaChernoff teh codez and it goes on election.stackexchange.com or we have to come up with a domain name.

I vote to give it to her. Though I'm not sure if you'll like having to maintain it :P especially with API 2.0 coming up

Yeah, that was my only concern.

If it still needs poking, it's easier if I host it I think.

Although I suppose there's ways we could make that work regardless.

The bit that needs poking would be the code that handles the request queue

Aye

I never got the hang of writing something that worked. I think replacing it with one of the ready made library/wrapper would be a good idea

Also, this:

// MarkdownMini parser, regexs are from the chat source *cough cough*

Details, details. ;)

The best way to ensure compatibility is to use the exact same code SE uses :P

That actually needs updating, since I reported a minor bug with the client-side version, heh.

balpha also said that the client-side one isn't particularly representative of the server-side one, but ah well.

It actually seems to work pretty well. I haven't seen any comments broken by it yet

Oh, I didn't even realize that the timeline request returned Markdown.

That's silly

@TimStone You go tell them that ;)

timeline request where?

API

@jcolebrand Stack Exchange API

You can request for a timeline of a user's recent activities

Which would contain information like the old activities tab on the user profile

> it means Google will crush them if it sees them doing auto-translated content. Immediate and permanent deindexing. Makes sense, as auto-translated content is a) duplicate and b) usually of EXCEEDINGLY low quality. Not a good experience for a hapless Google searcher in any language, is it now? (manually translated content, as long as it is attributed, will probably be fine) – Jeff Atwood 2m ago

So that's what he meant

Deputy on M.SO - ye-haaw fires pistols in air

Hah, nice.

@YiJiangs独角兽 I thought he meant something like that, but it didn't really answer your question.

dba.stackexchange.com/election/1#post-6199 <-- hehe at the comment

Who wants to know a trick to get O'Reilly ebooks for $5 apiece?

I like O'Reilly ebooks for $5

@jcolebrand Hahah :P

@mootinator email addy?

> I want to add answers to closed questions too. Teach me your magic, please. – lunboks 3m ago

@Sathya :D

Oh no, the internet knows my e-mail now!

Now I'm going to get 53 spam messages per day instead of 50.

@TimStone A lot of hand waving over the computer screen seems to do the trick for me

You can delete it, the email has been sent.

@mootinator wait, you see spam on a gmail?

I see about 3 a month lately ...

Too late.

speaking of, they must have retuned their filters lately, cos I was seeing more than that

@jcolebrand No, only when I look in my spam folder.

Yay background upkeep by professional engineers!

@mootinator Flag for a mod

I have to keep reminding myself to check the web interface of both my mail accounts, because the clients I use don't download spam by default, I'm worried they may have caught something important

There's a loud compressor-y noise outside...It needs to stop.

@TimStone DRRR. DRRRR. DRRRRR.

Yes, exactly like that. :P

@YiJiangs独角兽 I always want to punch Thunderbird in the face because of how entirely wrong it is when classifying things as spam/not-spam or "scam"

@TimStone Ah yes, the scam warning thingy is retarded. The webmail server filters out those anyways. I don't use Thunderbird's anti-spam features for the same reason

I'm going to be doing a lottt of reading at work... just picked up 4 books.

"Email from Blizzard? OBVIOUSLY A SCAM, EVERY TIME."

Blizzard will never ask for your password.

Ever.

Not even while logging in to your blizzard account.

That thing is WIDE OPEN.

:D

So I have this client.

When this website gets an unexpected error it returns a generic error message.

And logs the full error to the error log.

sounds like SOP for me

She refuses to look at the error log, despite having access to it, but does extensive testing to come up with an entirely incorrect theory about what the problem might be before mentioning it to me.

@mootinator That's brillant

@TimStone I believe you mean brillant

Corrected myself, thanks.

lmao

can anybody please push http-post into post or vice versa

@abatishchev we can definitely get someone to assist, but it would be better if you made a case for it on Meta Stack Overflow as a Q

sure, i'll post one

@TimStone hehe :D

title contains a [tag] prefix; please use the tag field to enter tags instead.

i don't know how to call that

@abatishchev can't use the same tags in the title

just title the post "please merge these two http tags"

tags in title - the same with tags in tags?

@abatishchev huh?

sounds suitable for any question except tags or retag-request

oh, did you tag it with tags?

then ... ffs, idk

just merge request and we can sort it out once it's posted I guess

That really is a horrid error message ... @TimStone @Sathya how can we fashion that as a proper Q to get it attention?

yes, when you do that what does it say? Does it still give an error?

Eh, what's wrong with the error message?

i removed brackets from title and was able to post a question

@TimStone i think that's good restriction for SO but not for meta SO

for example the most of my questions on meta is tags-related

The only restriction is that the title doesn't start with [tag], so you can always just write "Merge [tag] with [other-tag]"

ok, got it

@TimStone that is a shitty request

thanks for clarification

@jcolebrand Hm?

@TimStone it's akin to "we can't accept your form submission if you don't format it in just such and thus a manner"

the first rule of web form design is "accept garbage and clean it up your own damned self"

sounds fair

btw, the most popular edit by me on SO is to remove C# from title as first word

no [c#] but just c#. so the restriction is workarounded

@abatishchev Yeah, I think there's a discussion about that case too on Meta somewhere.

i heart there was a feature to detect such tags and remove them, or maybe just disallow to post

@jcolebrand I don't think that stripping it silently would have gone over better.

but maybe it doesn't work or work incorrectly

Plus the point is to say "Hey, there's a tags field down there, use it!"

Hello

@jcolebrand What I'm doing now with the course info from my uni

Welcome to Linux. What, it's broken? Blame it on pulse audio.

Sudden strong winds tonight caused something heavy and metallic to fall to the ground at the nearby construction site, kicking up a lot of dust

man that whiteboard is filthy

@Pekka Der Ball spielt Kind. (I wrote Das Ball on the board, but I'm pretty sure that's wrong.)

@Fosco Yep, it is. Bad erasers...

And right on cue it started raining

Tonight's rainstorm is especially big

@YiJiangs独角兽 Die Regen knallt ans Fenster, es geht immer weiter...

So .. go do a google search for "incredible hulks pants" and see if my Q shows up ... :D

Eh?

@jcolebrand scratch that. yes

@Sathya yay google :p

I'm curious if that's because the google algos know that we're all stack afficianados (there was some talk they were gonna do that with their results)

Now I want the damn thing cleaned up and made to look better and less like a internet-noob asked it :p

@jcolebrand it does use your previous search history, but only if you're logged in. Hence the incognito window to clear out any possible bias.

I don't trust them anymore not to know who I am :p

I just figure they do and that they make the world a better place for me in general

@Moshe old t-shirt + windex = bright and shiny whiteboard.

@TimStone you about? google.com/hostednews/ap/article/… Trying to parse the information in this snippet ...

> The census tally of gay married couples is higher than the actual number of legal marriages, civil unions or domestic partnerships in the U.S.

That would imply that there are less than 200,000 legally married couples in the US.

My interpretation is that responses to the census (people saying they are gay married,) is greater than the official count of gay marriages on record.

@Fosco ahhhh, that makes a lot more sense

and it's a fair sight less than I would've expected, tbh

but I know it's a good thing

I want to marry my computer, and my 40" monitor... ahh, polygamy.

meh, I prefer polyamory over polygamy

I have that too...

I am that ...

Just FYI socialized medicine is balls.

That is all.

socialism is balls.

Seriously though, they have an 800 number staffed by RNs which was designed to prevent people going to the doctor needlessly, but they just send everyone to a doctor or ER anyway (liability right). Then when you get there and happen to be under 50 they don't bother screening for the condition which had the RN on the phone worried because there's no point screening young people apparently.

</vent> freal this time.

Good luck with whatever you're going through, moot.

@mootinator just punch someone in the face. You'll feel better.

@jcolebrand What's up?

@TimStone you are so slow

Yeah, I was very inconveniently asleep for the last few hours, meh.

Okay, I just have to share this: Rename the Welbog contest is "closed as off topic by random♦, Ólafur Waage, Jonathan Sampson♦, FYI I'm still changing my name, GEOCHET Oct 8 '09 at 17:32" (emphasis mine)

Hahah

Aaand there was a shooting across the street from my school.