Programming style (or lack thereof)...

There was a time I used to program for a living, back in the days when it was all a C compiler could do to spit out assembler code, much less perform the kinds of checks that were later built into languages like Pascal. My first major project was written in line-numbered BASIC on a system with 8K of memory. After having suffered through the process of dealing with my own "spaghettti" code in the course of system deployment, I became an avid devotee of structured code all on my own, turned to C, and never looked back (at least, not at BASIC, not as implemented back in the day).

Some time later - I think I was still at Borland at the time - Microsoft came out with something called Visual Basic, which was to BASIC what military music is to music (and you can take that any way you like). VB, as it's called, formed the basis for writing macro code in Microsoft Office (or, at least, in Word).

One neat aspect of Word is its ability to "record" a macro, meaning that once you set the recording process in motion, you simply use the mouse and keyboard to accomplish what you want. Once you're finished, you turn off the recorder. Everything you did while the program was in "record" mode was captured as a sequence of Word Basic statements that you can edit, which eases the burden of having to learn the language from scratch.

Some time ago, I wrote a well-structured macro that would transliterate Cyrillic characters to Latin ones (e.g., Путин becomes Putin), but it was lost under circumstances that escape me at the moment. A couple of days ago, faced with having to transliterate a ton of Russian names, I reproduced the macro, only this time, instead of a loop, I copied the same few lines of code and made the requisite tweaks for each upper- and lower-case Cyrillic letter.

It's ugly and most certainly not very efficient, but... it works!

Cheers...

Occam's Razor, dulled...

Speaking of programming, I'm bemused by the behavior of whatever program was employed to OCR the project I'm checking over right now.

Table cells containing only the numeral "8" have been uniformly "recognized" as containing the infinity sign (∞) oriented at 90° to the direction of normal, horizontal text.

You can't beat that with a stick, methinks.

Cheers...

Delivered!

Final word count: 48,613.

Spit-shined, polished, and despeckled as best I could manage in the time remaining.

More work came in during the day, for next week, so my nose will continue to maintain its tenuous altitude above the level of the all-pervasive water, at least until then.

For now, I am totally, utterly, and comprehensively exhausted.

I'm declaring tomorrow a day off... gonna make it a three-day weekend!

* * *If you look hard enough, you can find almost anything on this 'net of ours.

One term that had me well-and-truly stymied was малофазный, used to describe a sighting target used with a surveyor's transit. The word, which might be calqued as "low-phase," isn't very informative in and of itself, and appears on the "runet" not very many times, either to describe precisely this property of a sighting target, or a property of electronic equipment, which I was convinced had nothing to do with the meaning I sought.

Finally, I hit the jackpot, in the sense that I found an explanation that made perfect sense. It was at a Russian geocaching site, and read as follows:

Визирная цель тригопункта – это малофазный визирный цилиндр, на который производятся наблюдения. [...] Ребристая боковая поверхность цилиндра образована радиальными планками для того, чтобы на большом расстоянии, при наблюдении в теодолит цилиндр не давал «фазу», т.е. был равномерно окрашен.

The sighting target of the "trigpoint" is a malofazniy sighting cylinder used in surveying. [...] The ribbed side surface of the cylinder is comprised of radial wood slats, so that at long distances, the cylinder does not exhibit "phase," i.e., it appears to be of uniform color. [my "gist" translation]

This gave me what I needed to solve the problem, and put a nice near-final note to my workover of the document, where this flagged term had been sticking out like a sore thumb.

It's late, and Shiloh is outside barking at something, hopefully not bigger than she is, or better equipped in the weaponry department. I should go see what's exciting her.

Cheers...