Next Time Think of Some Tests

If you volunteer to help your sister-in-law with wedding preparations on Thursday, and you don't get to it until Friday, and you decide to write a program to do it, don't forget to think about some basic sanity checks on the final output. Otherwise on Sunday you'll hear from your father-in-law wondering why some people didn't have placecards and didn't know where to sit.

So yeah, wedding preparations in the sense of "can you research how to go from an Excel spreadsheet of names and table assignments to a Word document with the names in the right places to print on these pre-scored placecard sheets from Hobby Lobby, SKU #717694."


The more you think about Excel, you think "Not too bad, Mathematica imports from Excel," and the more you think about Word you think "Ugh". And the more you think about Mathematica, the more you remember the vector graphics language, and that you can trivially export to PDF or rasterized image files.

tables = Import["c:/tables.xls"];
sheet = First[tables];
(* Extract name from row by pattern match *)
nameOfRow[{title_, names_, ___}] := 
   trim[title] <> " " <> trim[names];
(* extract table assignment text from row *)
tableOfRow[{_, _, _, tbl_, ___}] := trim[tbl];
(* filter out blank rows *)
rowsWithNames[sheet_] := Select[sheet, 
   Function[row, trim[row] =!= ""]];

Some Opening Lines of Code, Which May Become Important Later

Not very long after, it seems, the Excel spreadsheet is imported, blank rows are skipped, the names and table numbers are constructed and placed onto the vectorized layout of the placecard sheet, with or without preview construction lines. Very cool.

placecardPageTemplate[] := 
  With[{w = placecardPageWidth, h = placecardPageHeight, 
    pgborder = placecardPageBorder}, 
    {
     (* Solid page border *) 
     Dashing[{}], Line[{{0, 0}, {w, 0}, {w, h}, {0, h}, {0, 0}}],

     (* Scored page borders *) Dashed, 
     Line[{{pgborder, 0}, {pgborder, h}}], 
     Line[{{w - pgborder, 0}, {w - pgborder, h}}], 
     Line[{{0, pgborder}, {w, pgborder}}], 
     Line[{{0, h - pgborder}, {w, h - pgborder}}],

     (* Scored between-card borders *)
     (* vertical *) Line[{{w/2, 0}, {w/2, h}}]}
    ~Join~ 
    Table[With[{cardHt = pgborder + i*placecardHeight}, 
      Line[{{pgborder, cardHt}, {w - pgborder, cardHt}}]], {i, 1, 2}]
    ~Join~ 
    Flatten[Table[placecardTemplate[r, c], 
               {c, 1, numPlaceCardColumns}, 
               {r, 1, numPlaceCardRows}], 2]];

Sample of the Vector Graphics Code



More time is spent rasterizing, with long interruptions for meals, toddler nap and bedtime, and the necessary socializing that comes from being in the bride's family's house the day before the wedding (e.g. rehearsal and dinner).

By late evening the table assignments are finalized and the requested high-resolution JPGs are being rasterized from the vector graphic objects. Sometime the next morning, the placecards are printed. The ceremony comes off with only one hitch, and by evening the reception is ready to swing.

Except... for that one little hack. When you wrote that simple filter to remove blank rows, you did it by checking if the first column was blank. And as it turns out, the first column is for titles and some names, about 6, didn't have a title.

Fault? Everyone agreed it was the you the programmer's. Some issue can be made about the the given spreadsheet format, with a separate column for titles. But the bottom line is you had all the data, and simply spent too much time coding and not enough time planning. There was time to do it right, and no time to do it over. There should have been some time devoted up front to thinking about how to check for correctness of the final output.

Oh well. The next time someone asks to help print placecards you're all set...

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If you are interested in the Mathematica notebook that can generate custom placecards with your database of names, send to the gmail.com account jfkbits. And please note I've fixed the aforementioned bug.

April Curmudgeon

Disclaimer: The April[0] Post you are about to read is not meant to be amusing. Please adjust your expectations now. Lighthearted, yes, but it will not make you laugh aloud. Really, it will not be amusing unless you somehow make it so by assigning a meaning it was never intended to have. By reading this post hopefully you will gain insights that allow you to be a funnier blogger. When Frank Bunker Gilbreth's children, whom he was teaching to touch type, asked if he could touch type, he only replied "They tell me Caruso's voice teacher can't sing a by-jingoed note." May it be so with this post.

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It's challenging to write truly good April Fool's material about programming issues, but almost programmatically easy to write lame material. One reason things are funny is that (1) they violate expectations, and that (2) they do so in a way that doesn't personally impact you, as in Mel Brook's observation "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die".

We're immersed in dark humor by the nature of our process-based profession. Programmers with customers (the most interesting kind of programmers) keep huge databases of failed expectations. These only get funny with distance: either in time or in organizational chart hops. Your coworkers' bugs are more likely to be funnier than your own, but only until your manager decides to reassign to you. Another team's bugs are funnier. Unless you rely on that feature. And so on.

The other kind of expectation, that program P (browser, language, Turing-capable text editor) expects input format X and generates output format Y, are also targets for humor: "Bwahaha, a web browser that accepts COBOL as an HTML scripting language" if it's well-known that this combination doesn't exist and doesn't seem to make sense. Humor playing on this type of expectation is fragile, because the expectations are broken on purpose all the time by the current of software development progress. It's only a matter of time when "Ruby VM in Javascript" moves from being funny to being accepted way of life. Maybe COBOL is funny today, but legacy systems have a way of creating needs that can be solved by software. If you want a joke candidate generator, write a program that generates T diagrams with all possible combinations of known programming languages at the different points. The funny ones will be funny because they violate the intended design of the language: Logo as an implementation language for a Fortress to Haskell compiler. (It's probably a good sign for a language if it's never funny at any point on the T.)

Take a look at the April Fools gags out there related to programming and see how many are analogous to "that idiot tried to plug a USB cable into a Firewire socket". The DailyWTF material is kind of a catalog of such expectations:

• You should write code without explicitly specifying every input case
  


• Code should have a purpose, unlike this if check:
  

  if( nextIndex != currIndex )
  {
    nextIndex = currIndex;
  }



• You should use a standard library function rather than writing your own buggy version


• You shouldn't transform data through several unnecessary layers (the digital camera/wooden table technique)


• Code should, ideally, do something productive, especially if you're paid to create it

The real humor, the best humor in programming topics and others, is the kind that also incorporates the self-recognition element, which I think is simple imitation or mimicry in its rawest form. This is the Jerry Seinfeld style, where you observe and describe a situation or behavior. There's something about hearing a description of a behavior, especially one we wouldn't readily admit to unprompted, that makes us laugh when we recognize we're guilty of it too.

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Note: COBOL is one of those all-purpose humor words, kind of the "weasel" of programming humor. Source: Ask Mr. Language Person.

Lame subtlety spoiler: If you skipped the disclaimer, and thought this was supposed to be somehow funny just because it's April[0], check the title. Also, it's not realistic to expect to get a funny blog post in polynomial time from the T-diagram generator. Not that I tried.