inquiry

Been doing fancier scripting things with tmux of late. I find the documentation (well, man page..) right around the corner of Mystification Street and Infuriation Way. But it still casts quite the shadow over sliced bread, so....

I also wrote a rather kickass pair of commands that can manage song lyrics for us. One can digest and reformat lyrics page html (after Ctrl-S –> HTML only –> save) from a certain online lyrics site (which I won't mention lest anyone lose their shit..) into a library of such. The other can turn a file containing a list of songs in the library into a set of html files in a specified directory that retain the ordering of the aforementioned file via “PREV” and “NEXT” links at the top and bottom of each sheet to make it easy to navigate from one to another per the predetermined order.

But, Jesus... the fucking games one must play to get browsers to do anything useful, right?

This time it was learning the hard way how zooming tabs seemingly mucks with whether text in certain html elements wraps... in other words, bring up a page, enjoy line wrap... but then zoom, and suddenly the line wrap isn't happening anymore without refreshing. Ugh.

And then it seems zoom values are... associated with URLs (so that if you close a tab.. then reopen with the URL, you wind up with the same tab zoom)... or... well, maybe I'm not remember the exact relationship. But what it translates to in my scenario is if I zoom a specific song's html, then follow the “PREV” or “NEXT” link, the page that appears isn't zoomed the way the previous URL's worth was. That almost feels like a war crime to me, for godssakes....

So...... that led to a workaround involving some CSS against the 'pre' element, as well as specifying a “zoom:” property value against the 'body' element. Thankfully some kind soul (if you believe in such a thing..) had already worked that out – although of course it took me half of forever to come up with the right combination of search terms to find it... because... well, what are the chances of different software developers ever using the same terminology, am-i-just-fuck-me-right-here-and-now-rite?

Yeah. I've come to despise software development. Just seems like a big fucking mess compared to how things were when I was rookie. And it's sooooo anti-social an endeavor. Just try talking to a developer who's in the middle of something (which implies they're at least a dozen things in mind they realized along the way they need to change but couldn't write them down because that would risk fucking up the code currently under their fingertips.. even as they agonize how they're going to test any of them... oh, and don't forget to make crufty temporary file copies that wind up numbering scores faster than a Putin colluder gets shunned (if not repeatedly murdered by a murmur-happy mob...)), but be sure to don your suit of armor first....

I'm just sayin'. If you think you want to be a software developer, be sure to stay single. And to love working 12-16+ hours a day. And find joy in gobs of time spent (see also: wasted) trying to find something you know you already coded... refactoring in ways that will become irrelevant in, oh, let's just call it soon enough to make you wish you didn't do the last refactor...

OH! And others will change things under your feet breaking the fuck out of your hard work, but since what you've written a layer closer to the user, well, guess what? IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT....

And then there's probably having few friends who have any idea what you're talking about when describing your trials and/or tribulations. Throw your manager into that group too, who will furthermore never understand why – unlike your non-coding department cohorts – you can't create, stick to, and make a schedule....

And may all the deities who've ever lived try to help you if you're more a unix type stuck in a job that's 99.99% Windows....

<bashes head into table next to couch numerous times>

Don't. Just don't....

But back to the lyrics thingie. So cool! Once I've built up the library, we can create songlists at will, and it's just a matter of pointing the browser to a file named '000first000.html', flipping this glorious Acer Chromebook's screen over to turn it into a notebook, and then just click on “NEXT” after completing each song. Yay!

(In case you're wondering, '000first000.html' is a symbolic link to the actual first song's html, because it'll almost certainly always sort first when listing a folder in Chrome....)

And, of course, I don't really care which lyrics site I use to Ctrl-S lyrics into our library, because even if I have to start using a different site, I'll just have to stare at their song lyric html long enough to find patterns and parse out what the parser for current site html....

Oh... one more thing. Of course I didn't want to have to dick with a fucking browser with all their keystroke-turbation.. I'd hoped to “scrape” via curl... but of course the site I prefer has some kind of robots blocking shit going on... I could probably work around that, but it's not where I wanted to spend the bulk of my time for this.