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largely presented by shocking
Wednesday, November 23 2016
Most of the things I do in my remote workplace bear results in proportion to the effort put into them. But that's not always the case, especially when dealing with esoteric technologies. Yesterday I'd spent hours trying to track down how exactly to fix a UTF-8 glitch in a CSV export that was happening entirely in Javascript (using the Webkit sandboxed file system of HTML5 (webkitRequestFileSystem), none of which I even knew existed). UTF-8 is the standard for transmitting characters and symbols from a wide range of alphabet and character systems, but if the wrong headers are in place, characters get scrambled and end up as "wingdings" (that's one of the ways they're described by those who don't know what they're seeing). There's a lot of material on the web for tips on correcting this problem when the CSV is being generated by more common processes (Excel export or by PHP running on a server), but not many people are generating CSVs from Javascript using a sandboxed file system in a web browser. It took me hours to track down a solution to the problem, and when I did, it amounted to the addition of only ten characters to a Javascript function. A line that looked like this:
var output = new Blob([content],{type:textType});
had to look like this:
var output = new Blob(["\ufeff", content],{type:textType});
Making that tiny change, as I said early this afternoon during our weekly "stand up" (group video chat), had been my biggest achievement of the past 24 hours. But there were other achievements too, such as one I made this morning, when I further customized a PHP-based CSV processor so that it put quotes around the content of every datum, not just the ones containing spaces or problem characters. Doing this required that I abandon PHP's built-in CSV export support and write my own CSV exporting code. It seems I spend a lot of my workdays worrying about CSV files, and, though there are frustrations and annoyances, I rather like it. It could be much worse even working in this same department of this same organization; the two who work on the public-facing frontend have to look at depressing and horrifying pictures all day.
The differences among us in terms of what we have to look at all day became a topic of discussion today after I showed Ni one of Gretchen's nut loaf recipes as a suggestion for a vegan Thanksgiving main course. I then suggested Ni look at some of Gretchen's poems, perhaps starting with the one about that time she found two dead coyotes arranged as a gruesome "work of art." After Ni responded positively to the poem's anti-reproductive conclusion, I tracked down and posted a picture of the coyote corpses that had been the poem's inspiration. I might not have done that had I not been working at an organization whose message is largely presented by shocking, horrible images.
This evening Gretchen and I went on another of our occasional Shark Tank binges, eventually drinking glasses of port and feeling victorious when the beefcake behind Ice Age Meals didn't get any shark nibbles for his paleo foods business. [REDACTED]
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