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n-dash my ass
Thursday, February 3 2022
Today as I continued my ascent up the unexpectedly steep learning curve that is Azure DevOps, I ran into an unexpected problems with an example I'd copied from some tutorial. It was throwing errors that made no sense. After much irritation and desire to fucking quit this job and never work with software again, I realized what was going on: in YAML (the data format used to specify pipelines in Azure DevOps), the dash character has significance. But the dashes I'd copied from an example had been transformed by something (I suspect Microsoft Word, which offends this way on the regular) into n-dashes, which are Unicode "\u2013," well outside the universe of simple seven-bit ASCII. Such characters have no meaning in YAML, which requires the dashes to be of the ASCII code 45 (in decimal). So my YAML had been born broken. Fortunately there's a website to help figure out what a given character on a screen's code actually is. (I've had to use a similar site in the past to figure out whether what I was looking at was a lower-case el (the letter after "k" in the alphabet) or an uppercase "i"; the font was sans-serif.)
This evening Gretchen made a chonky "beef" stew using Blackbird (the Philadelphia pizza shop) seitan as the beef. It was great, though Gretchen and Powerful were less enthusiastic about it because the rehydrated mushrooms (that had been bought dehydrated from Costco) were chewier than they would've preferred. But I thought they were great.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?220203 feedback
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