Worus

I just realized that a feauture that I had to implement for a system this week was already implemented, just not exposed, by myself last November. That makes life pretty happy. I knew that I had started work on it, but I didn’t think that it was completely done. Apparently, I implemented the feature in its entirity in November and did not expose it for fear it would confuse users during other related tasks.

I hate the comma separated values format with a passion today. Actually, I hate Cold Fusion’s Replace function. The function requires you to pass a scope if you want to replace all occurences of something in a string. I always forget to do this and then wonder why my string replacements don’t work. I was trying to escape quotation marks in my file output and it did it for the first one but not the rest. Since quotation marks are relatively important in comma separated values, it jacked the whole file up. I passed in “all” as the scope parameter, and all of my woes were gone.

The already implemented feature is a good thing, because of the three things that I have to do for this project, I don’t have the last one started at all. Apparently, the first two are done, though!

So I was reading some lamenting on a forum that I’ve been going to about how they’d like to have random images at the top for the logo. Someone said that it would be trivial to write a smalls script to do this. Since it would have been, in fact, trivial, I decided to just write it and post the results.

Someone then told me that it was overkill to do it the way that I did and that it should really just generate the HTML to point to the image. Of course, then the script has to run inside of the bulletin board’s template file, which my research showed would require a hack. Furthermore, my “overkill” script was four lines longer than the suggested change; “overkill” might be an exaggeration.

The next person says that they’d rather use an official modification to the bulletin board. Okay, if you want to install extra scripts into the software that’s cool. Official modifications are at least official, and she did get burned changing an image path the evening before (how one gets that burned on such a simple change is beyond me). Apparently, she thinks that this forces another path into some part of the code. This script just echoes back an image. It is the path.

She then says that it would need to work on all of the different templates (there are three) for the board. Okay, that change is trivial (way trivial, in fact). Copy the script for each template is the easiest way, or just pass it the template name (a little uglier).

Finally, she says that the images are all different sizes, as if that’s a problem. The logo image does not specify a height or width property in the HTML, so no one is paying attention to the image sizes to start with.

The frustrating part is that no one really seems to understand what the script does. Apparently, I didn’t explain it well. I’m not going to force explain it at this point. I’m really not trying to be an ass about it, because the script seriously took fifteen minutes of my time. If no one’s asking to know, I won’t bother correcting them and looking like a jerk.

So what am I going to do with it? I’m going to use it for random avatars. I’ll be accused of heresy!