Narrator now supports PDF, Word, RTF, Text, and HTML...

Okay, this isn't a release announcement. But last night, much to my pleasant surprise, I got Narrator's intake engine to accept Word, RTF, PDF, Text, and HTML documents, convert them to a whitelisted variety of HTML, and put them up in TinyMCE for the author to review before posting it to his series of choice.

It only took two hours, and now that it's done it's done. It's horribly primitive, and it's slow (Okay, it was very slow processing Sterlings: Breaking the PDF into text, doing metrics to figure out the paragraph breaks, running the text throught Textile and then again through Tidy to make sure everything's balanced. I think I'll rip Tidy out, though, and replace it with Feedparser.htmlSanitize, which is even more sane.

I'm doing a lot of processing at the intake, but I've learned an important lesson from programming for the Palm platform: it's an output device; the more you optimize for speedy output, the happier your users will be. Input can be tedious, but after you've gotten commitment from the users a tedious input of a single story is acceptable, especially if what you get back is washed and ready-to-wear.

Omaha claims I'm not observant, but even I noticed this.

One of these things...

This evening my daughter's school had its annual fundraising auction, and while I was there I stood in the hallway with a couple of other couples waiting for the drunken revelry and insane spending of money would begin.

The event was held at the local community college's main dining room. South Seattle Community College, a school at which I used to teach. SSCC is primarily vocational, and two of their biggest specialties are tractor-trailer driving (including engine maintenance, both for trucks and aircraft-- Boeing is a big draw here), and food preparation (including a cooking school, restaurant management, service, and all the rest). The cooking school is quite good, and when Omaha and I lived right down the street from them we enjoyed it when the pastry chefs had their annual open-to-the-public cook-offs. Minor vocations include floral and beauty school. It's in South Seattle, which it Boeing territory-- industrial and vocational attitudes reign.

As I was standing there in the hallway at SSCC, I noticed something about the notices on the wall. You can see the part of the wall that stood out in the photograph. I asked the other parents: "Do you see anything odd about this hallway? Anything particularly sad?"

None of them did. There were thirteen bulletin boards along the walls of the corridor, which not only led into the dining area but also back toward the student union and the bookstore-- a fairly well-traveled part of the school, where lots of students would wander.

Only one bulletin board is protected behind plastic sheeting, closed off with lock and key. This one. All the other ones are out in the open: Mexican American Student Association, Christian Student Association, Student Diesel Drivers Association, Muslim Student Association, Student Culinary Council, Vietnamese Student Association, Khmer Student Association, Chinese Student Association. All publicly displayed without the need for protection.

Only the bulletin board for gay and lesbians students is locked down. I would hazard a guess and say that it's probably the only one that routinely suffered vandalism, and the only one that needed this degree of protection.