Tuesday, April 29, 2008

To Hyphenate or No

I am helping a friend who wanted lessons in English grammar. i find the going rather tough (having slept through grammar classes in school).

Anyways, today, I wanted to send across an exercise in hyphenation and, not wanting to go back to real-life technical documents, I came up with the following:

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It was the twenty fifth of December, in the seventy third year of the reign of Kind Edgar, that the saviour was born. On that star studded night when the gentle shepherds were tending their sheep and when the blue jays had gone to sleep, a child was born to white faced Maria. While the sandal shod husband stood and looked, the hay filled manger lit up with the smile of the child. The smile went a skipping, broke into a thousand pieces and ascended the night sky to burn a golden coloured star. The wise men in the east, who had grown old, bearded and heavy hearted awaiting the birth of the saviour, saw the star and exclaimed, "Here comes the world saviour and the sin redeemer." And they ran towards the west. Little did they know that King Edgar had started a faith based census where every evil doer would be asked the following two questions: Is it self evident that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is the birth right of all human beings? Is it that all passwords to Hell should be case sensitive? All such evil doers who could not submit their responses in the government issued template were to be thrice whipped and twice drowned before being hanged on the cross till death.
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Am waiting to see what happens. I am not too sure about hyphens either....

 

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Of dots and curls - Part 2

Colon, meanwhile, was unhappy. He liked introducing people to other people. So, he liked throwing parties. But, his last party had been a disaster. His cousins Period, Semicolon and Comma had absolutely refused to sit next to each other; Space had scandalised everyone by insisting on sitting next to EnDash; and the Uppercases had been a pain since they brought their lowercase legions with them and expected Colon to feed everyone. Now, Colon made all his money from introducing people to other people, and couldn't really afford to feed the two, or three, or more lowercase legions that Uppercases always turned up with. And, he couldn't stop the Uppercases from bringing in their legions because the senate had enacted the Drop Cap policy.

"I know what", though Colon as a sudden idea dawned on him. "I'll turn the legions against one another. They would keep banging against each other since I wouldn't invite Period, and since I would definitely not invite Bullet."

....

So it happened at Colon's next party. And the Uppercases stood gazing upon the carnage, sighing, and thinking, "Oh, what a tangled web we weave".

 

Sunday, April 6, 2008

Documenting Mjrz.net

Sometimes, I wander around at sourceforge.net just to see what's happening in my areas of interest (finance, languages, ...). On one such trip, I chanced upon a "Help wanted" for documenting a financial software. Right up my sleeve, I thought, and wrote to the developer.

That was about a month and a half ago.

Today, the documentation is up and running at the software website: Mjrz.net Personal Finance Manager*. Despite some teeny-weeny bugs in the doc, I am going around with a huge grin on my face - it gave me a thrill to see my name in the credits :)

* The project has since ceased to exist. The link will no longer work.