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Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL

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Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL

#181

This reminds me of the time I used Python to fill out my Wife's 4th grade report cards. She kept all the records in google sheets, so when it came time to do report cars, she already knew what all the grades should be. But the school only provided a terrible app where you literally had to make three clicks with a mouse to enter each grade. Each kid had about 20 grades to enter, and there were 30 kids. That was a lot…

My clinical training log (requirement for specalist board registration) is similarly frustrating, so I wrote some JavaScript hooks and then used Keyboard Maestro to mostly automate data entry. 9 clicks became Ctrl-9, for example.

Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL

#182
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm waiting for Emacs to run natively on ChromeOS (or Android) so I can get a Chromebook. (I'm not willing to install Cruton or any of the native Linux hacks on a chromebook).

For Android, Emacs 26.1 is available in Termux. I can confirm it works on my phone. No rooting required.

Thanks for this. Trying now. I always assumed this was some form of SSH/Mosh client.

Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL

#183
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on what you're doing, a webapp is a great way to deal with the portability issue

yeah, I hear that, and I also know in my heart that it's right, but I have no business running access control/distributing my code/or hosting it for public consumption. Mostly a "hey, look at this data analysis" or "this is a good way to do this process" kind of things. emailing someone a file was a pretty good workflow for the low-volume script problem. I wish I could just get a python sandbox for GitHub and have th…

Jupyter notebooks could be a way to do what you want: https://jupyter.org/try

Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL

#184
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really should learn that. I often find myself maniupulating text data in emacs, turning it into CSV or something that I can then copy/paste into a spreadsheet for calculations.

You should. It's surprisingly good. You won't get pivot tables (at least until someone codes them up, which isn't out of the question in Emacs community), but for regular calculations it's awesome. Here's a short intro: https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-spreadsheet-intro... . Here's some documentation: https://orgmode.org/manual/The-Spreadsheet.html And if you feel that TBLFMs are getting unwieldy, here's a…

I didn't know about calculation marks, thanks for sharing! I use org spreadsheets to keep track of my D&D party's character sheets, so this should definitely come in handy :)

Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL

#185
post #139
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe you'd be a top notch electrician. Some people enjoy their craft (or don't want to sit at a desk all day), in the past few decades programming became really hyped but it's not some kind of goal everyone should try to attain. At some point we'll have to stop with that "technology can and will solve everything" mentality.

I was just trying to say that there's a lot of general skill set overlap between being a programmer and something like a plumber or electrician. It's mostly breaking down problems, having a general curiosity on how things work and being able to read documentation. The only real difference between an electrician and a programmer is the context of how they apply those skills.

But doesn't that apply to basically anything in life ?

Everything is about will + tools + problem solving skills. From building a house to fixing a bicycle, building a shelf, fixing an old SLR, &c. I'd even argue that building/fixing material things is more rewarding than programming in general.

The only difference is that current society chose to reward average developers much more than average workers in other industries (good pay, flexible working hours, free snack, job security, &c.). But to me the average developer is not more important than the average trashman or electrician, quite the opposite.

A lot of tech workers are not much more than assembly line workers from back in days, spitting out barely maintainable code found on stack overflow, using tools they understand only on a superficial level (framework, DBs, &c.).

Again, familiarity is not knowledge. We have to stop romanticising our profession as if it was some kind of holy grail, for most people it's just a (good) way to bring money home. Most developers are not revolutionising anything, most are not working on anything meaningful, most are easily replaceable, most don't care that much about what they do, just like everywhere else.

Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL

#186

This reminds me of the time I used Python to fill out my Wife's 4th grade report cards. She kept all the records in google sheets, so when it came time to do report cars, she already knew what all the grades should be. But the school only provided a terrible app where you literally had to make three clicks with a mouse to enter each grade. Each kid had about 20 grades to enter, and there were 30 kids. That was a lot…

Rewrite the output logic with PyAutoGUI doing the keyboard shortcuts and grade typing? https://pyautogui.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

I've done exactly that for my monthly time reports at work.

The company's official ERP in which we report our monthly activities is a horrendously slow and error-prone old-school GUI, where you basically punch a lot of numeric codes that represent customers and activities, and that can be pretty hard to get right. It looks like a spreadsheet with delays of several seconds after each cell is filled-in, because the apps commits everything over the network each time. I would waste several hours of life every month, typing one piece of rubbish at a time into that sad thing. It's a lot of pain and a colleague had written an automation tool based on the ERP's binary formats. However, his tool needed the code to be adjusted to each user, then compiling his thing was no easy task, then you needed to ask for special permissions to be able to feed the ERP with the binaries, and at last you realized that the binary output was a fragile thing, and so nobody used the tool.

So I wrote an automation script in Python with pluggable input sources which can be combined (text files that are easy to read and write, http connection to Redmine activities... later on a colleague took the tool and added a GrindStone source, and another guy plugged it into his Outlook calendar). The output stage to the ERP is built upon PyWinAuto, and it just simulates key-strokes on the proper window. It is not smart. It remains constrained by the ERP's slowness. But IT IS A HELL OF A FUN TO WATCH your monthly torture getting done all by itself, and enjoying a walk with a coffee in hand for that time, coming back from time to time to see your screen doing stuff.

All in all it took me about a whole day to write the script. It has been running for four years now. One ERP update broke the output stage. Fixing it was a matter of minutes : just write down the new keystrokes.

Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL

#187

This reminds me of the time I used Python to fill out my Wife's 4th grade report cards. She kept all the records in google sheets, so when it came time to do report cars, she already knew what all the grades should be. But the school only provided a terrible app where you literally had to make three clicks with a mouse to enter each grade. Each kid had about 20 grades to enter, and there were 30 kids. That was a lot…

Rewrite the output logic with PyAutoGUI doing the keyboard shortcuts and grade typing? https://pyautogui.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Is this analogous to AutoHotkey on windows? I've been looking for something like this that works on Linux for a while, thanks!

Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL

#188
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cryptic, yes, but discoverable! Recently I was trying to help someone fix their bizarrely broken Word document, and I would have given my right arm for "F5 Reveal Codes."

It's right there in the toolbar, the "P"-ish looking icon.

You mean the paragraph mark, "¶"? The Show All feature in Word will highlight whitespace, tabs, newlines, which is helpful. But in WordPerfect, Reveal Codes would show much more than that: style changes, image and table introductions, etc. It was much more like looking at the HTML source of a Web page in a Web Developer tool -- not only could you see the tags, but you could modify and remove them easily and precisely.

Re: Running a Bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL

#190
If anybody is looking for an industry to disrupt: manufacturing, inventory, and logistics software is a complete disaster right now.

I pay $X,XXX a year for manufacturing software, and I just had to write software like OP for my own company.

The software I buy can turn product demand into ingredients and orders. But it can’t do it into the future. So I had to write custom software to take a sales forecast, turn it into a production forecast, and then turn this into a purchasing forecast. Seems like something that should be a solved problem, but not really.

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