Word, templates, rage

This is with Word 2019 for Mac. Why am I using Word, anyway? - because LibreOffice has stopped working with our membership database in SQLite, and wasn’t working at all well with a CSV export. Oh, and Word doesn’t work with SQLite either.

I managed to create a Word template by careful editing of the LibreOffice version; painful to have to work with CSVs, but better than filling in 100 membership letters by hand (most of our members have email, so a Python script using email.mime, smtplib, sqlite3 etc worked for them, leaving the diehards ...)

OK, the organisation has a new chair, time to update the template.

Where is it? Turns out, ~/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/User Content/Templates. Well done, Microsoft.

And then, the challenge is to find a way of editing the template. Whatever I try, whatever tips I follow on the net, all I can do is edit a document based on the template, which is not what I need to happen!

I would look into PDFs via fpdf2, but I should only have another year in this post and the next person might have an issue with that. (The same applies to using SQLite, of course. Hmm.)

So I guess it’s back to LibreOffice.

(Not) building GTK on Big Sur

People are having much trouble with GtkAda on Big Sur, so I thought "why not try building Gtk?" - as here.

Unfortunately, it's just too complicated & runs into so many problems that I give up.

Preparing for a Github PR

This is a note about preparing a pull request (PR) for a Github repository. As much as anything, it’s to stop me having to page back through my lab notebook to find out how I did it last time …

Developing for Cortex MCUs on a Raspberry Pi

Recently, on the Gitter Ada Programming Language lobby, there have been discussions on cross-compiling for Cortex M micro-controllers, specifically the BBC micro:bit, using the Raspberry Pi.

TL;DR: it's not going to be easy, unfortunately. Maybe later (or earlier?) Raspbian releases will help.

MacOS Software Development Kit changes

This post is based on the README from the corresponding Github repository.

That repository attempts to cope with expected changes in Apple’s approach to software development kits, specifically where to find the system headers (you’d expect /usr/include).

Coding Guidelines

This is a rather self-satisfied document, written in the mid-1990’s, which may still have some relevance.

Coding Guide

Purpose and Scope

While it is hard to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear (to create good code from a bad design), it is all too easy to do the reverse.

The principle that clear, readable, understandable source text eases program evolution, adaptation, and maintenance is not dependent on the programming language in which the text is written. The purpose of this document is to indicate those language-independent techniques which can help you to produce source text with these qualities.

Using GDB with a BBC micro:bit

This note is about using Segger J-Link software to help debug code on a BBC micro:bit.