See Obstinate Idiocy for some background.
Here are three warning signs I was able to deduce.
To which I can now add two more.
Symptom 4 of Obstinate Idiocy is that all questions are rhetorical and they often come with pre-argued answers …
more ...Apple's freebie tools -- Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Garage Band, etc. -- are wonderful things. I really like Numbers. I'm tolerant of Pages. I've used Pages to write books and publish them to the Apple Bookstore. (Shameless Plug: Pivot to Python.)
These tools have a significant problem. Protobuf.
Once upon a …
See https://slott56.github.io/replacing-a-spreadsheet/. This document is really exciting (to me).
This is still shaky -- I'm still learning -- but it's a very cool combination of Python components sympy and Jupyter Lab. As a bonus, Jupyter{Book} appeals to me as a writer. There's an aspect of literate programing …
more ...Author F. L. Stevens has a hellishly complex (and irregular) spreadsheet with agents, agencies, and query status. (This is how fiction gets marketed: querying agents.) The spreadsheet has become unmanageably complex, with multiple pages. Each page has multiple tables. Buried in this are three "interesting" tables with agent query information …
more ...I can't emphasize this enough.
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think
“I know, I'll use a spreadsheet.” Now they have two problems.
(This was originally about regular expressions. And AWK. See http://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247)
Fiction writer F. L. Stevens got a list of literary agents …
more ...A common way to save persistent, important data is a spreadsheet. It provides a handy, potentially normalized store that's readily accessible with minimal tooling. It has a UI usable by people with a spectrum of skills.
Sadly.
There's a core conflict:
From someone in the process of becoming a data scientist. They had a question on regular expressions, which made almost no sense. It appears that the core concepts of ETL -- Extracting source data, Transforming it into a useful form and the Loading into some persistent storage for long-term analysis -- had …
more ...Once in a great while, you see someone engaging in Obstinate Idiocy.
Here's my recent example.
They're solving some kind of differential equation. Not sure why.
Symptom 1 of Obstinate Idiocy is No Rational Justification. The explanation is often "that's not relevant, what's relevant is this other thing I want …
more ...For years, I've been using Apache POI in Java and XLRD in Python to read spreadsheets. Finally, now that .XLSX and .XLSM files are in more widespread use, we can move away from those packages and their reliance on successful reverse engineering of undocumented features.
Spreadsheets are -- BTW -- the universal …
more ...It's not that spreadsheets are evil incarnate, it's just that there are so many ways to abuse them. Spreadsheets put a veneer of structure over some information. Bad spreadsheet design, worse yet, puts unstructured information into a hard-to-manipulate format.
I've complained about this before. See Great Quotes about the Spreadsheet …
more ...