English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room - 2019-10-05

« first day (3250 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (1672 days later) »

12:29 AM

@Reg: Just discovered this, but don't have time just now. Looks interesting, though.

The Secrets Of The Violin - Documentary (Stradivarius, Guarneri del Gesù)

About the good old Strads and Guarneris.

1:15 AM

This isn't really an appropriate question for English Language & Usage. We here are not the arbiters of gender trends, etiquette, or what to do in embarrassing situations, nor should we be relied on to speculatively parse all present and future uses of pronouns in all situations. — Robusto 19 secs ago

@Cerberus: I appreciate why you answered that question, but I am getting really tired of people who pigeonhole us as clairvoyants and expect us to say how this or that person in this or that state of androgyny should be addressed.

@Robusto Well, when we are told to say "she" and this person is not being facetious, we don't need to be clairvoyant?

Well, we would have to be clairvoyant to determine all of these cases. Really, that is not a question about English. They should ask Ann Landers or Dear Abby.

It's not about English, even though it uses English words. Hell, tarot readings use English words, too. Are they about English?

Why should we be the arbiters of transgender pronouns?

I'll admit it's not directly about English. But I wanted to convey a little lesson about language in general.

I will understand if someone should close the question.

And if we do set ourselves up for that, we are opening a giant can of worms. If you thought the SWR questions were bad, wait till we have more like this: "My husband is transitioning, but I don't want him to. He insists on being called she. What should I do?"

@Cerberus "Language in general" is also not narrow enough for this site.

@Cerberus you don't need to admit it. You said as much in the very first sentence of your answer.

Case closed.

Question, too.

@Robusto the thumbnail looks familiar. I may have seen that one already. The thumbnail, that is. Can't say about the video.

1:25 AM

@RegDwigнt It won't be until the question is closed.

I am typing shit up in the close reason box.

And of course, it won't be. This is the kind of shit people love to speculate on.

You're only delaying the process.

Oh, now it's my fault. I see how it works.

Good. You're very clarvoyant today.

1:26 AM

@Robusto Haha. Migrate to the advice-column site.

@Robusto I know, I know.

Well it is a question for Ms Manners.

@RegDwigнt OK OK.

We're not Ms Manners.

We're not even Ms. We're "they".

I think that's racist though I'm still trying to think of how.

Anyway. I must be off again.

1:30 AM

Laterz.

For some stupid reason I got retarded and decided to transcribe my favorite Bach's motet in MuseScore.

You deus ex machina, you.

That's a whole week's worth of work. Maybe longer.

Thanks for stopping by.

I always answer the call. Especially if it's a call for watching more YouTube.

Nighty-night.

1:31 AM

cya

Sleep well.

I'm trying to debug an old Autohotkey script of mine.

I wrote it when I knew even less about programming than I do now.

zomg

But it's such a nice programme I want to keep using it every day.

Except for this one bug.

How does it manifest?

@RegDwigнt See, that's your mistake right there. You can point to it.

@Robusto When I press a hotkey or do a mouse gesture, selected text is copied, and a window pops up allowing, me to edit the selected text and search for it using various search engines or programmes on my computer. What happens is that using the programme to do two searches in a row through the same engine/programme fails (nothing happens). Otherwise everything works well.

I think it must have something to do with not restoring the button for an engine properly.

The easiest way to fix it would be to simply reload the programme every time after doing a search.

The ugliest work-around ever.

1:52 AM

@Cerberus Yeah, you are not returning the program to its initial state. That shouldn't be too hard, if you can just figure out what is getting in the way of that.

Too bad you don't have a step-through debugger, or that would be fairly easy.

@Robusto Yeah, fixed it!

Turned out the programme was waiting indefinitely for the right Firefox window to be active, but Firefox apparently changed the title of new tabs.

@Robusto I have made the beginning of a step-by-step debugger based on someone else's script.

It can go through the lines of a script step by step.

And it sees certain errors and automatically marks them in the code in Sublime Text.

But I haven't gotten round to letting it display the contents of all variables.

There is another script that does that, so I was planning to integrate that into my debugger.

There are also two editors for Autohotkey that have built-in debuggers, which work reasonably well.

2 hours later…

3:54 AM

@Cerberus Good job.

@Cerberus In a perfect world you should be able to assign the window itself to a variable. Then the name doesn't matter.

10 hours later…

1:38 PM

@Robusto What it does is open a new tab in an existing window in Firefox, then wait for that tab to exist (just to be sure). I don't think there is a way to identify that other than watching for the name of the window to change?

It is an ugly work-around, of course, but it's the only way I found in which I could use a search engine in Firefox using a keyword rather than the full URL. In addition, I do it this way because using the URL directly is much slower (like "run firefox.exe google.com"). I don't know what it is so much slower.

1 hour later…

2:59 PM

@Cerberus In JavaScript you assign the result of a window opening to a variable. If you have access to the window.open method you might give it a try.

developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/open

Surely AHK has some kind of access to window methods.

@Robusto But it is a tab, not a window?

Autohotkey can't see much inside Firefox (as can't other programmes, I believe).

A tab is a window.

Not with Firefox...

More specifically, it is a window object and behaves like a window.

@Cerberus Yes, with Firefox. Your problem with Firefox is probably due to something else.

Well, it doesn't show up like a normal window.

Nor are the control visible to Autohotkey.

3:11 PM

The link I gave you is Mozilla Developer Netework, which is associated with Firefox.

var windowObjectReference;
var strWindowFeatures = "menubar=yes,location=yes,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,status=yes";

function openRequestedPopup() {
  windowObjectReference = window.open("http://www.cnn.com/", "CNN_WindowName", strWindowFeatures);
}

But the link is about seeing things from inside Firefox.

That works in FF.

Autohotkey cannot see inside Firefox at all.

Does it have access to the window.open method?

No.

Does any external programme?

Perhaps a work-around exists somewhere around the Internet for Autohotkey.

3:13 PM

I don't know. But I do know that you can use JavaScript to do easily what you are sweating mightly to accomplish in AHK.

I know there are or were complicated ways to get the titles of existing tabs, but I don't think those are reliable over several years.

Titles are properties of windows, not windows themselves. Which is why I mentioned getting a reference to the window itself.

@Robusto Yes. But, if I were to run Javascript in some external programme (like which?), could it see inside Firefox and act on the window object inside Firefox?

I am acting on windows using the Windows API stuff (I think).

I don't know what it's called.

There are extensions for running JS in any browser. I can't recall their names off the top of my head, since I never used them, but I know they exist.

I cannot run Javascript inside Firefox for what I'm doing.

Yes, I use Greasemonkey.

But the programme I have written works outside of Firefox. It is not and must not be dependent on Firefox.

It merely uses Firefox for certain things it does.

The programme works anywhere in Windows.

If I am in a command-line Interface, I can search for a term from the command line in Google, for example. Or in a Latin dictionary, if it so pleased me.

3:17 PM

Sounds like AHK needs a better API.

I believe Firefox does not provide an easy way for external programmes to access its own internals, or does it?

@Cerberus I doubt that. Don't confuse browser windows with the Windows API, which is something else.

It's probably the wrong name. But it is a Windows thing, not a Firefox thing.

@Cerberus Browser windows are not "internals" in the sense you mean.

No doubt.

3:18 PM

@Cerberus If it is that, then you're doing it wrong.

Then how should I do it?

(By the way, the programme works perfectly fine with the work-around.)

I just told you.

@Cerberus Then problem solved. Move on.

How do I access the window object inside Firefox from an external programme? For starters, which external programme should I use to do that?

I'm just trying to show you a simpler way to do this.

I would be interested in doing so.

I know how to access the window object in Firefox using Javascript in a userscript.

3:20 PM

Wait, are you actually trying to access other programs' windows, or just web browser windows (including tabs)?

I have written a programme, whose file is called ResearchText.ahk or ResearchText.exe (when compiled). The programme copies selected text, wherever you are in Windows, and allows you to search for the copied text in many places. Some of these places are websites; for those, I have the programme open a new tab in Firefox and paste text into the address bar.

The programme itself has nothing to do with Firefox.

OK.

How do you get a reference to the address field?

I mean, you must have some kind of reference to be able to do that.

3:53 PM

@Robusto tell me about it. It's been a day and I'm only on page 2.

And there's like 100 pages in total.

Well, maybe not 100. But definitely more than 2.

1 hour later…

5:17 PM

@RegDwigнt More than two is "many" ...

2 hours later…

7:05 PM

> “Trou da hairst dat wanjoy Secretary o’ wirs – Tamson – speered me gin I wadna gae a paper I’ wir ain dialec. I telt’im at aince ‘at I hed been sae lang awa fae hame ‘at feinty bit o’ me minded on ony o’d, an’ even gin I deud I hed tent da way o’ makin’ a dacent discourse. Da common galloos wadna leed tae me, bit jeust pat me doon for id.

Tae mak a lang story short, he sent a lang screed back tae me sayin ‘I high English “Thu’re a leer.” Noo, bairns, I pit id tae yersels, waas dat right? I wad hae taen da laa api’ ‘im for takin’ awa me guid name ‘I dat wey gin gin id warna ‘at ‘a bod…

scotslanguage.com/articles/node/id/71

3 hours later…

10:16 PM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Blacklisted username, offensive answer detected, potentially bad keyword in answer, potentially bad keyword in username, toxic answer detected (251): What does it mean to suck chode? by Fuck You on english.SE

10:29 PM

@Cerberus Can you imagine some sort of ancient, etymologically based sense of arrogant that could possibly meant to freely dispense one's possessions to others? I can't get there, even if we grant arrogate a meaning of to assume. This may be as far back as Latin.

Maybe expropriate, but yeesh.

I can't even find a sense in Latin that deviates from the normal uses.

Much.

10:46 PM

@tchrist I can't.

Asking goes in the other direction.

Why?

@Cerberus Because of the footnote for its use in this user profile.

@tchrist Is that Catalan?

No, it's Asturian.

Or Astur-Leonés, if you prefer.

He said he always tried to be "arrogant"[1] with his time, the footnoted it as you see there.

Ah, I was thinking about mentioning Galiciand and Asturian.

Galician is more reminiscent of Portuguese, Asturian of Castilian. But notice the verb for speaking is falar not hablar.

Only Gascon and Castilian have the f- > h- bit.

10:52 PM

I once used the Galician version of Telegram on my phone.

Because it had better privacy.

You can figure it all out, or at least I could and did, but I couldn't figure out where he's getting his footnote's sense from.

OFFS

I'm so silly.

Now I understand something else.

Cultural thing, not translation.

Camelia is the mascot of the perl6 project.

A Camelia caiparinha, though, is a drink with passionfruit juice and lime and cachaça licor.

He's referring to the perl6 bit.

Not getting drunk in Rio.

kicks self

I must admit I only glanced at it.

Some of the short words are too hard to guess for me, not knowing Spanish nor Portuguese.

Oh.

> I won't come back here until the SE people offer an apology, and admit the
evil/badness/wrong they did. But I don't expect(?) they'll do that. I always
tried to be arrogant¹ with my time, anyway I'm going to invest time in
other places on the net/web. Recommendation to all(fem.) and all(masc.) is
to think through whether it's worth the bother to contribute with the
event[s], assuredly there are other venues where to learn Castilian for
those who are interested. If you(sing.) want to talk to me, look (sing.)

It's because of this ugly business. I think he's making too much of it, but not mine to say.

Odd. Perhaps it's some regional thing?

Possibly. Asturian/Astur-Leonés/Bable has always been pluricentric without a formal standard, more spoken than written. There were at least four centers when I looked at it more deeply. Somewhere I have a book on it, but much as been done in the past three decades.

11:07 PM

Or just an Asturian thing?

Or even something in colloquial Spanish?

And I feel like I've gotten caiparina wrong by assuming it means the caiparinha drink now that I see that he's alluding to the perl6 mascot.

Colloquial Spanish? I doubt it, but I'm not going to promise. It's curious he felt the need to footnote it.

But he also deliberately has "code" in there to throw people off, or to allow only a few to understand. After all, you can't feed that to Google Translate, a very deliberate choice of language for his statement. But curious.

@tchrist Quite.

But he mixed a tu imperative at the start of a sentence (busca) with a vos imperative later on (buscái), which I can't help but think is an accident. (Both mean "look for".)

Perhaps it was written quickly. He had a typo in his last es.se (meta) posting, too.

11:34 PM

@tchrist That would seem likely.

By the way, there is an open letter waiting in the mod room for all moderators to sign.

Don't feel obligated.

ok

« first day (3250 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (1672 days later) »

Transcript for

Oct '195

English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…

Not for the faint of heart or those easily triggered by Englis...

phrase-requests pronunciation single-word-requests synonyms

join this room
about this room

00:00

06:00

12:00

18:00

all times are UTC

site design / logo © 2024 Stack Exchange Inc; legal

mobile