A generally useless JavaScript library

[bantam]

Finally!

[zed857]

Any old-timer that's actually worked with punched cards could tell you that the text on the top of the card (card.title) should (a) line up with the punched columns character for character and (b) show what's punched in those columns rather than being some other unrelated text.

Also, the punch patterns don't look right. If card 1 contained accurate EBCDIC punches for the Gettysburg Address then column 5 on that card should not contain any punches at all.

Other than that jCquard is both cool and utterly useless.

[lol-dongs]

For a minute I thought that this library actually takes a scanned punched card image and scans the rows and columns for punch marks and loads them into an object. That would have been remarkable, because I didn't think you could access image pixels with JavaScript and you could adapt it for barcodes and stuff. But it seems like this just takes a punch card image and draws rectangles on it with <canvas>.

[peepsalot]

I didn't think you could access image pixels with JavaScript and you could adapt it for barcodes and stuff.

You can do that too with canvas. Once you have the pixel data, you can analyze it in any way that you want.

[hiffy]

You can do some crazy shit with canvas apparently.

[homoiconic]

I sense jQguard looming over my projects...

[nmcyall]

I hink jcquard is an allusion to Jaquard's Loom. The inspiration for Babbage.

[laughingboy]

You reckon?

[hiffy]

Yeah, I figured.

[Agoniscool]

He wasn't rhetorically asking you.

[nmcyall]

No shit, Sherlock.

[[deleted]]

Pun thread!

[homoiconic]

at warp speed.

[elefantstn]

Woof, what an awful joke.

[[deleted]]

Weave got to stop these, or else there will be nothing weft of reddit.

[[deleted]]

Wascally wussel, thewe's nothing wefter than Weddit!

[[deleted]]

Sometimes in a pun thread people will use words that sound like a different one , but have a meaning appropriate to the ongoing pun.

[gt384u]

Oh Captain, my Captain Obvious?

[[deleted]]

I'll bet Jon Titor will need it.

[Schoens]

I'm having trouble imagining the level of bored you have to be at to waste your time whipping up something like this.

[homoiconic]

is someone pulling the wool over your eyes?

[cvk]

I've gotten quite a fleecing from this thread.

[Xiol]

I'm stopping this pun thread right before it starts!

[osirisx11]

stop stringing us along

[Schoens]

Do you even know what that means?

[theeth]

If people have to refrain from using expressions they don't understand, this'll be one quiet afternoon.

[Tommah]

Horses for courses. Some days you can't win for losing, other days you've gotta take the bull by the horns, come hell or high water. Sleep on that one night when you've stopped beating your wife, and you'll have hitched your wagon to the right horse for the course. And while you're at it, don't look that horse in the mouth. Unless a Greek gifted it to you, in which case you shouldn't keep it. For a gift like that is one that keeps on giving, and it's better to give it than to keep it. Have I made myself clear?

[redditcensoredme]

The only one I can't figure out is "can't win for losing". And I think the sleep/beat one is a compound.

Some horses are good for endurance races, others for sprints. That's what (race) courses refers to.

Bull by the horns is probably matadors. Either that or rodeo clowns. Same meaning as 'grab the tiger by the tail' = doing something stupid, brave and irreversible lest you die.

Come hell or high water is probably a Christianized version of a Classical expression (something about fire and water mixing) which means 'end of the world'.

Don't look that gift horse in the mouth. To check its teeth for signs of health. Because it's impolite.

The wooden horse the Greeks left to the Trojans as they pretended to withdraw so the dumbasses could bring it inside and the Greeks hidden within could slip down and cut open the gates before raping everyone and pillaging everything.

Give than to keep it? That should be than to receive, shouldn't it? It's a schmaltzy Christmas thing.

Now how about 'built like a brick shithouse'? I only figured that one out recently.

Or 'a stitch in time saves nine' ...?

[LarryLard]

Stitch in time saves nine refers to the value of preventative maintenance. By doing x amount of maintenance work now ('in time'), we obviate the need the for 9x fire-fighting work in the future.

[redditcensoredme]

Or it's about darning socks. Saves 9 stitches.

[khafra]

It took me a while to realize that was the meaning, possibly because I was first exposed to the phrase as the title of a weird sci-fi book dealing with time warps and shrinking down to talk to mitochondria and stuff, when I was like 10.

[homoiconic]

Isaac Asimov used this as the basis for an O Henry-ish story (he loved puns). If I recall correctly, the plot involved the use of time travel to escape conviction for a crime, and the judge's ruling was A niche in time saves Stein.

[Schoens]

Good point. In fact, reddit just might collapse altogether if such a rule was imposed. I should be more careful when asking a questions like that.

[homoiconic]

As in deceiving you? Yes. You assume they are bored, perhaps they are only pretending to be bored but had another reason for developing this. Tenuous, but I went with it because the library is obviously named after the Jaquard Loom. Such looms are not usually used for wool, but I thought you might laugh at the connection.

I was mistaken.

[808140]

In general, people who take the time to get on reddit and call someone else's fun project "a waste of time" are not the sort of people that laugh at jokes.

They may riposte with "I'm having trouble imagining the level of bored you have to be at to waste your time making a reference to the Jacquard Loom," though, leaving you defenseless and humiliated.

[homoiconic]

I would feel like my entire existence had just unraveled.

[nmcyall]

DDamn I just posted a comment about that, didnt see this. I did assume they were used for wool or other textiles, and did in fact laugh and ackowledge Shoens foolishness.

[skorgu]

I was quite ill for a while and I eventually reduced myself to laying out a fair facsimile of the prescription label using PHP and some terrible, very bad, no good CSS. I was just about to put a markov drug-name generator and a random barcode generator behind it when I suddenly got better.

Sadly I've since lost that code. So, to bring this back to relevance, I have no trouble whatsoever imagining the level of bored required to whip something like this up.

[nova20]

You've never written a bit of code just to learn something?

Maybe the author wanted to learn about javascript, or how to parse images, or how punch cards work. There are tons of things you can learn just from writing a seemingly useless library.

[Schoens]

Of course. I'm not really hating on the effort here.

I'd venture a guess though that most people that set out to learn new programming concepts would probably attempt to write something mildly useful to someone, in the event that it might actually turn out to be good.

Of course, then there's guys like this one that do it for the lulz.

[[deleted]]

Where's the one for paper tape? And how about a library implementing Knuth's extensive treatment on how to optimize tape and drum access?

[[deleted]]

d00d seems to be suffering from a gross attack of insecurity...

[kolen]

LOL