Waldo Jaquith

Very nice. Thanks!

Future upgrade ideas:

1. Print friendly file

2. Links back to the bills for more information

Posted by Cory Capron on 19 July 2007 @ 9am

There’s no such thing as a print-friendly CSV file, nor is there such a thing as links within a CSV file. CSV (comma-separated values) is just a list of data, like such:

HB616,”Sentencing proceeding; victim impact testimony is to be admitted during jury hearing.”,Y,pass,”",2006-01-27

It’s not possible to embed a link, and there’s no printer formatting — it’s just straight up data.

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 19 July 2007 @ 9am

Thank you for your service Waldo! I now know that not only did delegate Chris Saxman support these infamous “abuser fees”, but that he never met an abuser fee he couldn’t vote in support of. Waterboy to Grover Norquist!

Posted by Bubby on 19 July 2007 @ 11am

Hmm. For some odd reason, I can’t view those CSV files with CSView or MS Excel Viewer. Any other suggestions?

Posted by finnegan on 19 July 2007 @ 12pm

Richmond Sunlight just got a nice plug on the Kojo Nnamdi show (WAMU), in response to a question from a listener on how she could find out who voted in favor of the abuser fees . . .

Posted by MB on 19 July 2007 @ 1pm

Waldo and Sunlight in Brick:

http://www.brickweekly.com/index.php/slapdash/article/let_there_be_light/

Posted by Jason on 19 July 2007 @ 1pm

Hmm. For some odd reason, I can’t view those CSV files with CSView or MS Excel Viewer. Any other suggestions?

That is strange — thanks for mentioning it. The data is fine, but Windows can be enormously finicky about file types. Windows may not be smart enough to see a filename that ends in “.csv” and figure out hey, this data is probably comma separated values (CSV). I’ll fire up Windows XP in Parallels and see if I can figure out what’s wrong, and then see what I can change about how the file is transfered that might give some stronger hints to Windows that .csv really, truly does mean CSV.

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 19 July 2007 @ 6pm

FWIW, my XP machine with Office 2003 installed recognized and opened it without issue.

Posted by MB on 19 July 2007 @ 7pm

Richmond Sunlight just got a nice plug on the Kojo Nnamdi show (WAMU), in response to a question from a listener on how she could find out who voted in favor of the abuser fees . . .

Since you mentioned that, I’ve been listening to today’s episode. Sean O’Brien got the plug in for the site there. That’s pretty cool. :)

For some odd reason, I can’t view those CSV files with CSView or MS Excel Viewer. Any other suggestions?

I just fired up a fresh copy of Windows XP and downloaded CSView and MS Excel Viewer. CSView crashes as soon as I run it, so I can’t say what’s up with that not working. MS Excel Viewer won’t view CSV files because that program is intended only to view Excel files — that is, files that use Microsoft’s binary data storage format, rather than the simple, plain-text CSV format.

So, in short, I have nothing useful to offer you. :) Here’s hoping that the problem is not more widespread — MB’s comment gives me some hope on that front.

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 19 July 2007 @ 10pm

I haven’t tried it at work (Linux here at home), but might it be a line-ending issue?

My work computer recognized .csv files out of the box.

Posted by Ben C. on 19 July 2007 @ 10pm

Good suggestion, Ben — I’ll check that out.

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 19 July 2007 @ 10pm

Everything that I’ve read indicates that a \n is what should appear at the end of a line in CSV, rather than an \r or a \n\r, which is how this CSV is being exported now. But what I’ve read is really unimpressive and unconvincing. Since I can’t reproduce the problem, I’m not getting real far. :)

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 19 July 2007 @ 10pm

FWIW, the csv file you gave me a while back from a query works fine on WinXP with MS Office 2007.

Posted by Mark Brooks on 20 July 2007 @ 12am

Heh, that sounds like it’s not a line ending issue then. Honestly, line-endings are pretty much always my first guess when a file works on one platform, but not another.

But yeah, I just checked the csv writer that I wrote, and it uses \n. Not having CSView, I can’t say whether or not it would read my files.

Good luck on getting these to cooperate.

Posted by Ben C. on 20 July 2007 @ 9am