Posting Woes
July 29, 2007Well that was an interesting little exercise. The previous post (Traffic Woes) was written by pen on my Dell Pocket PC in its Notes app. Rather than go through several steps to export the note as text I simply dragged a copy of the actual Note which has the extension PWI to the Mac’s desktop.
I dropped it into Tofu and there was all of my text as I had written it, along with some XML-style code. I dropped it into an editor (Scrivener) and removed the spurious code, then tidied it up before posting it to the blog. There it was, pasted into the blog’s online editor. Great. I post and there’s nothing in the entry.
Mmm. Paste as plain text. Still nothing. Go back and save the text as plain text, then re-open it and copy and paste. Still nothing. I guess there was more to that PWI file than simple ASCI. Damn those Microsoft files!
In the end I went back to the Dell and pasted the text into Pocket Word and saved as plain text. That worked.
I know it wasn’t a virus, or even nefarious, but I still feel infected.
Why use the Pocket PC in the first place? Let’s just say that when they were writing the Transcriber handwriting recognition software for this thing: they were using MY handwriting! If you saw my writing you’d say it looked exactly like Marker Felt in iPhone Notes, and Transcriber “transcribes” it flawlessly. Credit where credit’s due.
