NaNoWriMo :: NaNoWriMo Blog

Recently, I discovered from professors that this computer's way of publishing does not translate well into what REAL people use on updated equipment. I have adapted...somewhat. I now have a way to save it as doc. Is this acceptable BEFORE scrambling? Trust me. If I use wps, scrambling will not be necessary, but the manuscript will not be readable either. :-@

I have a FS7555 COMPAC labeled degauss. I have no idea what that means except I think it's the monitor. The standing thingy is 330-296 something or other. I'm tired of standing on my head for that one. I'll try to get back to you later for it.

So, basically, my question is....Does my ancient equipment eliminate me? I could always use a pen or snail mail it I suppose.... If the printer held out.... Or I paid a fortune to the library....

I'm really excited about November. I really hope I can do this. I hope to put the thing on care2.com and challenge the people there to contribute here. Never know when a few pennies could help. --Mama Q

Peter,

I tried your global replace and it worked perfectly. Is a scheme such as that acceptable to the NaNo word counter?

George

I don't know, guys. If people aren't going to believe you when they say you don't read their novels or keep a copy, then why should they believe you when you provide a bit of software that you claim makes the file unreadable?

Some people really will only be satisfied with the manual method that they do themselves. Find and replace.

And your script comes out with the same word count, I take it? Will it work for WordPerfect?

Mary,

I think everyone is busy with the site move. I found the links below helpful.

Being A Liason Information - note email at the bottom to send request to be a ML to.
http://www.nanowrimo.org/modules/cjaycontent/index.php?id=16

Flyers - I printed out a few of these and posted them around the library with a note "Watch For More Information - Sign-Up Begins Oct 1st". They seem to be work well at getting people to ask questions, and begin thinking about what they could write about.
http://www.nanowrimo.org/modules/cjaycontent/index.php?id=37

Young Adult Writing Program - This also has a link on one of the pages (Teachers Comments?) of a booklet aimed at High School students.
http://ywp.nanowrimo.org/modules/cjaycontent/index.php?id=34

Hope this helps! I am probably a bit TOO excited about doing this, and I can NOT wait until November.

Diane

I, too, participated last year for the first time and am organizing a group at a public library (I am a patron, friends with staff) and haven't a clue about being a ML. Please let me know if this query gets any results!

Mary

I sent your request for cookies to the main office, and they were receptive to the idea...

I've made a very simple JavaScript, where you can paste the text in a form and hit a button. Link

I am so excited about this year's NANO! I work a day job in a public library and this year we decided to host it for those patrons that are missing out on all the fun. Last year was my first time as a participant, and this will be my first year as a ML. My question is, do you have any suggestions as to where to look etc.. for information to help me be as well prepared as I can possibly can be as a ML between now and Oct 1st?

Diane B

Just remember the most important instruction: Use SAVE AS instead of SAVE after making the search-and-destroy.

I would have to recommend 'before'.

Sure, if you want to credit me, that's fine. I'd rather have a prize, though. Maybe a cookie? It doesn't have to be a big cookie.

Hey, it's you guys that do all the tough work. (I mean, making NaNoWriMo possible. The authors do some tough work too, of course, during November.)

Just remember the most important instruction: Use SAVE AS instead of SAVE after making the search-and-destroy.

Nice catch on MSWord and OpenOffice.

A simplification: instead of [a-zA-Z0-9] one can just type [a-zA-Z] or even simply [a-z]. This last selection will convert only lowercase letters to 'a' (or whatever char you picked), but readability will be likewise lost.

I think Peter wins the prize. The exact same invocation works in Open Office (select 'Regular Expressions' instead of 'Wildcards').

It would be even better if we could find a way to say "everything that isn't white space", like the \W expression in PERL regexes, so that we could match non-ascii characters like á, ñ and ö. Open Office documents a posix style [:alnum:] operator that looks promising, but doesn't seem to be actually working.

I will update the scrambler page with these instructions. Peter, please let me know if I can credit you on the site.

Thank everyone for awesome advice!

Took me a couple minutes, but I just discovered that Microsoft Word's search-and-replace accomplishes pretty much what the sed script does.

1. Open the Find and Replace dialog box (Edit -> Replace).

2. Click the "More" button to expand the box.
3. Check the "Use Wildcards" checkbox.
4. In the "Find What" field, put this: [a-zA-Z0-9]
5. In the "Replace With" field, put this: a
6. Click "Replace All"

Done. (Just be sure to "Save As" instead of "Save". :-)

I just tried it on a document with 1,151 words, and the word count was identical before and after.

Since I started this discussion, I guess I should, like, provide links and stuff:

sed f.a.q. (also has links to many other windows search-and-replace batch utilities, each of them likely to be powerful enough for our purposes):

http://www.student.northpark.edu/pemente/sed/sedfaq2.html

sed executable (unfortunately, hosted at an alarmingly-foreign url; perhaps we can host this small file?):

http://www.dbnet.ece.ntua.gr/~george/sed/OLD/sed15.exe

sed archive (at a fully trustworthy server, but requiring unzip skillz):

ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/msdos/txtutl/sed15x.zip

The bit about windows people installing cygwin was meant as a joke. Heh. Heh.

The problem is, as you correctly point out, we really can't host anything for this purpose for people to download. In addition to the hideous liability issue, if you're already worried about uploading your unscrambled novel to us, you won't necessarily trust us to provide a working scrambler (maybe we have the keys to it somewhere).

I don't actually think many people are really this paranoid! But the idea is to try to provide as much protection as we can to people who are worried about it.

So the ideal would be free piece of software or online service that is not affiliated with us at all in any way that we could point people to :)

Perhaps I'll add a technology wish list to the office wish list once we launch the new site...

"Windows people could install cygwin.."?

Well... let me be a bit of a contrarian and say that if there isn't something you could just provide which would be available from the site (like, "put the name of the file containing your novel in this blank space or else Browse for it, and then click here to scramble and upload..."), it will probably cause more questions and problems than it would solve. Asking people to download anything, and then run it offline, will be one of three things:

1. second-nature and trivial,
2. manageable but worrisome because of download paranoia, or
3. totally Greek jibberish and an instant cause of fear and trepidation.

I don't claim to know how the NaNo population shakes out into these 3 categories (or any others which I may have neglected), but I suspect you'll have a non-trivial chunk in category (3), and another vocal chunk in (2). I am all for providing a "drop down here it is just fill in your filename and run it" scrambler if possible, but think long and hard about suggesting all n-thousand NaNo writers download-and-run something on their own computers.

Yes! Does OS X have sed? Probably. Windows people could install cygwin, and we could find someone to distribute a single shell script to both :)

That's actually not the worst idea ever...hmm...I wonder if there's an easy windows port of sed that windows users could install, and then we'd distribute this as a batch file...

This would be a very simple program to do in C--probably a few dozen lines or so. I haven't used C in a few years, but a little command line program to swap X for every letter found and leave whitespace alone sounds like a classic Programming 101 homework assignment.

I don't have a C compiler on my computer any more (switched over to LabView work a few years ago), but I would be surprised if you didn't have tons of NaNo fans out there who could write this up in twenty minutes.

While this is unix only, I'm pretty sure this is as simple as can be. Save the novel as a text file and then:

sed "s/[a-z]/a/ig" < novel.txt > scrambled_novel.txt

This replaces every letter of the novel with the letter 'a', keeping word breaks intact. This process renders the text somewhat less readable, although in some rare cases the reverse might occur.