Wed Sep 24 09:36:55 BST 2008
Back to my beloved Fvwm desktop
After what seems like a bit of an eternity of battling with obstructively
gui-driven and complex desktop configuration (such as with gnome and kde), or
just plain awful configuration and usage (such as ms windows)
I've finally blown the dust off my old Fvwm
.fvwmrc file and have re-entered my desktop utopia once again:
Of course I'm back to configuring most things by hand again (wireless, mounting usb drives, X) - but that has always held a certain perverse enjoyment for me anyway!
Fri Sep 19 15:26:37 BST 2008
Server Status Images
Here's a sort of long-running private joke between some of my friends and I...
Many years ago we were setting up a server monitor and it was decided that we'd come up with an executive summary style - that being a simple thumbs-up:
Or a thumbs-down:
Somewhere along the way the system developed a bit of an attitude and somehow the thumbs-up became a little bit more like....
Don't really know why I've posted that but a recent conversation lead to
re-building those simple images and I thought I'd put them up in lights.
:)
Wed Sep 17 21:01:43 BST 2008
Working on the Perl 5.8.9 delta project
A couple of days ago I noticed that a couple of my good friends from back home were working on the Perl 5.8.9 delta project. I've been meaning to get involved at some stage and now seemed as good a time as any!
So today I am a committer to the project - entering into a rather steep learning curve of Perl's innards, not to mention getting my head around the somewhat different way of thinking that goes with the Git version control system.
Tue Sep 2 12:40:16 BST 2008
Comparing lists in a spreadhseet
I've recently been investigating comparions of lists within spreadsheets and needed to provide a process to a client, and thought I might try my hand at a screencast.
The spreadsheet being used is excel and I found that the Winows Media Encoder is provided by microsoft as part of the operating system license. There are several other options (Wink looks interesting) but this was a quick fix and did the job.
MATCH and ISNA are both supported by
OpenOffice as well so the process
should be exactly the same in calc.
Comment by: Bradley Dean at Fri, 26 Sep 2008 19:09:47 (BST)
The first screen cast (straight from Windows Media Encoder) worked but wasn't particularly non-windows friendly. I've taken the handily lazy step of pushing it up onto YouTube.
The quality is a bit reduced - if you're able to watch windows media files and you want to see the high-res version it's here.
Comment by: Bradley Dean at Thu, 4 Sep 2008 09:30:45 (BST)
I noticed this morning that there's an alternative approach which is more
visual (probably not so useful for large lists but interesting nonetheless).
Instead of filtering items out of a range this approach highlights entries with
conditional formatting instead. It also uses the COUNTIF function.
The approach is described here: Comparing Two Lists With Conditional Formatting.