super-cooper

I had been reading about del.icio.us for quite a while now, and about how cool it was. Last week, I broke down and gave it a shot. Wow. It’s pretty slick. For those of you out there you haven’t heard of del.icio.us yet, it’s a social bookmarks manager. You get an account (it’s all free), and when you find a site or web page you like, you post it to your del.icio.us account, just like you would bookmark it in your browser. The beauty of this is that it’s all public, you can view your bookmarks from any machine, others can view them, you can share them, you can see who else has the same pages bookmarked as you, you can get feeds of other’s bookmarks, the list just keeps going on and on.

So this got me to wondering. Was there perhaps a way to import all of my existing Firefox bookmarks into del.icio.us so I could have my work and home bookmarks in sync? That would be nice, would it not? So off to our ole buddy Google I went. Well, I didn’t find a way to import bookmarks into del.icio.us, but I did find Foxylicious. And oooh what find it is. Foxylicious is a Firefox extension that syncs your del.icio.us bookmarks into your Firefox bookmarks. And it will do it for you automatically everyday if you want. So now, I just post bookmarks to del.icio.us, be it at home or work, and let Foxylicious update my Firefox bookmarks for me daily. So I actually have all of my bookmarks in three places, one of which is still public. How cool is that? Very cool, I say.

Tags: computing

I sometimes think that if it weren’t for conditional logic, Excel would be practically useless. I use Excel alot, just about every day. And just about every day, it aggravates me. But then there are the times when I figure something out, some cool way to convert numbers or perform a calculation, and Excel has redeemed itself. And so goes the love/hate relationship. The love is usually brought on by my using some conditional logic to get a job done. The other day I came across the AND function, which basically allows you to test to see if a condition or set of conditions is true or not. I needed to test for multiple conditions in an IF function, and the AND function did it for me.

My data (see screenshot) had two fields (A and B) that I needed to compare, with my result of the comparison going in column C. If A was greater than B, then put A in C (C5). Simple enough. However, there were some caveats. In columns A and C, I had VOID and (BDL) values. If column B=VOID or B=no value, then my column C value needed to be -9999.0 (to one decimal place). If B=(BDL), then C=<0.01. And sometimes I had no values at all (A12, B12). So you can see where I needed the test for multiple conditions. This was what I came up with:

1. =IF(AND(A5>B5,B5<>"",A5<>"(BDL)",A5<>"VOID"),A5,IF (B5="VOID",FIXED(-9999,1,TRUE),IF(B5="", FIXED(-9999,1,TRUE),IF(B5="(BDL)", "<0.01",B5))))
2. Download this code: excel-if.txt

The AND allows me to see whether or not multiple conditions are met inside of my logical test for my IF statement. Pretty slick I thought. Now I of course realize that I could have just went through my sheet line by line and manually done this, replacing numbers as I go. I chose not to do that for two reasons: First, I try to never alter my source data, that way I can always go back and look at my original numbers and have confidence in them, and second, what kind of fun would that be? None, of course. Right?

Tags: excel

Aahhh, the command line, also referred to as the Command Prompt or DOS prompt. You tell most people these days to open up Command Prompt and they respond with a “Huh?”. Try it sometime. We’ve all grown so accustomed to pretty, fancy-schmancy GUIs, it’s easy to forget about our good ole long lost friend, Mr. Command Prompt. Lately, I have had the pleasure (seriously, I’m not being sarcastic) of working at the command line with some simple, easy to use, no frills programs - executables you can just copy and paste from one directory to the next, then open up Command Prompt, navigate to the directory, type in one or two simple commands, and voila!, results, usually in the form of ascii files.

The one shown here is called LOADEST, which is a stream load estimator developed by the USGS. I won’t go into what it’s for, but I will tell you it is an executable, coded in Fortran, and it runs off of four input text files supplied by the user. Took me all of a day and a half to figure out how to use it, build my own text files, and successfully run it. See the command? One word: loadest. Pretty nice.

The other command line program I used recently was png2ico, a great free tool for converting png files to favicons. One simple command executed on two png files, and you got yourself a favicon.

Oh yeah, and I got the LOADEST package via FTP from USGS, and I FTP’d on what else, but the command line.

In a time of using software that takes 45 (OK, maybe only 30) seconds just to load the splash screen, the command prompt can indeed be a breath of fresh air.

Goodbye Mapquest, hello Google Maps.

Tags: linkage

Well, I’ve been working on this overhaul since last year, probably late summer actually. I have been close to done for quite a while now, but this weekend I had some time, so I decided that, by God, I was going to launch this already. My objective was simplicity both in looks and functionality. I wanted things clean and uncluttered, quick and easy. It’s just that it wasn’t so easy to do. Basically, upgrading my WordPress install in the future is going to be next to impossible. I hacked up the template a ton and a bunch of core code too. But as of now, I don’t see upgrading my WP install as a priority.

So what did I do?

Main page: I wanted this to be very simple, yet present everything logically. Also, I wanted a section for little snippets of info that are interesting, but don’t really warrant a full post. So I made the “Interesting” section in the right column. I separated the Interesting stuff from all other posts by employing Kitten’s Show Categories plugin. It isn’t the easiest thing to set up, and I think there is a small performance hit from it (due to some logic), but it gets the job done nicely. I’m working on a feed for the Interesting posts, by the way.

Archives: I never cared for the default WordPress archives design. It’s pretty lame and really doesn’t it make it very easy to dig through old posts. So I used a combination of Dunstan’s archive code and Nick Momrick’s WP Archives hack to get it done. I’m pretty pleased with the way the Archives turned out.

Commenting: I had some major CSS issues in IE with the comments during the redesign, but I got them worked out. I added Chris J. Davis’ Live Comment Preview plugin, which works well, except I can’t get the blockquote quicktag to work on the live preview. Oh well.

Gallery: Paul Griffin has version 1.1 of his Simple PHP Gallery out now. I thought 1.0 was nice, but man, 1.1 is great. GD Library does all the work for resizing, plus there are many other new features, such as outputting the number of works in the folders and custom folder/file aliases. And installation, why it’s a breeze.

The look: This really didn’t change that much. Still mostly grey and white, still 2-column with header and footer. Pretty basic, but it works for what I wanted to do. I decided to keep the header image (I just love the perspective of the water coming right out at eye level), I just softened it up a bit. As long as it took me to do this, I don’t think I’ll be changing the design anytime soon either.

What’s left?

For starters, I’m pretty sure this site looks like crap in IE5.5 Win, and I need to address that. It looks good in Firefox, IE6, and Safari, so that’s just about good enough for me. Oh yeah, and everything but the Contact page should validate as XHTML 1.0 transitional, which still surprises the hell outta me. The CSS validates also.

That’s about it. So, what do you think?