I Sure Don’t Miss This!
And I'm glad it happened inside a virtual environment.
I literally haven't gotten the BSOD in over 3 years since I've switched to Mac. I use a PC every once in a while, usually in a virtual window like this.
If I'd been working on something important it would probably be lost. I'm so glad I only have to run windows in a window on my mac and don't have to use it 24-7.
Have I stated yet how much I love Macs?
PC LOAD LETTER? WTF?
I had fun playing with the printer at work during lunch.
I actually changed the status message on the networked printer using a perl script.
Constant Learning: New Objective-C Tutorial
I'm always trying to learn new things, especially when they relate to programming.
Scott Stevenson just posted a new tutorial at cocoadevcentral.com entitled "Learn Objective-C".
A cursory scan shows that It's a great article for people wanting to learn Objective-C for Mac applications or even for making iPhone applications.
Go check it out if you're the least bit interested in Mac and iPhone development.
[Link]
QUICKLINK: Understanding Buffer Overflows in OS X Leopard
How Leopard Will Improve Your Security
The most significant security update in Leopard is one that you'll never notice, but that will cause the bad guys no end of frustration. It's an anti-exploitation technology Apple calls Library Randomization (also known generically as Memory Randomization and as Address Space Layout Randomization in Windows Vista). To understand Library Randomization we need to take talk about vulnerabilities, exploits, and buffer overflows.
Excel Text Wizardry to Extract First and Last Names
What happens when you need to sort through data in excel to insert into a database? You typically have to clean the data before you insert it.
Today I was handed a spreadsheet that contained people's names. Unfortunately, the database schema requires different columns for first name and last name.
So here we go!
| A | B | C | |
| 1 | Full Name | First Name | Last Name |
| 2 | mark rickert | =PROPER(LEFT(A2,(FIND(" ",A2)-1))) | =PROPER(RIGHT(A2,(LEN(A2) - FIND(" ",A2)))) |
|
Will Become: |
|||
| A | B | C | |
| 1 | Full Name | First Name | Last Name |
| 2 | mark rickert | Mark | Rickert |
This code will take the full name and determine the first and last into their own columns. You can then take those columns, copy them, and do a edit>paste-special>values and it will paste the text in without the accompanying formula (so you can delete the full name column).
That's my quick and dirty Excel tutorial for the day.
Oh yeah, and it will also convert the first and last name to proper case if the original text was all lower case. It doesn't work with middle names or middle initials and will tack those onto the last name field.
Have fun!
The New Apple iAquarium
What to do if you've got an old iMac sitting around?
Take all metal off of it and put it in a 100 gallon fish tank, that's what!
“woot”, What’s It Mean?
It is interesting reading the origins of a word that i've been using for years but is not in the "real" dictionary: "woot"
Woot originated as a hacker term for root (or administrative) access to a computer. However, with the term as coincides with the gamer term, "w00t".
"w00t" was originally an truncated expression common among players of Dungeons and Dragons tabletop role-playing game for "Wow, loot!" Thus the term passed into the net-culture where it thrived in video game communities and lost its original meaning and is used simply as a term of excitement.
"I defeated the dark sorcerer! Woot!"
"woot! i r teh flagmastar!" (Think Tribes)
"Woot, I pwnzed this dude's boxen!'
Symbols.com – Symbol 25:18
Symbols.com has an interesting look at the "Apple Symbol" as it is known in the computer world:
In Germanic countries this structure is called St. Hans' cross or the cross of St John. In Scandinavia it is a magic ideogram from the Viking era, or even older. It seems also to have been used in Cabbalistic mysticism. Today, it is used as a cartographic and traffic sign to denote ancient remains or an ancient monument.
Here's a source from the horse's mouth:
It's difficult to come up with a small icon that means "command", and we didn't think of anything right away. Our bitmap artist Susan Kare had a comprehensive international symbol dictionary and she leafed through it, looking for an appropriate symbol that was distinctive, attractive and had at least something to do with the concept of a menu command.
Finally she came across a floral symbol that was used in Sweden to indicate an interesting feature or attraction in a campground. She rendered a 16 x 16 bitmap of the little symbol and showed it to the rest of the team, and everybody liked it. Twenty years later, even in OS X, the Macintosh still has a little bit of a Swedish campground in it.
Recommended Reading
- Free Demo Version of Epic Citadel
- General Web Content: CAPTCHArt
- I’ve Got a Bad Feeling About This…
- Steve Jobs was right, Flash fails on Android
- Things are About to Get Awkward on the Enterprise
Nike+ Running Stats
- Total runs: 175
- Total distance: 305.50mi
- Total time: 89hr 23min 36sec
- Total calories: 40,864
- Avg pace per mi: 17'33"
- Avg distance per run: 1.75mi
- Avg calories per run: 233.51
My Records
- Farthest Run: 6.43mi
- Fastest Mile: 8'40"
- Fastest 5K: 32'10"
- Fastest 10K:2hr 16min 12sec
My Recent Runs
- August 25, 2010, 11:06pm
- Distance: 0.46mi
- Duration: 31' 22"
- Calories: 61
- August 25, 2010, 6:02pm
- Distance: 1.20mi
- Duration: 21' 6"
- Calories: 159
- August 24, 2010, 4:39pm
- Distance: 1.12mi
- Duration: 19' 58"
- Calories: 148
