VBA, a bit of recognition

First, let me state that I don't like VBA. This is Excel's macro language which back in the '90s wasn't that bad, but since that time I've learned a lot about various programming languages. VBA is weak, at best. It's just powerful enough to barely get your work done, but it's powerful enough to screw things up too. I'm not just griping, but do have a point here.

I write Excel macros about 3-4 times a year. But when I do, it's always a challenge. These usually aren't trivial things -- they construct pricing tables or analyze time sheets usually doing some tough things. One macro I wrote recently was easily over 100 lines. But as I've mentioned, I'm no VBA expert. So I spend a lot of time in the Help windows. But Microsoft, in their wisdom, usually write documentation just for the API, assuming you already know how the function works internally. It's a help in that you can find various functions that are there, but not great for branching out and pushing the edges.

Enter the Internets. Usually a quick Google lands me several tutorial examples or code bits already written. Here is one example I just used to test for all-numeric or all-text strings. I could have written this myself of course, but a search and copy & paste was much, much quicker.

So to all you VBA guys and gals out there that write this stuff daily and are kind enough to post code snippets: Thank You!

Cingular Discount? Not!

My Treo 650 is starting to show its age. The browser is slow, the face is getting banged up, and really it's just not as 'cool' as it was 2 years ago. So I started looking at the 680 recently because Cingular sent me an offer to upgrade for $75. But it's not much of an upgrade. More recently, the 750 is available. It's better in memory and speed, but they still downgraded the screen resolution. And they won't give it to me for $75

So I looked a little more, and many people are raving about the Cingular 8525 (HTC Hermes). It really looks slick and like a real upgrade. Of course, it's $399 right now. But on Cingular's website, they have this box to enter your work email address to see if you qualify for discounts. In a couple seconds, I got an email that was my "exclusive link to our Cingular Premier website". Woohoo! I check out the 8525 in the shopping section and the above picture is what I found.

My discount read as: $1029.99 for the phone's base price, minus $630 because it's in a Package.

Let me repeat this: Any John Q. Public can go to Cingular's website and buy an 8525 to $399.99. With my "exclusive" access to their Premier website, I can now get it for $1029.99 - $630 = $399.99. Go me!

Uunartoq Qeqertoq

The Warming of Greenland. Pretty interesting (and kind of scary) stuff. So much ice has melted, we're finding new islands now. And it's apparently not a freak thing, but becoming a "regular phenomenon" which is the scary part.

Matrixse

A funny little spoof. If you're not a complete computer dork like me, you probably won't find this funny at all. If you get the lingo, there are a few chuckles. If you totally understand all the little nuances, you've probably already seen this before 100 times
http://kos.li/navigate/matrix/

If you give a pig a pancake...

This is just too funny, and I had so share.

My son had to write lists of 2, 3 and 4 letter words for kindergarten. They send everything home, so we were going over the words, and some of which weren't words. Some were spelled phonetically like "EAGL" for Eagle, so pretty much everything was close to a word. But at the bottom of the two-letter column he had "LL". We asked what that was, and he responded, "When you give a pig a pancake...." But then I started laughing out loud, and everyone else was all smiles too. We never found out the end of that. When we asked later, he just grinned and said he didn't know. Just one of those great childhood moments!

[after 2 seconds of googling, I see there is a real book called If You Give A Pig a Pancake, so we'll have to see if "LL" shows up anywhere]

MHT files (MAF format)

I grew to like MHT files a while back. Basically, you can save a self-contained web page in a single file. This has huge organizational advantages over the typical 'save complete' option where you get the html in one place and a subdirectory full of images. Besides being awkwardly names usually, it's just too annoying to archive many of these sets, but MHT solves at that by embedding all the text and images in a single place. It's a step up on bookmarking too because you're snapping a state to archive, so if the page moves or goes away, you've still got it. Now I've got lots of these files laying all over the place and started going back to some old MSDN pages. But Microsoft has moved things around and pieces that were linked now redirect and generally break it all and destroy my awesome plan. There was the problem that MHT is proprietary and you need IE to open and save them, but dealing with MSDN, you want to be using IE anyway. So I swallowed my pride and just used IE for this.

But now IE is following all these redirects, and I don't want it to. Opening in Word gave the same behavior. I knew I had Mozilla working once with MHT files, so I tried to hunt down the pieces. But since then, I've upgraded to FireFox 2.0. I quickly found the Mozilla Archive Format add-on, but this only works with FireFox 1.5 and won't install for 2.0 because of the max version check. Ugh. But with a little more research I found MR Tech's Local Install tool. It's designed for people developing or testing themes and add-ons and lets you do lots of cool things. The only piece I needed was to ignore the max version check when installing an add-on.

It took a couple tries to get the Local Install thing installed correctly. I don't know what went wrong at first, but anything I opened in a new tab just wouldn't load. So I uninstalled it and a couple other old add-ons, then started again. Everything seemed to be working this time, so I hit the Install Now link to the xpi file and immediately I'm presented with a nice option to turn off the delay and then another dialog with a checkbox that lets me ignore the version check. Perfect. I ignore it and it installs.

With the plugin, I simply drag one of my old MHT files into FireFox and it takes a couple seconds to load, but the content pops up in a new tab. No redirecting to other MSDN pages, so the behavior is as I expected and I can get to the (outdated) content.

Anyway, a nice little tool if you like to work with MHT.

Star Wars Episode III

I watched this again last night. As a stand-alone movie, it might be pretty good. Decent lightsaber battles and some good effects and sound. But as a prequel to Episode IV and the rest of the original trilogy, I have lots of issues with it. Yoda's light saber antics, the role of the wookies, the Emperor's lightening thing (which I didn't like in Empire either), the term "younglings" (redundancy, anyone?), etc. But the big problem is the timeline. Granted I haven't read all the books, but connecting Episodes III and IV with about 20 years elapsing is pretty hard. All the ages work out OK, but many of the comments in IV just don't line up with the clone wars being less than a generation ago and the rise of the empire so fast. The glimpse of the Death Star at the end is cool, but it takes say 25 years to build that one, and only 5ish to build the second? No matter what kind of futuristic techniques they might have, building a moon-sized hunk of metal would take generations. Even collecting the raw materials would take decades.
Anyway, I'll stop ranting about this. For now.

[update:] I had read a long time ago, and recently found, 91 Reasons to Hate Episode III. This is a good write-up, much more involved than anything I could cover. He also does Episode I and Episode II. He also touches on the original trilogy. But there's one quote there that kind of sums up EpIII: "hearing James Earl Jones's voice ask questions about Padme makes my ass ache."