Archive for April, 2008

Mini Searches with Answers

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

These are links associated with recent searches I’ve done. They’re not difficult enough to warrant to their own posts but still super useful.

How to get a Windows UNC path of a file on a Mapped drive
If you’re just doing this manually, I recommend installing this path copy utility, it will let you right click on a file and get its UNC (network) path.

Cool Date Picker JS (Timeframe)
Still needs IE support, but might be good someday

The Blog Authorship Corpus
The Blog Authorship Corpus consists of the collected posts of 19,320 bloggers gathered from blogger.com in August 2004. The corpus incorporates a total of 681,288 posts and over 140 million words – or approximately 35 posts and 7250 words per person.

pyExcelerator (xlwt) cheatsheet (create native Excel from pure python)
xlwt looks like a better alternative than pyExcelerator. This guy even gives us a cheetsheat (i.e. ANY documentation)

The Linux Newbie: Installing a WiFi (Wireless) Card in Kubuntu: Using ndisgtk and ndiswrapper
Perhaps try ndisgtk next time you need a weird driver for Ubuntu? It’s supposed to be an easy to use wrapper around the utlra-complicated ndis whatever thingy …

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How to Restart MySQL in Ubuntu

Friday, April 25th, 2008

sudo /etc/init.d/mysql restart

How to Show Empty Table Cells in IE and Firefox

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

Just use something like this in your CSS styes:

table {
empty-cells:show;
border-collapse:collapse;
}

empty-cells works in Firefox, and border-collapse unintuitively works in IE to not collapse the cells.

Save Hours in Excel with this User Defined Function to get Cell Color

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

Have you ever wanted to sort or filter by the background color of cells in Excel? There are no functions built into Excel to do such a thing, but you can still do it with this simple user defined function:

Function Color(MyRef As Range) As Long
Color = MyRef.Interior.ColorIndex
End Function

I found installing it a bit convoluted (at least in Excel 2003). First you want to make sure you get it into your personal workbook so it will always be available to you. But when I went to the Visual Basic editor in Excel, it wouldn’t show me my personal workbook.

What I did was record a simple macro in Excel, being sure to select to store it in the “personal macro workbook” option. Do something simple like type in a cell, and hit stop recording. Then go into the Visual Basic editor again, and you can see your personal workbook (PERSONAL.XLS). Place the function above in the same module as the macro you just recorded. You can delete the macro you recorded now.

To use the function you have to call it in a funny way. Thus to get the color of cell A3 you would type in a cell:

=PERSONAL.XLS!Color(A3)

And now you can get numeric values for the background colors in your cells! Yay!

Mini Searches with Answers

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

These are links associated with recent searches I’ve done. They’re not difficult enough to warrant to their own posts but still super useful.

Color Palette Generator
Enter the URL of an image to get a color palette that matches the image. This is useful for coming up with a website color palette that matches a key image a client wants to work with.

Feature: Automate Repetitive Typing with Snippits
Finally a text expander for Ubuntu (linux)

Administrative share – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Here’s how that C dollar (c$) syntax I always see people using to view their files remotely. Here’s an example mostly for my own future reference: \\nfa-nt-wks2001\c$

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