Part A: Set up the NAME
Part B: Use the NAME to create a drop down via cell validation
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Wednesday, 5 December 2007
Excel: Dynamic drop downs using Names
Posted by Ook at 15:23 0 comments
Labels: Excel
Thursday, 1 November 2007
Firefox Screen Real-Estate
Save screen space by auto-hiding the Bookmark toolbar in Firefox - thanks Lifehacker. |
Posted by Ook at 02:18 0 comments
Labels: Web
WooHoo Dell XPS 710
Looky what the postman bringeth - course I did order it and I still have to pay for it sometime. I got home to find the usual enormous Dell box, but was rather shocked to find that there was very little packing and it was mostly full of an truly enormous aluminum XPS case. When it comes time to de-commission maybe I'll convert it to a kennel for Fido. As usual I trawled Dell Outlet and yes - this is the 710 model that has very recently been superseded by the 720. But its Quad Core and 4Gb and when it boots it growls and then quietens down to a slight purr. The dual drives have been striped with an Nvidia Raid card - not sure if I want stripes (or how I'll roll it back if I decide I don't). After sitting through the Vista set up it was too late to play with it much - but I had to boot it as the badge said Core Duo and I wanted to check the CPU spec. I can see the Vista learning curve is going to be frustrating. In other pictures it is often shown with a garish red fascia - this is the effect of four LEDs mounted under the front cowling which thankfully can be turned off (or colour changed) from the Bios. A bit bling but it will impress the neighbours should they stroll round, or the kids friends. It even has a light at the back to illume the connectors. |
Posted by Ook at 02:04 0 comments
Labels: Gadgets
Friday, 26 October 2007
Magnatunes Music in Slimserver
Already a big fan of LastFM - I have just come across Magnatunes - an independant music web site with a free-to-play,pay-to-download attitude. The site boast 500 albums to play for free over the web - plus there is a slimserver plugin - double huzzah. I'll give it a whirl... |
Posted by Ook at 14:34 0 comments
Labels: Music, Squeezebox
Thursday, 25 October 2007
N73 Annoyances (Collected)
I'll collect the little annoyances with my N73 here, plus solutions where applicable
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Posted by Ook at 05:38 0 comments
Labels: Gadgets
Saturday, 20 October 2007
Runescape Verboten
Well it only took 12 minutes of post-tutorial play for a some trailer-trash to raise a 'kill the nube' battle-cry and I had to vacate the hill-side smartly. My youngster had heard about Runescape from school friends and although he is under the 13 year age limit I thought I should give it a proper test drive before positively turning him down. Being an avid D&Der in my teens I must admit a soft spot for swords and sorcery, so maybe that is my excuse for giving it a whirl. The interface was above expectation - a responsive 3D landscape, animated avatars and an acceptable level of detail; the controls extensive, intuative, responsive. But I have been knocking about in virtual dead-ends not to recognise one. With the account sign up so straight-forward (and with no verifications of any kind) the world was just about as full of nubes and nube-vampires as you could expect. After the tutorial sequence I found myself wandering through a town of carnage, with characters shouting advertising, killing each other randomly and wandering around bored and aimless in equal measures. A sort of medieval housing estate with all the hoodies decked out with swords and beards. The gaming system seems designed to reward long hours spent performing aimless activity to accrue experience, with the highest rewarded activity being random violence against other players. I have no desire in spending long long long hours to reach the status of 32nd Level Half-elven Mugger myself (or promoting the vocation to my descendants). I explained this to my youngster and told him that whatever his friends' parents may allow, this was not acceptable to me. I did say I would play it with him if he really wanted, but that I really believed a conventional and off-line adventure would be more rewarding. Even if he was within the official age range I would set a hard (and low) limit to the time spent on this site - and enforce it. Reading through the parents guide and googling about a little I am rather amazed to to see the site promoting itself as educational with a straight-face. Runescape is a phenomena - no doubt about it, but it's a money making phenomena More later... |
Posted by Ook at 13:46 0 comments
Labels: Kids
Friday, 19 October 2007
Babylon Hiccups
Babylon is my Centos 5 server which streams music to my brace of squeezebox, but lately it has suffered from occassional hiccups and reboots unexpectedly, mostly when trying to stream Wogan (using the excellent AlienBBC). Now I'm putting this down to a mildy damaged hard drive (suffering last year from a tempestuous fuse box turning it off and on frequently and at short notice), and usually running a file system check fixes the problem (for a while). But I tend to run the server headless, and it's a faff hooking up a screen and keyboard just to hit 'Y' at the correct moment of the boot sequence So is there a way to have the system forced to automatically fo the filesystem check every time it boots up ? Yep - echo "AUTOFSCK_TIMEOUT=5" > /etc/sysconfig/autofsck echo "AUTOFSCK_DEF_CHECK=yes" >> /etc/sysconfig/autofsck If a problem is encountered during the fsck, will the system automagically fix it? No but it can get additional options from the /fsckoptions file, so (dangerous possibly as the entire filesystems may end up in lost+found!) : echo "-p" >/fsckoptions I'll give it a whirl... |
Posted by Ook at 14:10 0 comments
Labels: Linux
Oracle BI Jam Tomorrow
Over the last few months the Old Day Job (ODJ) has lead me into the murky depths of real-world implementation of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Plus Suite (what a mouthful = OBIEE+). It is a marriage of convenience between the Oracle incarnation of the wildly lauded (by whom?) Siebel Analytics (a demo-pretty web -delivered dashboarding and adhoc querying tool) hitched to the oh-so-flexible BI Publisher (xml-based pixel perfect web reporting). I am ignoring the recent Hyperion gate-crasher (aka plus) for now. The main issues for us have been
So setting aside the usual corporate jaw-wagging, the bottom line was continued moves to integrate, combining the schedulers/delivers (possibly more of Publisher optionally delegating to external services I bet), no plans for a db based repository but the ability to install multiply on a single server (this one did not seem so vehement). And what of poor old Disco (Oracle Discoverer) - well it will get some integration crumbs from the table - Disco queries on the dashboard (already inside Publisher), delivery via the Delivers and (ultimately?) a migration tool for those ditching for a move into Answers. |
Posted by Ook at 09:30 0 comments
Thursday, 18 October 2007
Towards a Weblog Taxonomy
In no particular order....
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Posted by Ook at 01:24 0 comments
Labels: Blogging
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