High-Tech Rojak

I find that I have to do this once in a while and every time I'll have to look it up again. Basically the problem is that someone sent an excel file which the column need to be a string but the data is numerical, so without adding the tick in front of the number, excel interprets it as number. Here's the small script to add the tick: For i = 2 to 196 Range("C" & i).Select ActiveCell.FormulaR1C1 = "'" & ActiveCell.Value Next Now I won't have to google all those mysterious command again the next time it happens.. p/s: don't laugh at me struggling with vb you insensitive clod.. :P

It has been quite a while since I've last used Gnome 3. The thing which I especially didn't like was starting an application by browsing the menu feels like a whole lot more cumbersome, mainly because it'll take the whole page filled with huge icons to do it and I didn't like how when you press alt-tab all the apps are grouped together kind of thing. So with a mind to get back to gnome 2, I switched my arch machine to use linux mint. But guess what? Even linux mint is moving to gnome 3 with it's upcoming release 12. Except it'll have a bunch of customization which keeps your workflow more the less the same. And not only that, it's even easy now to install the gnome-shell in ubuntu 11.10. So since now almost everyone is on that bandwagon, I might as well get on it myself. I've bought myself a spanking new laptop recently and thought that'd be a good candidate for a new start on gnome 3. At first I thought maybe I'll try fedora first (I've alwa

Time management... How do you manage something which is not even physical? And you certainly can't put it here and there... All you can do is decide what action to take at certain time... So maybe it should be called action management? Never mind whatever it's called, there sure has been tons of literature on it. You'd think that we all would be absolute experts at it. But there is a very wide void between knowing and doing. And the successful ones are always the ones who are doing even though they might be lacking in knowing. Write your goals, then write your actions toward those goals, going from long term to short term. And very soon you'll end up with actions you can do here and now to reach your goals which might take years and years to reach. Write it down you so wont forget. Write it down so that you can focus. Write it down so that is your contract between you and the future you who might get distracted by other things happening around him/her. Have you written

After putting it off for so long, I finally went all out and did it. But it took a far longer time than expected but at least I have taken the precious first few steps. I'm talking about developing for the android platform. I've bought my desire last year in december. But for almost half a year all I did was play around with other software on it, I didn't even start to do the very reason I bought it in the first place, develop my own software on it, until recently. After seeing how long I've procrastinated, I decided to get serious and even bought a few books off amazon and the one which I have been reading which got me over the first hurdle was " Hello, Android ". It is a pretty nice walkthrough on how to write your first android software by showing you the steps to write a sudoku game. And a few other small apps to show how to implement other features. I highly recommend it if you're looking for good a beginner android development book. So the first andr

Since the dawn of time, man has always dreamed the impossible dream. Uploading photos in an instant, playing online games without lag, watching videos on youtube and ted without waiting for buffer. And now that I have got unifi up and running at my house, those impossible dreams has come true.. :P What can I say? So far I'm pretty impressed at the speeds I'm getting. Downloading gigs and gigs of stuff takes hours now, not days, not weeks, just mere hours. The installation went quite smoothly except for a bit of broken fiber problem but that was quickly resolved. Took only around 2 hours in the end. When I asked the technician what was the red marker around the last port of the router, he said it was for the tv. At first I thought he was joking. But when I finally tested it out, it is exactly that. A port for just the tv connection. Connecting other devices or computers to it would not resolve any ip for the said device or computer and connecting the tv to any other port would a

Just yesterday I finally watched 'Eat, Pray, Love'. I especially liked the part where they talk about the 'sweetness of doing nothing' and compared the difference in attitude between an american man and an italian man. Where an american man hears "It's Miller time", he goes out and buy a six-pack and drink the whole thing in one night and waking up feeling terrible the next morning. An italian man walks by a sign that says "You deserve a break today" and he'd just say, "Yeah, I know". The italians are the masters of doing nothing. In this fast paced world of ours (especially if you're involved in computers and software where even the latest is obsolete in just 3 years time), I think the 'sweetness of doing nothing' is very much under valued. I guess geeks are pretty acute to 'doing nothing'. Because even in 'Office Space', the rather geeky hero dreams of doing nothing if he had a million bucks before his

In the past few weeks since Gnome 3 came out, I've been reading a lot about what people think of it. My initial impression was it might be something like the Unity interface which I first used when I installed ubuntu-netbook 10.06 on my mom's netbook. I absolutely hated that. Almost made me redo the installation with a normal desktop ubuntu then. But I got to thinking, 'heh... my mom is the one who's going to use it, so maybe she might get used to it, as long as I've set up the side bar with all the software she usually use it should be fine'. And I guess I was right. Until once in a while my mom asks me to do something on it and I feel like redoing the installation again... >.< But finally I took the plunge and enabled the testing repo on my desktop, 'pacman -Syu' instantly installed all the latest package and boom, I'm running Gnome 3 baby... :D What do I think of it? I kinda like it. It's very clean. I mean, very very clean. I'm kind

I've been thinking quite a bit about documentation and the 'cost' it involves. And when I say documentation, I mean documentation in general about anything. One obvious case with the industry I'm involved in is user documentation (a.k.a The Manual). Creating great features in software takes time and effort but if it is not documented then the user won't even know about it and finally it never gets used. But then while documenting it you just wish that you're working on the next cool thing rather than have to write this up. So finally you end up not doing the documentation or doing it rather badly. Same thing with this blog writing. I have been doing some pretty interesting things with my phone (rooting it and using cynogenmod and all), some pretty significant life changes (my grandmother passed away) and a lot of other things which I should probably like to remember better or reflect more on it but not documented (here or anywhere permanent) and it would probabl

Been trying out a new issue tracker at work, it's called Redmine. In ubuntu just need to do an: sudo apt-get install redmine redmine-mysql Then once that is installed add the following line to /etc/apache2/mods-available/passenger.conf PassengerDefaultUser www-data Then add the following lines in /etc/apache2/sites-available/default <Directory /var/www/redmine> RailsBaseURI /redmine PassengerResolveSymlinksInDocumentRoot on </Directory> Then enable the passenger module for apache by running: sudo a2enmod passenger After that add the redmine softlink in the /var/www directory: cd /var/www sudo ln -s /usr/share/redmine/public redmine Then you should be able to access it from http://localhost/redmine. Default username and password is admin:admin.