Last year I wrote about the ease and utility of pulling data into Excel via web queries. This mechanism has served me well in the interim and has proven to be an effective tool in collecting data for certain kinds of analysis. It’s not suited for every application, but if the data you are interested in consists of thousands to tens of thousands of rows, it’s a simple and workable option.
In a recent effort to pull data into an Excel spreadsheet for further analysis, I needed more flexibility than a static report URL could provide. The back end could accept parameterized values (e.g. the desired date range) in the report URLs. I just needed to be able to set these values (initially or through user input) from within the spreadsheet, then request the needed data. Seems generally simple and useful enough, so I’ll share what I did.
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After reading about all the exciting new features and improvements packed into WordPress 3.0, I’ve finally gotten this blog updated to it. Thelonious is one awesome release of WordPress, making this great platform even better!
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I came across a game called Osmos by Hemisphere Games from this story posted on Slashdot. Their experience of porting the game Osmos to Linux and the sales they had witnessed thereafter was what interested me initially. They had found the decision to be a profitable one. I was pleased and a bit surprised at this. Then I saw there was demo for the game running on Linux. It installed quickly, worked perfectly, and had stunning visuals, along with a wonderfully chill soundtrack. Often gaming on Linux is manifested through Wine, workarounds, resignation to VMs running other OSes, or simply putting up with games that aren’t really that attractive.
Osmos is a wonderfully fun and good-looking game. I was so impressed by the demo (a game that starts off with Newton in Latin deserves my attention) that I purchased the full game. I might add this is only $10 and allows you access to DRM-free versions on Windows, Mac, and Linux, as well as a download of an ambient album used in the game! Quite a deal for a game that can provide many hours of enjoyment. It’s like a simpler version of the first stage of Spore, with more interesting novel elements and music reminiscent of Blade Runner. Full size screenshot here.
Go check it out, it’s a lot of fun. And if you are on Linux and want to see more great games for a great platform, consider buying the game!
Posted in Desktop
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Tagged Gaming, Linux
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Hacking Vim 7.2 by Kim Schulz is filled with a variety of useful explanations and helpful tips for Vim users wanting to improve their efficiency and learn more about their editor. While I’ve enjoyed finding new and better ways to use Vim for some time, I still learned quite a lot from this book.
If you use Vim only to edit text files when you happen to be logged into a CLI: mosey on along, this isn’t the book for you. If you currently use Vim regularly and want to improve your knowledge and effectiveness with it: your time reading this book will be well-spent. If you’ve somehow never heard of Vim but are enraptured by the idea of a text editor that can be an effective IDE in addition to allowing you to play Tetris and Rubik’s Cube: you might like this book too.
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Often when trying to catch up on the news or just researching something online, I come across article pages filled with distractions. Ads before the article, ads around the article, ads below the article, ads in the article, obscene sidebars with three or four columns, animated neon dancing bears trying to sell me railroad testing equipment at a Ruby on Rails site, you get the idea. Sure, you could use something like FlashBlock and get the worst of these out of the way. But often you’re still left with a misshapen mass of text whose designer might have had a number of priorities before getting to clarity of presentation.
Enter Readability:
Readability is a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you’re reading.
Huzzah! Simply go to the Readability site and try out the different options for how you want rendered pages to look. You can change things like font size and style, as well as margin. You can even make the colors inverted if you prefer a dark background. Then drag the indicated button to your bookmark toolbar and click it whenever you are on a page you want to be more readable. After discovering Readability, I’ve been using it every day.
I was interested to see that the new version of Safari released today (version 5) added a feature called Safari Reader. This serves the same purpose as Readability, just built into the browser’s address bar. It doesn’t appear that Safari Reader allows you to set more advanced options like the appearance of the font, but it does have the added benefit of remembering your zoom level.
