arcster’s WordPress blog
When I started this arcster.com adventure, I was paranoid about privacy. Now I’m more frustrated by a lack of readers than a lack of privacy. I haven’t quite gotten to the stage of accepting the axiom “You have no privacy, deal with it,” but I’m not going to bother trying to hide my identity anymore.
Anybody who cared could have figured it out easily enough. So here I am. I’m on Facebook. I’m on Google. I might even activate Buzz. And I’m going to work on keeping the site fresh.
If you copy and paste from another application into Excel, chances are you’ll come across some boxes that create unsightly line breaks in your cells.
Use this formula to make those line breaks disappear:
=SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE([celladdress],CHAR(13)," "),CHAR(10),"")
where [celladdress] is the cell you are fixing
Warning: you will have the Who song Substitute stuck in your head after using this formula.
Tip of the hat to Otto for his PHP Code Widget, which has enabled me to feature my random quote and random consumption item right on the blog.
A few thoughts:
…Ergo, I should make WordPress the driver of arcster.com so that the site becomes the blog.
I just don’t have time right now. But look for it.
Do you like the new theme?
postcard
To get infor on your environment: env
to do a case-insensitive searc for .pm files in /usr and subfolders:
find /usr -iname '*.pm'
To get a terminal type xfce4-terminal in the Alt+F2 box
To find a string of alpha characters between 100 and 200 characters long in finnwake.txt:
grep "[A-Za-z]\{100,200\}" finnwake.txt
To find words between 25 and 30 characters without vowels:
grep -w "[^aeiouy]\{25,30\}" finnwake.txt
to exit a MAN screen, use q
What is going on with NBC’s Meet The Press podcast? In between segments, where there used to be plugs for Rachel Maddow and Keith Ubermensch (a title I’m sure he would love), there are now strange audio rumblings that sound like someone has left a microphone on and doesn’t know it
The inability to find things inside of that inscrutable black inbox that is your Microsoft Outlook email is one of the great frustrations of modern life. So Xobni’s search tool seemed like a great thing. And it probably is, if you’re willing to buy the full version. But don’t even bother with the free download.
Xobni’s evaluation version only indexes your inbox. So if you use other PSTs, tough. Most frustratingly, it hijacks your recently used email selection. So you start to type a name in the To field and you get a message “10 messages including …” So you hit your down arrow and instead of getting your contact you get a popup to buy Xobni.
I don’t have the freedom to buy software for my work computer, so while I’m sure it’s a good tool, I’m giving up on Xobni
If you have rows of fixed-width data (in this case the first 12 characters of each row) and you want to put a tab at the end, put this in your “Find what” box in Microsoft Word:
(^13*{12})
and put this in the “Replace With” box:
\1^t
and check the Use Wildcards option
The “^13″ is a newline character (^p doesn’t work when using wildcards)
Ok. I’ve calmed down a bit since my previous rant.
Apparently there’s an issue running aptitude or synaptic (using Xubuntu Gutsy) on a secured wireless network. It just doesn’t seem to work. I’m sure there’s a fix for it and if I had hours of spare time, I’d find it.
Meanwhile, I took my laptop to a wireless network with a unsecure guest connection and was able to run
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin sun-java6-fonts
(Thanks to ubuntugeek for that one) Then I did the same thing for sun-java6-jdk.
Then I used mousepad to write up a standard helloworld.java example. I went to my terminal and did
sudo javac helloworld.java -d /home
Without the -d I had no idea where the class file was going. Without the sudo I got permission errors.
then I ran
java helloworld
and it worked!
Ubuntu is alot like Windows 3.1, except Windows 3.1 pretty much did what you wanted it to when it wasn’t crashing.
Ubuntu doesn’t crash, but it doesn’t do anything. I admit I’m using really old hardware, but I’ve spent a whole damn night just trying to install Java Runtime. I messed around with all these sudo apt-get commands and edited my stupid etc/apt/sources.list, but I still can’t download squat.
I found a promising lead that says some people can use Firefox to connect to their wireless internet but the add/remove software app doesn’t work. So I edited my stupid etc/somethingorother.conf, but that didn’t work either.
And Linux is better than Windows why?