amudi.org

18 Aug 2009

The Time Machine

Browser has become one of the most important piece of software in human life. Take one example, me. I use web based application to track a project. One day, I can't access the website. I was literally pulling my hair trying to figure out what's wrong. The ISP? The web? The whole internet broken?

After a dozen of refreshes and restarts, I am somehow able to access the site now. After I log in, I see something wrong. The CSS and JavaScript files were not loaded. The site is a AJAX-heavy site (which is cool), but has no alternative when the browser can't load JavaScript. See, the J in AJAX is JavaScript, and it's not AJAX if you can't do the J. In conclusion, I can't see or update my task list, I can't do anything for two days.

I tried re-installing Safari, tried with Firefox (two different versions of it), nothing worked. 3 am in the morning, in desperation I pull one last trick. Time machine. I restore Safari and some of its configuration files from a few days back (before the latest update), and shutdown the computer (without trying opening that damn site again, too tired). Later that day I tried again, and to my surprise it worked. Life is good again. Now I can continue my life.

20 Nov 2008

Microsoft Excel Limitation

This morning, I have to do something (simple calculations) in excel *sigh* documents. I have to append data, and make adjustment to some formulas I have created before. The formula contains a series of nested IFs. It was made by me as a quick and dirty solution, without really thinking about future usage of the document or formula.

Apparently, as more data being inserted and I add more columns to check with the IF, excel keeps telling me that my formula is wrong. I tried to change it several times, triple check the parentheses, and retype the formula from scratch. I was frustrated, am I that stupid and can't get a stupid IF formula to work. In frustration, I search for enlightenment to Google. As I typed "nested if excel formula", the first hit excerpt shows that there are limitations.

A well known limitation to Excel is that you cannot "nest more than 7 functions

What? Excel only support SEVEN nested IF functions? What kind of limitation is that? Is it that difficult to make it support 8, or 10, or 100, or unlimited?

I don't want to know why they choose 7. I don't care. I'll live with 7 nested IF, just like everyone else. Thanks to excel, now I have to rewrite all my formulas in this file. Not that it's difficult to do. It's just a waste of time. Good stuff excel.

*I wonder whether OpenOffice and iWork Numbers have this limitation too*

7 Oct 2008

Beta softwares

Why people love to release beta softwares or web apps. Why don't they just name it as version 1, it's better than 0.0.1build2937 or 0.2.138.40 or other zero point zero point some cryptic numbers. Even Oracle DB starts at version 2 (because they thought people will think version 1 softwares are buggy), and Flickr was a Gamma software once (whatever that means). Just a thought.

7 Oct 2008

If you have everything needed

If you have the money and softwares that are needed to run a telco company, what stops you from doing so?

For example, a software vendor company has a complete solution for telco company. From HR, finance, to the industry specific areas such as telco billing, business analytical, etc. The only things needed are the company (i.e people, infrastructures, legals). What stops that software vendor to become a telco vendor (e.g cellular provider).

22 Sep 2008

I am busy doing

Composing email for posterous.
Skimming some mailing list on GMail: gadtorade, id-mac, smun8_2003, if03, and so on.
Reading some info about Oracle OpenWorld from my Google Reader.
Downloading podcasts, I have about 400 new (un-played) podcasts. How to catch up with that amount, I don't know.
Browsing and commenting on people's picture on facebook.
Reading some tweets from people I followed.
Listening to radio, via iTunes. I like radioio, but too many advertisement.
Making slides about my work. Looking for pics from google image search.
Reading some company announcement, and they successfully send a new one (or more) everyday.
Fighting in the forest (in lotgd). Bump into a goblin for an RPS game.
Creating a task in Remember The Milk , then logout and forget about it.
Conference in jabber . Chatting about things which are not essential.

21 Sep 2008

HTML Problem With GMail and Posterous

In my previous post, I tried to add some background color and one hyperlink, and I used GMail. I posted it to posterous, and with autopost everywhere, to my blog and my tumblr. It seems that GMail produce invalid HTML. The hyperlink linked to the wrong URL, with some goog_<some-weird-number-here> at the end of URL. I have to manually edit the post, in the posterous and my blog, but I'm too lazy to edit the tumblr one. Maybe in the future I shouldn't do too many HTML thingy in GMail.

By the way, is it possible if I edit one post and automagically every autopost will change as well?