Carpe PM

I haven’t touched this place in an age. As I get back into it, I found a very useful plugin to share snippets of script writing called Scrippets. I am very excited about all that has transpired in the creative and technical fields that I pursue. I’m definitely looking forward to what is to come this year. So much to do and so little time.

If you ever choose to live in the Central West of New South Wales, TNT Express is not forthcoming with the location of their depots. That being the case, I’ll share the “top secret” location of their depot in Bathurst, NSW Australia. This may of course change at any time, but these are the correct details for now.

Address:
6/45 Upfold Street
Bathurst NSW 2795
Australia

Phone:
(02) 6332 2222

It is fascinating that I have been living in Australia for well over the last two years. I just finished my paperwork for permanent residence and should hear from the government here in a little while. So, I will change status from a temporary permanent resident to a permanent resident. As of this month, I have been married to my beautiful wife for two years. Amazing!

Wow! I haven’t written here in months. Time to run a number of updates and get things active again…

I am in the planning stages of building a diy opensolaris box. In the wake of Oracle acquiring Sun, who knows how well Oracle will keep OpenSolaris up to date. However, the potential of zfs entices me to try it out in the original habitat.

The most important part of a computer is always the case. I had a tough requirement this time around: I wanted 8 3.5″ bays and as quiet as possible. It may seem greedy, but I like the idea of setting up two four drive raidz2 mirrors. The quietest one I could find is made by Fractal Design in Sweden and gives Antec a run for their money in terms of loudness.

Fractal Design Define R2 Black Pearl:

You can see that this is an awesome potential box for storing a beast of a NAS. I am nailing down the final details for the internals, but it looks like I should be able to come up with a fairly affordable machine. I may also need to wait for the 2TB drive price point to drop since the low power “green” drives are apparently quite awful in performance and the server based drives are right now cheap at 1TB size. In addition, It looks like AMD consumer chips are the only processors that will support server type ECC memory. So, there you have it. More to come.

I have spoken about this before locally, but it is quite fascinating what one can find. Embedded in a number of Chinese characters are what is believed to be pictographic representations of many of the Genesis stories from the Bible. In this example, the verb ‘to create’ is made up of a subset of other character words. It appears that the Chinese might actually embed both meaning and story within their traditional language. Now that is super cool! But really, how interesting that the Genesis story would be in there. Another tid bit of info… The Chinese culture was once theist, worshiping a singular being named Shang Ti (forgive if any misspelling please).

Behold, the mixer I have been waiting for. It can record 16 channels simultaneously at an affordable price yielding professional results. It is on the very top of my to buy list at the moment. The company supports linking two mixers together to allow for 32 channels of recording, but I would prefer to have one solid 24 channel desk to work with instead because the snake I use has 24 channels.

Let’s pretend you have a web page where you want to use a URL rewrite to load content from a db where you have specified a guid with a year and month from a date. For example, you want to visit /2010/01/page-name/. Behold the solution below to add to your .htaccess file.

RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/$ ?y=$1&m=$2&g=$3 [L]

You’ve probably seen Iron Man. One of the coolest parts of Tony Stark’s mansion was the window in his bedroom. It was literally a transparent screen hooked up to his computer network. That technology is not far away. Samsung recently unveiled their own transparent OLED screen. Imagine waking up in your bedroom with an epic sized window that shows the current weather reports while being unobtrusive enough to allow you to still enjoy the view.

Say you want to sort in Excel by columns W, V, S, M & L in a spreadsheet and the actual data starts at row 6 from columns A to Z. This script sorts any number of rows by those columns starting at row 6 in the Excel spreadsheet. Sorting in Excel with macros is not always well documented. Hopefully, this post will pop up in search results in the future to help others with their macro sorting woes.

Sub derpurtSortColumns()
'
' derpurtSortColumns Macro
'
    Dim mySheet As Worksheet
    Dim myRange As Range
    Dim LastRow As Long

    Set mySheet = ActiveWorkbook.Worksheets(1)

    mySheet.Activate

    'Determine Last Row
    LastRow = ActiveSheet.UsedRange.Rows.Count

    mySheet.Sort.SortFields.Clear

    'Sort Data
    mySheet.Sort.SortFields.Add Key:=Range("W6"), _
        SortOn:=xlSortOnValues, _
        Order:=xlAscending, _
        DataOption:=xlSortNormal
    mySheet.Sort.SortFields.Add Key:=Range("V6"), _
        SortOn:=xlSortOnValues, _
        Order:=xlAscending, _
        DataOption:=xlSortNormal
    mySheet.Sort.SortFields.Add Key:=Range("S6"), _
        SortOn:=xlSortOnValues, _
        Order:=xlAscending, _
        DataOption:=xlSortNormal
    mySheet.Sort.SortFields.Add Key:=Range("M6"), _
        SortOn:=xlSortOnValues, _
        Order:=xlAscending, _
        DataOption:=xlSortNormal
    mySheet.Sort.SortFields.Add Key:=Range("L6") _
        SortOn:=xlSortOnValues, _
        Order:=xlAscending, _
        DataOption:=xlSortNormal

    With mySheet.Sort
        .SetRange Range("A6:Z" & LastRow)
        .Header = xlGuess
        .MatchCase = False
        .Orientation = xlTopToBottom
        .SortMethod = xlPinYin
        .Apply
    End With

    Range("A1").Select
End Sub

Red, the camera company that made the Red One camera has been working on a whole slew of new film cameras. It will be a wonderful day when I can use one of these. They film at a higher quality than most theatrical release films. Nonetheless, I’m more than content with my HVX, which is capable of quality images. To stir my abilities, I’m planning to get something filmed either this weekend or the next depending on how soon I can fully map out the project. Should be a good result since the idea for it is pretty cool already.