Old Chinese Characters

December 15th, 2009

Traditional Chinese Character: To Create

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).

StudioLive Digital Mixer

November 26th, 2009

Presonus StudioLive 16.4.2

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.

URL Rewrite For A Page Manager

November 26th, 2009

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]

A Transparent Screen

November 25th, 2009

Image: Transparent OLED Screen

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.

Macro Sorting In Excel 2007

November 25th, 2009

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 Camera – The Scarlet

November 24th, 2009

Scarlet Camera Rig

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.

Firebug & FCK Editor

November 23rd, 2009

Lets pretend an IT department has hidden the button that allows you to edit in html mode when using FCKEditor on a website. No problems there. Just install Firebug and run the following code to toggle between html source and rich text edit modes. Firebug allows users extra control when that control has been taken away from them.

Note: “editor” is the id of the FCKEditor instance. You can navigate the DOM to discover the ids for the instances of the FCKEditor that are currently in the page.

FCKeditorAPI.GetInstance("editor").SwitchEditMode();

Sydney Red Dust Storm

September 23rd, 2009

Sydney Red Dust Storm

Amidst the rumors and Snopes denounced stories of Mars coming so close to earth that it would be the equivalent size of the moon, Sydney was hit with a massive red dust storm. The girlfriend of my brother in law took this picture from her flat in Sydney when it hit. I am starting to wonder if I am really on the same planet anymore. Maybe the flight over the Pacific also consisted of some sleeping gas halfway. Perhaps we made a short jump to light speed to take us home to our red planet? Nah… In any case, it is pretty cool that something that affects Sydney would not get us as bad in the Western regions.

World Audience

March 9th, 2009

CarpePM Google Analytics Stats [Image]

Apparently, I have a world audience now. The above image is a color concentration map from Google Analytics of countries that people are visiting this blog from. How strange that something I just did for fun would get so many hits. I look at about 10,000 page views per month. A lot of this stems from Google indexing some things on my site in high ranks. But, some of it is repeat visitors. I do not pay a lot of attention to this thing lately, but I suppose I will continue to use it as a venue to show personal works in progress. I definitely need to make time to record more footage with my camera. However, I actually have some other web related projects in the works at the moment during my weekends.

Working On A Project

January 21st, 2009

Eyeball

You always get interesting stuff when it come time to work on an advertisement. Who would’ve thought that I’d be animating eyeballs, crashing people into cars, and everything else I can find time for in a few short days. Well, I better get back to it.