Statrix Redux

Today I had an amusing adventure in software compatibility. I was sent a file to put on the private site I manage in the new Office 2007 Excel Open XML format (.xlsx). It was also sent to a number of other folks in the organization via email.
Naturally enough none of us could open it. 🙂
Now I have Office for Mac 2004 at home and it’s been fine up until now for everything that’s been thrown at me but it doesn’t appear there’s a software compatibility pack that covers Excel files yet. I do believe that Word and PowerPoint are covered, but that’s not what I needed.
As it turns out Office 2003 for XP does have a compatibility pack that will do a conversion and I do have a copy of 2003 on my Back Pack XP partition so all was well and good. But…
To be honest, and I mentioned this in an earlier post, I haven’t decided to upgrade Office yet. I’m not sure I really need to keep going down the Office path and had been giving some thought to iWork. I use Office at the office and I don’t expect that’s really ever going to change. But for home use, and I never bring work home, it’s overkill. So…
As I was out and about I stopped at my local Apple Store (Ala Moana) and opened up the webmail account on which I’d gotten the .xlsx file. I opened with Numbers from iWork and lo and behold, it converted with just a warning or two a bit of difference in the formatting. It was good enough to use for posting on the site.
I liked it enough that I downloaded the trial iWork package from Apple and plan on giving it a go. Hopefully OpenOffice will also come through with conversion and…maybe even Google Apps!
Later I gave the conversion pack for Office 2003 and that worked too – kinda boring though.
Aloha!

It’s just been one of those weekends. I was on the go from 7 A.M. till after 6:00 P.M. on Saturday, and then again from 9:00 A.M. till 6:30 P.M. or so today. That’s busier than my usual workday. That’s one reason I’m generally glad to get back to work on Monday – which, of course, I don’t have to do this Monday.
The big problem wasn’t just that I had a lot to do, but that my moped broke down. And I just had it tuned up too. It seems the engine seized. I don’t blame the guys at Cycle Imports for this one – I’d kind of abused the engine (accidentally, but abuse nonetheless). It’s time had come. Still it’s not fun to be sans transport.
The upshot is a new piston and cylinder set. It’s not cheap, though compared to a Harley or something it’s a drop in the bucket – thanks goodness.
Anyway that’s the way the cookie crumbles.
Aloha!

If you notice that I have a Joe’s Goals badge up and it looks like I’ve accomplished nothing lately it may well be true. It may also be that the Joe’s Goals site is down making it impossible for me to update my goals.
I discovered this tonight while trying to congratulate myself on a day well spent. Well at least a day with little spending.
Aloha!
1/19 – FIXED

Just a quick note to say that I ended up going with the MacJournal 5.01 update and putting off all the other ideas of spending money till later. I do have another plan to spend too much money, but I really, really have to give it a think.
Do you hate those times when there just isn’t a hotspot around and you actually need one? I do. Mostly I don’t need one, but when I do…
So I’m thinking of getting a wireless card, but I haven’t decided if that’s really the direction I want to go or not.
I will say I think the price for all the plans I’ve seen is way too much – given that unlimited data on my iPhone is $20 a month and I use that all the time. The plans I can see around Honolulu run from $50-60 depending on the carrier. Over the course of a year that’s going to be expensive. Like I said, I’ve got to give this one a think.
Aloha!

I guess upgrading software is just a fact of life. The real problem is that often the new, improved software is merely new, and expensive. Most of the time it’s fine, but I end up asking myself did I need the new feature, especially at the price. I bring this up because I’m currently faced with two different upgrades for two very different products at two very different price points.
Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac
Let’s face it, for the moment, and that moment may be fleeting, Microsoft Office is a fact of life. I use the Windows version at work courtesy of my employers and I can’t imagine that they’ll change anytime soon. Because of the nature of my work, programming at a large insurance company (large by Hawaii standards anyway) I was given the opportunity to purchase a bunch of Microsoft stuff at a huge discount. I ended up with a couple of XP installs, Office for Windows (2003 I think) and Office 2004 for the Mac – I believe they were all the professional versions.
Having XP is nice as I do have it on my MacBook running on Boot Camp. I almost never fire it up, but it’s there if I want to show off. Of course now that Vista is out it isn’t really showing off I suppose. Since I have almost no XP software on that partition it was a no brainer to install the almost free Office 2003. No problem. I don’t expect I’ll ever be overcome with the urge to upgrade, at least not on the life of the MacBook.
Office for the Mac is a different story though. I actually do use it sometimes. I play with my bill paying in Excel, sometimes redo documents I get sent in Word, and view the odd PPT in PowerPoint. I used to use Entourage, but since Apple Mail was upgraded a bit for Leopard I’ve gone back to that – especially since I can keep my desktop, laptop, and iPhone all synced up.
At home I really don’t need the horsepower that Office came with, but at the price it was hard to turn down. Now, however, I have to pay to upgrade ($214.99!) and it doesn’t even include the stuff I use at work all the time. I just don’t know if it’s worth it. Perhaps I should drop less than half the price on iWork instead. Sigh.
Amazon has a variety of prices for an upgrade, all of which are far more than I paid for the original – $214.99!! Ouch.
MacJournal 5.0
Now here’s another option. I’ve always liked MacJournal. Or rather I should say I’ve always liked the idea of MacJournal but rarely use it. I’ve had it on my machines for a couple of years now and sometimes get all fired up and write a blog post with it, only to go back to my normal way of doing things. Upgrading is not particularly expensive, unless you consider I use it less than I do Office which I like less. Sigh.
What’s going to happen? I suspect I’ll end up feeding the beast and upgrading both but not enjoying either as well as buying iWork. In short I’ll end spending an arm and a leg on software I’ll use minimally.
Aloha!

I’m sitting the Kahala Mall Starbucks (yeah, I know) killing a little time before I go up and see if Barnes and Noble have any books I absolutely need on PHP.
I’m not really sure I want to get into it, but if I’m going to keep up with all the stuff I’d like to do I guess I’d better bite the bullet. The real problem as I see it as soon as I know enough to be useful WordPress will be rewritten in, I don’t know, perhaps a functional language like Haskell or something. Just what I need, lambda calculus.
Sigh.
This is what happens when I drink too much coffee. 🙂
Aloha!

Okay, I’ll admit it, I went for the easy solution. Normally I would simply love to use open source software to solve a problem if it’s at all practical. Note that I say practical and not possible. So far I haven’t found may problems there isn’t an open source solution for – keep in mind I’m talking about “hobby” computing here and not in medical claims processing and the sort of stuff I do at work.
WordPress right here is a good example.
So what’s the problem?
Calendars.
I had to install a calendar yesterday for that nameless org I do volunteer work for (it’s private so the link won’t be appearing here I’m afraid). I wanted to be able to get it working with WordPress, at least side by side and looking similar if not embedded.
I checked out all the plugins I could find first and none of them seemed robust enough to do the job without some backend SQL support. I don’t need much, but I do need repeating dates without having to enter them a dozen times for a given year. On the site I’m using static pages so it would be nice to have a calendar page. I don’t want it too “busy.”
To make a long story short I tried WebCalendar but, and it’s probably my fault, I couldn’t get the public access calendar to display our local time instead of that of the server. It did fine for my calendar, but not the public one. I can’t have everyone logging in, so that wasn’t a solution. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it’s possible, it just wasn’t happening in the time I needed it to happen.
Enter EasyPHPCalendar, a paid solution with locked down PHP scripts. I don’t mind paying for things and had this been open source, I’d have paid for it. I really don’t want to put the folks I’m dealing with looking like they’ve stolen anything.
So how did it turn out? Being completely honest here, EasyPHPCalendar did everything I wanted in short order. I had an internal WP page almost working last night with the demo version of EPC. I figure it won’t take too much more to get it going. However I stopped work on it when I got the paid version and put up a “real” calendar for my clients that works, looks like the rest of the site, and most importantly, is working NOW.
I’ll probably play with WebCalendar on this site soon enough and solve the problems I didn’t have time for yesterday, but in the meantime, my hat is off to EasyPHPCalendar.
Aloha!

I recently mentioned that IE had a problem with the GoogleMapper plugin. The solution turned out to be easy and can be found on the WordPress Support Forum.
Now the maps I’ve created for another site display just fine in IE. Actually, now that I think about it, I don’t think it was the maps themselves, but rather the markers one can create in GoogleMapper. It’s all fixed now though.
The real solution, of course, is simply to avoid IE.

Aloha!

This is just one of the reasons I love the rRed Elephant.

Char made this one for me. I’m trying to convince her to do a “signature” elephant, but we’ll see. 🙂
Here’s some more latte art.
Aloha!

I use a Mac, a couple of them in fact. I’ve got an older iMac G5 and a newer (but now getting dated!) Intel MacBook. At work they have me at a Dell running XP.
For a web browser I use Firefox on all these machines and Safari on the Macs. I do have IE v6 at work, but only use if for “work” as we have some stuff that’s pretty specific to that browser on our intranet.
Sadly, and I’ve known this for years, not all browsers are created equal and I’ve just come across my first IE specific problem. My GoogleMapper plugin doesn’t work with IE v6. Apparently it’s a problem with “commas” ending an array and there seems to be a fix out for it and I’ll give it a try, but how darn annoying is that. Sigh.
BTW – the plugin isn’t here where I’d just say “use a different browser.” No, it’s on the site I maintain for a group I belong to and I guess I can’t just say “sorry sucker.” Isn’t that always the case?
Aloha!