OMG Excel Arrays (a UNIQ filter)

Right. I needed to write a UNIQ filter in an excel spreadsheet and this needed to be implemented using functions i.e. not VB for two reasons; I can’t and the customer doesn’t want me to.

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Linux Power Management

Been trying to get my latest Linux Laptop to behave nicely while on battery. It’s an Elementary Luna build. I came to the conclusion that there’s not much that can be done; it’s one of those things we leave to the OS authors, in this case Canonical.

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Download Error -505

I am trying to install natter on my Galaxy S5 and get an install error 505. Here are my notes. I have now fixed issue, see the final paragraph.

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1and 1 News Letter tool

I have started to use 1and1’s newsletter tool. It comes with my package. I using it because I need to send to more than 100 people/blast. Here’s some do’s and don’ts and some gotchas.

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More on Splash Pages

I want a splash screen on this page. See also this post. This article documents my experiments with Kento Splash Screen. If the short code is before the More line, then it appears on the Home, if after only if one enters the page itself. (So make a tiny article that looks like part of…

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Cairo Clock

I fancied a desktop clock for my elementary builds. I found cairo-clock, which has a bunch of default themes and a bunch of add-ons also. It can be obtained via the package managers; I found this, as the package documentation. 

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Unicode in Python

It’s a very long time since I have had to deal with binary code translations, but when dealing with HTML and JSON with Python, I need to get to grips with it. The € symbol for instance requires the extended character set support and rss should be written in utf-8. This page collects the notes…

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Web Site Testing with MaxQ

MAXQ is a web proxy with recording and replay features. It is designed to capture and replay tests. They are quite keen that one understands the terms of use of target sites since many prohibit automated access and these days it would seem defend themselves against it.  This article documents how to run MaxQ and…

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Data Flow Diagrams

How useful are the old fashioned data flow diagrams in today’s world, in particular how useful are they in demonstrating process flow? They showed the relationship between external entities (actors), functions/processes, data stores and data flows.

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Converting dates to strings using Python

While working on converting ello.json to rss, I needed to convert the date formats, I needed to do it in Python and found the following code worked, using strptime and strfmtime. I had to augment the date string with the name of the day of the week attribute, so felt it had to via a…

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RSS from JIRA

For those of us for whom email is a bit passé, we want to recieve our Jira updates using feeds, either because it allows us to choose our browser, or for other reasons. I hope the following links help.

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