I signed up for my Google Spreadsheets account yesterday, and last night I received my invitation.

Since I was using Excel at work for something, this morning I figured I could quickly try it out. And I bumped into a pretty serious limitation in functionality almost immediately. My spreadsheet contains about 1000 rows (it’s a dump of a database table that I need to analyse), and I needed to “find” instances of a certain string in the sheet. Guess what? Google Spreadsheets doesn’t do “find” yet. :-p

Update. See the comments below. It’s the documentation that is lacking.

Watching some TV tonight, I was reminded about a weird problem I used to have…

In my previous home, a nice townhouse in the inner city of Calgary, I had a weird static electricity problem. By weird, I mean that no one and I mean no one, would ever believe me when I told them about it. Thankfully, one day after my husband (then boyfriend) moved in, it happened to him as well, so at least one person believed me.

So, here’s the scoop. The living room/dining room floor was covered in carpet. Nothing strange, just builder grade pile carpet. The couch was placed under the front window, about as far away from the kitchen as you could get. In the winter (which is very dry in Calgary), I could get significant static build-up as I walked across the living room from the couch toward the kitchen. The fun part would happen as I crossed over from the carpet to the linoleum in the kitchen. Occasionally, my foot would land directly on the metal threshold strip. ZAP! There was a truely impressive spark/shock generated when this happened. But that’s not all that happened (or else it wouldn’t be weird, would it?). As I was exclaiming “Yikes!” from the shock, I noticed that the TV muted simultaneously. Kinda weird, but it gets weirder still. In addition to the TV muting, the motion sensor light on my back deck would light up.

To recap… static zap.. TV mute.. motion sensor light turns on. Weird, eh? If this happened once, or twice, I would have forgotten about it. But it was REPEATABLE. As long as I could generate static on that carpet, I could make the TV mute and the motion sensor light go on. And so could my husband.

There must have been some really interesting electrical wiring in that place.

Microsoft Launches Wireless Keyboard and Mouse for Macs – Gizmodo

The Wireless Laser Desktops consists of a Comfort Curve keyboard—for the carpal tunnel—and a blob mouse—also for the carpal tunnel, but maybe also for the warts—and is compatible with Intel- and PowerPC-based Macs—because USB swings both ways like that.

I have used keyboards from the Microsoft Natural keyboard line-up for years. A couple of weeks ago, I bought the Comfort Curve 2000, after playing with one for a bit in the store. While I would have preferred a wireless version, and doubly preferred a Mac specific version, the Comfort Curve 2000 has it’s charms. It has some of the ergonomics of the Natural keyboards, but with a really nice low travel, low profile set of keys. And, of course, it has the proper layout for the arrow and Insert/Home/PgUp + Delete/End/PgDn (editing) keys.

This last bit is what is missing from the new wireless version. Sorry Microsoft, but switching around the key layouts on keyboards is just a bad, bad, idea. The only people I know who like that vertical layout for the editing keys… are people like my parents, who never use them, so they just don’t care. Well, the rest of us care. So, I won’t be buying a new wireless Mac keyboard from Microsoft this week. Too bad.

Someone needs to learn that .NET is not the center of the world.

Enterprise .NET Community: News : On the heels of IronRuby comes JRuby

IronRuby has achieved it’s first preview which is an accomplishment, but it is FAR from being ready to use.

OTOH, JRuby has been actively releasing versions since March of 2004.

So who’s heels are being trampled here? Hmmm?

Watch this page, but I would recommend waiting until they have a nice Universal installer for the whole package. After attempting to cludge this together as described on the page and in the comments, I ended up with a PowerBook that was unusable, and I had to boot in safe mode to uninstall/back out everything just to be safe.

I can hardly wait, though. This is so cool.

Medallia Blog: SmackBook Pro Archives

SmackBook Pro

Trails seems to have stalled these days, but it looks like Grails might go somewhere now…

Oracle gets Groovy with open-source project | CNET News.com

Oracle said it will participate in Grails, an open-source project that seeks to make Java programmers more productive through a close tie-in to the Groovy scripting language. Grails is a project to create a development framework, a set of prewritten software components designed to speed Web-application creation using Groovy. The name Grails was inspired by Ruby on Rails, a productivity framework for another language called Ruby.

NewsForge | The CVS cop-out and the stranded user

One of my biggest pet peeves with open source software is what I call the CVS cop-out. It works like this: I criticize (accurately) some shortcoming of an open source application either in an article or in conversation, and someone responds with, “That’s not true! That feature was fixed in CVS four weeks ago!”

This complaint is real, but the answer is so fundamentally simple, that I have a hard time believing that people don’t do it. Every open source project needs a complete, end-to-end build process. And every check-in to the CVS repository needs to kick off an integrated/continuous build, which results in a usable, downloadable binary, or set of binaries. If you don’t have such a process in place, then you should put it on your task list as an absolute priority task.

I know that automating builds is hard and boring. Too bad. Call it a character-building exercise and Do It anyway. And make sure that every committer in your project understands that if they break the build, they have to drop everything and fix it. And if they don’t fix it, or if they keep breaking the build, then take away their committers’ rights. In the end, you will have better quality code being committed, AND the users of your software will be much, much happier. And isn’t that what open source is all about?

Escape from Cubicle Nation: Open letter to CEOs, COOs, CIOs and CFOs across the corporate world

I am writing to you as a newly minted rebel. My main purpose in life is to take your best, your brightest, most creative, hard-working and passionate employees and sneak them out the hallways of your large corporation so that they are free of the yoke of lethargy, oppression and resentment.

The 10 “do’s” and “don’ts” outlines in this blog are brilliant. If I had met a manager that followed even half of these, I might still be working in a large corporation. It’s just too bad that such people are few and far between.