Narangba Community

I just received an amazing package in the mail. Delivered to the door in fact. It had been kindly opened for us by Australian Quarantine – I think they thought we were hiding our cocaine in it. The smell of the chili would have confused the sniffer dogs no end.

Let me back track.

A few years ago I started reading www.reallivepreacher.com. I bought his book and read that as well. noticed that he was using Drupal to run his website. Some time later I ended up talking to Gordon and he expressed his frustration with where the site was at. I glibly offered to look at it for him – for free!. A couple of years later (actually I have no idea how much later) Gordon and I are really good mates. I have been working on his site for free all this time – something I love doing for him. In response he has been touting me around  both on his site and to people he knows. Between us we put together the ccblogs.org site. I say between us because he pulled the community together, I only built the site and provide backend support. We did another site www.materialmedia.net for a friend of theirs, Elizabeth. Jeanene now manages this site. Then we rebuilt Jeanene’s website www.gracefullthings.com. I did this for a nominal fee largely because of the ubercart shopping cart implementation we put in. I had never done this before and I treated this job as an R&D job. Well one thing led to another, and I did a bunch of stuff for Gordon and Jeanene that they think took me a lot of time :)

Jeanene hinted that she wanted to send Judith a necklace as a thank you. I replied and asked her to include a game that I couldn’t buy here and offered to pay for it. Jeanene wouldnt hear of it and said she would buy it for me as thanks.

A few weeks went by but the package just didn’t come. I wondered why. Then a sneaky  little email from Gordon let me in on the secret. Jeanene was stocking the package with Texas Goodies for us. and not just going and buying the first thing she saw.

Here is a list of all the amazing things that arrived today:

• 2 necklaces - beautiful hand crafted necklaces from www.gracefullthings.com
• 2 bags of Mexican chewing gum
• A large bag of Arbol Chili Pods
• A small bag of  Whole Piquin Chili
• 2 bags of seasoning
• A jar of Tomato Garlic Salsa
• 2 goats milk candy wafers
• Pecan candy
• Mexican drinking chocolate
• Fritos original corn chips
• A recipe for cooking Texan Chili
• Sid Meiers Civilization IV – Colonisation

Wow!

Thanks very much Gordon and Jeanene.

I spent the last 4 days in New Zealand with my parents and siblings and their families. Unfortunately the rest of mine couldn't come for various reasons. While spending some time in a kayak yesterday we saw some frogs at the edge of the little lake. I was able to get the camera on the kayak – very carefully – and manoeuvre right up to the edge of the bank and snap some awesome shots – I even got a dragonfly landing on the frogs nose. I also snapped some shots of a tui feeding on the flax flowers. That was hard as these birds don’t sit still for more than about half a second. More shots on Flickr

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Wow!

Mooncake is real easy to use and fantastic.

Its only in Beta right now but its free. It uses the Microsoft SeaDragon DeepZoom technology combined with silverlight to build massive photos files into an easy to use web based interface.

See my sample below. Its easier to use than describe.

Basically I have added a collection of close up photos from my flickr account (all point and shoot to do this) and it creates a silverlight application using the deepzoom techniology.

What that means is that it only downloads the portion and resolution of the photos you are seeing. As you drill in by clicking to zoom in and shift clicking to zoom out it loads the resolution to view what you can see.

Its a great way to let your friends and family see your high res pics easily without requiring them download gigabytes of photos.

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I normally don’t suffer from tech woes – but – this week has been hell!

The good news is that is hasn’t affected machines I set up for clients. I set up 2 new laptops with no issues at all and delivered one – one to be delivered boxing day. Each of them has LiveMesh running successfully. When I delivered one last night I et up live mesh on their existing XP PC and synchronised their data. I then set up an old laptop of mine and a virtual machine (running in bootcamp on a Mac) and attempted to install live mesh. No joy. Tried reinstalling Vista 3 times each machine even using different SKUs. Each time Live Mesh fails to start. I have the Microsoft Live Mesh Tech Team looking at it now.

Then to top it off this morning I awake to find my backup production machine (from which I still haven’t transferred everything over to the new machine) sitting there with a blue screen of death. After restarting it and troubleshooting discovered that the main system OS which is a striped raid running on 10,000RPM drives wouldn't boot. Reason, the raid had a failed hard drive. Being a stripe there is no recovery from this. By the way – never set up your machine using a RAID Stripe for system OS unless you never store any data on that drive. I don’t. I do this to gain speed from my system. So I took both drives out, talked to the shop about the warranty, discovered that they don’t have these drives any more, they have been replaced by the 2.5” form factor drives. I will need to get it sent away and replaced. Being Christmas, that wont happen until early January now. So I whacked a 160GB drive that was sitting on my desk into the machine, booted from the Windows Home Server restore CD, (after disabling the RAID setup in BIOS), connected to the Windows Home Server and starting restoring my system. It is telling me 1 hour and 15 minutes remaining. What a blessing Windows Home Server is!

And I am trying frantically to get work one for clients before going off for my first holiday since February 2007 when I had 2 days holiday with the family and friends down at Kingscliffe in NSW. Christmas Day I fly to New Zealand to spend 3 days with my parents and siblings for a family reunion. I don’t want to think about what I need to do when I get back!

PS that’s not me in the picture – just some random lady I found when searching for tech problems. She sums up how I feel today!

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This cruise liner was docked in Sydney when I was there last week. Got this snap with my phone camera through the security fence.

There’s a chap in a dinghy doing something to the anchor – gives you some idea of the scale of the vessel. She looked awesome!

I realised that when I wrote the ISNA function article that I had never written an explanation of VLOOKUP. I want to write up explanations for a umber of other functions in the future like COLUMN, ROW, MATCH and INDEX followed by OFFSET. All these make lots of sense when you use them with the VLOOKUP function. So I though it best to start with this function. I will also say that everything I write about VLOOKUP here applies to HLOOKUP as well. the only difference is the orientation, that is VLOOKUP looks across columns from left to right, and HLOOKUP looks down rows from top to bottom.

The built in Excel Help is very good at helping with this function. However it doesn't point out many of the pitfalls than occur in common use.

The VLOOKUP function syntax has the following arguments (argument: A value that provides information to an action, an event, a method, a property, a function, or a procedure.):

• lookup_value  Required. The value to search in the first column of the table or range. The lookup_value argument can be a value or a reference. If the value you supply for the lookup_value argument is smaller than the smallest value in the first column of the table_array argument, VLOOKUP returns the #N/A error value.
• table_array  Required. The range of cells that contains the data. You can use a reference to a range (for example, A2:D8), or a range name. The values in the first column of table_array are the values searched by lookup_value. These values can be text, numbers, or logical values. Uppercase and lowercase text are equivalent.
• col_index_num  Required. The column number in the table_array argument from which the matching value must be returned. A col_index_num argument of 1 returns the value in the first column in table_array; a col_index_num of 2 returns the value in the second column in table_array, and so on.

If the col_index_num argument is:

• Less than 1, VLOOKUP returns the #VALUE! error value.
• Greater than the number of columns in table_array, VLOOKUP returns the #REF! error value.

• range_lookup  Optional. A logical value that specifies whether you want VLOOKUP to find an exact match or an approximate match:

If range_lookup is either TRUE or is omitted, an exact or approximate match is returned. If an exact match is not found, the next largest value that is less than lookup_value is returned.

Important: If range_lookup is either TRUE or is omitted, the values in the first column of table_array must be placed in ascending sort order; otherwise, VLOOKUP might not return the correct value.

If range_lookup is FALSE, the values in the first column of table_array do not need to be sorted.

• If the range_lookup argument is FALSE, VLOOKUP will find only an exact match. If there are two or more values in the first column of table_array that match the lookup_value, the first value found is used. If an exact match is not found, the error value #N/A is returned.

Common Uses of VLOOKUP.

I use VLOOKUP frequently – many times a day and in many different ways. While I am aware that there are limitations to how it works (more on these soon) in the following circumstances it performs well.

Example: I have 2 columns of the same data from two spreadsheets – different versions or different data sources. I want to know if all the data is in both spreadsheets, and if not which data is missing from which sheet. Typical scenarios include account codes from an accounting system, names from a payroll system, lists of suppliers or customers, lists of gas wells from a an engineers data collection sheet etc.

The data may be several hundred or thousand lines long – and it is not time efficient or practical to scroll up and down the two lists comparing them. Sorting them doesn’t necessarily work, and if there are duplicates then looking at the total number in each list isn’t going to help.

Solution: I would copy and paste the two columns of data into column A of two separate sheets in a temporary work book (or maybe work with it in the source files and delete my work afterwards). IMPORTANT: I would then sort each list in ascending order.

In column B of Sheet1 I would make a formula like so: =VLOOKUP(A1,Sheet2!$A:$A,1,FALSE). After filling this down for each item in column A It is very easy to filter out all the #N/A items. These are the items that do not appear in column A of Sheet2.

In Sheet2 Column B I would write a formula like so: =VLOOKUP(A1,Sheet1!$A:$A,1,FALSE). After filling this down for each item in column A It is very easy to filter out all the #N/A items. These are the items that do not appear in column A of Sheet1.

Example: I am trying to balance a set of data that is being summarised from a source set using SUMIF formulas to group the data into some top level values. The sum of these subtotals should equal the sum of the original data.

Eg RAW Sales data totals compared with the sum of the sales data by Salesman suing the SUMIF formula does not equal for some reason. I have checked and every line of raw data has a salesman’s name against it and each unique salesman’s name is being included in the subtotals. Or so I think. In actual fact there is a typo and there are some sales mans names that have an extra space after the name, or maybe a couple of letters transposed. This is a very common error and not easily located in a set of data of several thousand rows. (see a previous post about this problem)

Solution: Assume the salesman’s names from the raw set of data are in column A of Sheet1 and the sales values are in column B. Column C is blank. Column A of Sheet2 is the subtotals of salesman’s names (appearing once) with the SUMIF subtotals in column B.

In column C of Sheet1 I would enter a formula that compares the salesman’s name from column A against the subtotal page on Sheet2 like so:=VLOOKUP(A1,Sheet2!$A:$A,1,FALSE). Once again after filling down for all the data in the raw data sheet, I can filter on this column and any #N/A values will highlight the problems – spelling mistakes, extra spaces, etc.

That’s enough for this week. Next week I will continue on with more on VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP – more scenarios of day to day use of them, and some of the common traps, including why sorting is important.

Oh the things I do for you my gentle readers!

Some more nice cheeses were reviewed recently – and at the request of a reader the King Island Dairy Roaring 40’s blue cheese was selected.

I was expecting the cheese to be a raging stinky blue cheese – from the name I guess. However I was pleasantly surprised. The smell wasn't bad at all and the taste was awesome – very nice – I had it in sandwiches with hot chips and chicken – very nice!

The Mersey Valley Sharp and Crumbly series have been favourites in this house and the sweet chilli did not disappoint with kids who don’t even like sweet chilli eating it and declaring it their favourite cheese ever.

A very pleasant cheese.

The Dutch Spiced Gouda was a completely different flavour. I wasn't particularly enamoured of it, but Jude liked it and I said she could have the rest! It was sort of a weird dry dusty flavour. Cant explain it any better than that sorry.

As a special SpyJournal service to all our geek girl readers and followers I am letting you know that there is a discount on heels, wedges, flats and boots at the new online shoe store Therapy.

All the details are available on the Missy Confidential website who are announcing the discount. Missy Confidential have lots of good bargains and discounts, giveaways and promotions you can enter.

Therapy Shoes is excited to launch their new online store by offering all Missy readers 15% off.
During checkout, simply enter the code MISSY to receive your 15% discount.
Be sure to join the Retail Therapy Club and be the first to know about the season's hot new styles, sale items and special member discounts.
15% VIP Discount: Online offer for Missy Subscribers only and valid for unlimited pairs of shoes paid for in one transaction.

• WHEN
  Online offer from 10th Dec - 30th Dec, 08
• WHERE
  www.therapyshoes.com.au
• TIMES
  Online 24/7
• PAYMENT
  Visa / Master Card/ Bank card / amex

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Some of my take aways from this conference:

• Client apps should be experience first, tech second – e.g. they are built for the consumer to use – the back end stuff should be largely invisible.
• These apps should live on the cloud and be able to synch across devices and platforms invisibly.
• 3rd party extensibility is important.
• Authentication and login (including Open ID) on websites can now be performed using the exposed LiveID framework – 460 million LiveIDs in se on the net.
• Twitter back channels can liven up the day – thanks to @NickHodge, @laflour, @aussienick, @DamianM, @kiwitwitter and @JamesHip.
• RSS, ATOM, JSON, SOAP feed data is available from the LOE (Live Operating Environment) to describe changes, news etc from the LOE.
• Fiddler is a Web Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP(S) traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect allHTTP(S) traffic, set breakpoints, and "fiddle" with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler includes a powerful event-based scripting subsystem, and can be extended using any .NET language. Fiddler is freeware and can debug traffic from virtually any application, including Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and thousands more.

May be more but that will do for now.

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Potts Point is not as flash a place as it sounds. It is next to Kings Cross.

Don’t go to any Thai restaurants in the cross and expect to pay with EFTPOS or credit card – they all only take cash.

It is sad seeing how young the hookers are in the cross.

A 2 star hotel is rated that way for very good reasons – cheap and very basic – however it was clean.

Business class on a plane is much nicer than economy – but they still give you a dodgy plastic knife.

Live Mesh announces an update affecting all platforms

Windows Vista SP2 hits the streets today - Sarah has a full list of the enhancements and fixes in Vista SP2

Tony Morgan posts a though provoking piece with 10 reasons why he doesn’t like most Christians. I would agree with them all.

Rodney Olsen posted this cool video about technological and futuristic trends. I have added it here also.

WIN2K3 to SBS2008 migration – thanks to Susan the SBS diva

Google Chrome is getting an extensions framework – awesome news brought to us by Geeks are Sexy

Common Craft Explains Windows Live

The New Windows Live site has launched and is open for business

Check my site here.

Look at all these articles explaining the goodness:

Windows Live Wave 3 services launch today

Windows Live update ships: After years of waiting, we create a Group

Windows Live Wave 3: Homepage

Windows Live Wave 3: Photos

Windows Live Wave 3: SkyDrive

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On 1st November at dusk we were able to see the Moon (earths main moon – we have three actually), Venus and Jupiter form a smiley face configuration.

I got this photo of the unusual event.

I had to take the gas bottle of the BBQ today to be refilled. The underside is a haven for Redback spiders.

I got some great photos before squashing them and fumigating the under BBQ areas.

See more photos by clicking Read More

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The ISNA function is an Information Function. It is is used to return information about the status of a cell, or specifically another functions results. The most common use I have for this function is to validate the VLOOKUP function. If the VLOOKUP function is looking for a value that can not be found in the lookup range, then it will return #N/A as the result. Thus it is good to wrap that function in an IF Statement using the ISNA function to replace the #N/A results with something else – e.g. a text string such as “error” or maybe a zero.

=IF(ISNA(VLOOKUP(A1,$B:$B,1,FALSE))=TRUE,"error",VLOOKUP(A1,$B:$B,1,FALSE))

Remember the ISNA function returns a TRUE or FALSE. These equate to a 1 or 0 so can be used in formulas such as array formulas as well.

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I use a tag in my delicious account to identify sites that I want to share. I forgot. Here is a bunch of websites from back in January and February.

Blog and web design advice and tools from Virtual Hosting

• No More Comment Spam! 46+ Free Tools and Resources to Stop Blog Spammers
• Scientific Web Design: 23 Actionable Lessons from Eye-Tracking Studies

Skelliwag’s blogging advice

• A Complete Guide to Finding and Using Incredible Flickr Images
• Productivity by Elimination
• My #1 Tip for Creating Better Content: Write in Advance

Digital Inspiration Blogging Tips

• Download All Your Blogs with Blogger Backup, Easy Restoration

Robin Good’s Google Analytics Video Tutorial

• Analyze Your Web Traffic With Google Analytics: Video Tutorial

Minti (www.minti.com) Here is what they say about the site.

Minti is the most amazing site for parents I have ever come across. It breaks down the walls of social isolation that many parents face. The members are real people with real problems, and real solutions. Whether you are a parent of your first newborn baby, your teenage grandchildren are becoming difficult to understand, or you are planning a child and want to get a better idea what you can expect, Minti (www.minti.com) has the answers… or we will quickly find them for you!

mySyndicaat is a news mastering tool that allows you to retrieve, filter, mix and monitor content from remote content sources available on the web. Collected content is cached by mySyndicaat and can be retrieved later on either by using mySyndicaat content viewer, or by subscribing to is using any RSS 2.0-compliant RSS aggregator.

KeywordSpy is a search engine tool which tells you the exact terms and phrases that are driving the most traffic to your competitors' websites, helping you increase targeted traffic and lower your cost-per-acquisition.

Having worked for 72 hours last week and most of the weekend so far, it was good to take a couple of breaks. Saturday I went for a bike ride with the youth through the bush near here. After losing the slow riders early on the fast bunch went hard for an hour or so. I followed that up with hanging with our kids for a bit. We had some great laughs just hanging out. Today I went to church briefly (after a few hours sleep – didn’t stop to talk sorry) and came back home to work. At 4 PM I had finished a major piece of work and decided to take the kids to the park. We went to the lake and I have that story below. I actually ended up being there for 2.5 hours and took over 400 photos while I was there. All the good ones have been uploaded into Flickr in a couple of different sets. All the photos I uploaded are in the 20081130 lakewalk set. I also uploaded large versions of the close ups, mostly of birds, but also of the girls, into the Close Ups set. There are some really nice black and white shots of the girls there.

After playing in the playground for starters, we went exploring – Mercedes was the leader today. First we went out onto the bridge over the lake and looked at ducks, turtles, fish, dragonflies and lilies. I have been teaching them the value of sitting still and looking at what you can see sometimes. It is amazing what is right under your feet!

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Then we wandered through the untamed side of the lake (no smooth lawns or concrete paths) and ended up crossing a bit of a swampy area where we got muddy. That meant when we hit a long puddle it was time for splashing. I got the girls to line up and run toward me and got some awesome shots.

From there it was heading into that magic hour for photography and I was having a ball playing with the aperture settings. I got some great shots of a paper bark tree as well as some other trees.

Next thing a couple of ducks came right up to us. These things are real friendly and hung around us. I was able to get a bunch of really cool photos – I now have a extremely large ducks head staring at me from my 6 monitors!

I also took the chance to get some very tightly focussed closeup shots of the girls. I have uploaded these to flickr in colour, black and white and a blue black colour.

Heading away from the ducks as the sun was just setting we had the tops of the trees with sun light and lots of parrots flying around and eating seeds etc. I managed to get some shots, but they were much harder to get close to.

I also got some shots of white herons I was particularly happy with. The first pic was just after caching and eating a fish. No black swans today though.

Heading back to the car I was stopped by a chap who wanted to ask about us repairing his PC. The advertising works!

We picked up pizza and came home for dinner, then caught the escaped skinks before I got stuck back into work. Right now I am waiting for files to synchronise before doing the next job.

More yummy cheeses on the menu – and we enjoyed tasting these ones.

First up was a double Brie from King Island Dairy. This came ina little wooden box, made from very thin wood glued together. Open the image to see the larger picture and read the story of the King Island Dairy.

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The cheese itself was very smooth, cut very well, was not sticky, and had a very pleasant external mold, not dry and papery as some bries are.

It was a bit overshadowed by the plain rice cracker – not really a stand out performer on its own, though very nice. Today I had it on my sandwiches and it was very yummy mixed in there. I deliberately tasted this first as the most bland of the 3 cheeses being sampled.

The next was another Havarti, this time by South Cape. This was possibly even creamier in taste than the Mainland one we tried a couple of weeks ago, though a little more rubbery in texture.

The 3rd and final cheese (left to last because of its flavour, is a Trilogy – also by South Cape. This particular one contains Summer herbs, Vintage and sun dried tomato. A very nice mixture, the 3 different flavours balance each other nicely. This is a good cheddar. It was the hardest to cut, stick to the knife after slicing almost every time. Also the sun dried tomato bits caused the knife to not slice straight at times.

Summary: I had a very hard time choosing one cheese from this list. However the cheddar can only be stomached in small portions. The Havarti could be eaten all day long, and the brie makes for excellent sandwiches.

Mercedes is mad keen on bugs.

Pretty much any time of the day you can find her with a plastic cup or container with some sort of bug on it, or an insect. moth or spider of some kind crawling on her hand while she oohs and aahs over it.

Today she has a woodroach in a container with some dry dog food. It is her pet. She is going “Oh roach” and “come here roach” and having little conversations with it. I suggested she feed it to the dragons but she indignantly exclaimed - “No its my pet!”

Photo courtesy of InsectsAway

This mind map from Robin Good has to be the best this week  listing free or minimal cost online collaboration tools. Feel free to add missing tools (or contact Robin directly).

This week I have a few selected items from Amit over at Digital Inspiration.

• How to Make a Twitter Background Image with PowerPoint or Keynote
• How to Carry Your Google Reader Offline with Scoop, Supports Synchronization
• Scandoo allows you to check your website for potential misuse in comments etc by spammers. Simply type in your domain name using the site: identifier – e.g. site:spyjournal.biz.

Mostly Lisa has a photography contest – vote for your favourite photo on this page

Dana Coffey has a very good netiquette article – I fully agree with the Facebook application thing!

Xobni (an Outlook plug in I couldn’t live without now) has upgraded and has some cool new features. Their blog post is titled Xobni brings the internet into Outlook…4 ways your Outlook will never be the same. Includes integration with Facebook, LinkedIn, Hoovers and Yahoo Mail.

The Windows Live Photo and Video Blog has a nice easy all in one place list of plugins for the betas of Live Photo Gallery and Live Movie Maker including Facebook, YouTube, SmugMug, Flickr, Picasa and Drupal.

I installed Expression Blend and am going to use it to try and produce some Silverlight content if I can. I found this site to be a good source of video training for Expression Blend, and the other Expression web products. Microsoft also has a Learning Snacks page with helpful videos about Silverlight.

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