Posted December 3rd, 2008 by Reed
Once upon a time, while cranking away at our Web Analytics presentation, Dave tried accessing our main data file. To his horror, he got the following message: “Excel cannot open this file. The file might have been damage or modified from its original format.” We tried opening the spreadsheet in Office 2008 and on the Windows version, but nothing worked. We even tried the “Recovery Toolbox For Excel” and that did absolutely nothing.
Though we eventually had to recreate all of our data, I’ve recently stumbled upon the fix.
A classmate (thanks Karl!) recently told me that Office Open XML documents (docx, pptx, xlsx, etc…) are essentially zip files containing all of the document information. So on a whim, I tried the following, and it recovered the file!
- Rename the Excel document so that it has a .zip extension
- When prompted, click “Use .zip”
- Double click to open the file
- Choose “Save as…” and save the file as either xlsx, xls, xlsb…the more the merrier
I hope this helps someone out! If the fix works, please add a comment to let me know.
Posted October 15th, 2008 by Reed
I just found out that my team will be progressing to the final round of the Omniture Web Analytics Competition! The judges will award a prize to the team that has the biggest fan support, so we need as many people there supporting us as we can get.
Here are all of the details:
Posted August 24th, 2008 by Reed
So it appears as though Apple includes a free file comparison application with developer tools.
Developer > Applications > Utilities > FileMerger
You can also highlight two files and perform comparisons on the fly.
After highlighting your two files, go to Finder > Services > FileMerge > Compare Files
If anybody knows how long this feature has been available, let me know!
Posted August 12th, 2008 by Reed
For a while, I thought Gmail was acting up, but I found a quick fix to this problem. In the menu bar, select Mailbox, Take All Accounts Offline, then bring them back Online, and finally Synchronize All Accounts.
Posted August 4th, 2008 by Reed
I got a little sick of the old orange theme, so I decided to give “elegance” a shot. It took a bit of tweaking to get it to display correctly, but I think it looks nice! Unfortunately, the search bar doesn’t work, and the theme seemed to nuke some of the site’s functionality. No big deal - I don’t think anyone ever used the browsing buttons anyway
So what do you think? Should we keep the new theme around?
Posted July 28th, 2008 by Reed
Quick tip:
To take a screenshot on your iPhone or iPod touch, simply hold down the home button for about two seconds, then tap the power button. Then take a peek at your Camera Roll to find your image.
Posted July 28th, 2008 by Reed
I’m sure most web developers have come to hate the variety of layout engines that web browsers are built on. My site will look perfect in Firefox (Gecko) and screw up completely in Internet Explorer (Trident). Thankfully, the Web Standards Project is starting to push browser developers to comply to a set of best practices for how their browser displays pages.
One way that they’re (attempting) to do this is with Acid Tests. Both the Acid2 and Acid3 tests have become benchmarks for CSS compliance. Presto, WebKit, and Gecko have already made huge strides towards better browsing by making their layout engines render…righter
Unfortunately, Microsoft has no incentive to improve their browsing, as they have over 2/3 of the browser market under their belt.
Regardless, I’m very impressed with what MobileSafari has achieved in the latest iPhone/iPod Touch firmware release. A perfect rendering of the Acid3 test can be found here:
http://acid3.acidtests.org/
When I ran the Acid3 test, I came up with the following page:
Not bad! Especially when considering that Firefox 3.0.1 only scored a 71:
Posted July 24th, 2008 by Reed
Quicksilver has long been hailed as one of the best productivity tools available for Mac OS X. However, with Apple’s release of Leopard, (and the consequential beefing-up of Spotlight,) many users have uninstalled Quicksilver, and have never turned back.
Leopard’s upgraded spotlight can do some pretty neat tricks that were just a tad bit clunky in Quicksilver. For example:
- Calculator! (try cbrt(3) for some cube-root fun).
- Dictionary! Get definitions on the fly.
- Search email messages without opening Mail.
Despite all of these cool tricks, I haven’t quite given up on Quicksilver. There are two cool things that I did today that revived my faith in this awesome app:
Shell Command Hotkeys
I’m sure there are cool *nix ways to accomplish this, but here’s the Quicksilver way.
Step 1: Install the Terminal Plugin in Quicksilver
Step 2: Go to ‘Triggers’, click the plus button and select ‘HotKey’.
Step 3: In the field that says “Select an item”, type ‘.’ which will send you into text-mode. Then type the command you would like to run in the Terminal.
Step 4: Hit Tab to modify the Action field, and start typing “Run a…”. You can then use the arrow keys to select the appropriate action from the expanded list. If you’ve done everything correctly, you should see “Run a Text Command in Terminal” show up.
Step 5: Now it’s up to you to configure this custom trigger. Highlight your new command, and click the 
button to expand the options panel.
Step 6: Finally, bind your command to a Hotkey and you’re good to go!
Firefox 3 Bookmarks
Firefox 3 and Quicksilver don’t seem to play together nicely. If you’ve upgraded to the latest version of Firefox and Quicksilver won’t catalog your bookmarks, here’s a lil’ fix for you:
Step 1: In your address bar, type in about:config and accept Mozilla’s disclaimer.
Step 2: Using the filter, locate “browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML”
Step 3: Double click on this line to change its value from false to true.
Step 4: Restart Firefox, restart Quicksilver, and rescan to find your newly exported Bookmarks. Now that these are indexed, you can bind them to hotkeys, or use the launcher to get to ‘em.
Hope this helps!
Posted July 9th, 2008 by Reed
I was asked to give a brief tour of Xcode and Interface Builder at our monthly Cocoheads meeting last night. Here’s my segment:
http://www.viddler.com/explore/byucocoaheads/videos/1/
Huge thanks to Vara Software who provided us with a copy of Screen Flow. If you haven’t seen it already, you’re missing out! Screen Flow
Posted June 3rd, 2008 by Reed
Here’s your stupid Xcode trick of the day. This shortcut is gonna save me quite a bit of time:
To switch between the header (.h) and implementation (.m) files in an Xcode project, press:
Command-Option-UpArrow
My productivity just went up 400%.