Month: November 2008
A couple of great videos via Zbigniew
Avi Bryant’s powerful spreadsheet editor that remembers changes that you make by hand and can apply them in bulk to the rest of the lines in your spreadsheet. Note that Avi’s a Smalltalk guy, and a more primitive version of this (repeat last replace) has been in the Smalltalk environment for decades. Cool to see that Smalltalk ideas are still proving revolutionary 30 years later 🙂 (And cool of Avi to keep discovering them and taking them further)
Another way of doing something similar : Mass Edit which puts simultaneous editing cursors under the user’s command. Very clever. That’s from a video by David Huynh who seems to be involved in a lot of other neat research, like this mashup tool.
A Platform Wars post on spreadsheets.
Not making as much progress on SdiDesk.NET as I thought I would. How can Visual Studio 2008 be soooo S-L-O-W? I swear it takes between 30 seconds and minute both to start and stop(!!!) my program executing.
At least with punched cards you knew where you were.
Jocelyn Paine is one of the more interesting thinkers about evolving spreadsheets. Here’s some recent stuff about components in Google Sheet.
StackOverflow discusses how to keep notes about programming projects : paper notebooks win hands-down.
One Product Management rule Of The Day, that I try to impose, against resistance from most people, is Tasks that aren’t crucial don’t become more important with age. (Of course, if you have a paying client, “crucial” may be filtered via the Golden Rule.) Every task that takes more than 30min (even less?) should be evaluated against “is this the most important thing to do now?” (FoCus). Go ahead and stick that item on a To Do List. But it’s ok if it sits there forever.
A blog written on Google App. Engine.
I didn’t know some of these great Python features.