Bits and Bobs

Excel follow-up

~ Heshsum ~ Leave a comment

Recently on Commit Strip, there was a post about a project management tool written in Excel. This, and another Excel comic from CS which I featured here reminded me to share a small story from a previous job. I work in logistics IT and had the pleasure of encountering many different companies, each of them with their own flair of “how things shall run”.

One of our clients has pretty specific requirements and had his whole transport management built in, you guessed it, Microsoft Excel and VBA.
But not enough, he also had a management software for returnable transport items, and it was developed in, you guessed it again, Excel and even more VBA.

Basically, the whole operation founded on a few spreadsheets that took eternities to load. But because their solutions didn’t scale that well, they wanted to switch to more profound solutions, at least for the transport item management.

Unluckily for us, they had some devious stuff running with other software (and even more Excel) which in the end meant we had to implement a middleware. Now guess what they opted for when it came to writing it…

Bits and Bobs 1

~ Heshsum ~ Leave a comment

There has’t been a blog post in a while. And that for a number of reasons. Nothing special happened to FreeNAS, luckily. I hope the guys take their time to build a very stable version 9.2.2.
Also, no new gadgets and busy time at work.

So I think this is a great opportunity to just dump all the stuff that has accumulated in my bookmarks and which I didn’t put in separate articles, like the HD live stream the ISS has since a few weeks:

Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream

 

Or the Linux command shelf, a structured overview of the most common Linux commands: http://linoxide.com/guide/linux-command-shelf.html

 

Here’s a nice german online shop for MacBook stickers: http://stickerlicious.de/

 

And then I found this assortment of beautiful low poly wallpapers: https://imgur.com/a/OgXb5

 

And for the last bit, I’ll leave this link to a rather interesting article on chargers: http://www.wired.com/2013/12/charging-devices-faq/?cid=15956254