Jobserve Alchemy virus

I’ve been keeping an eye out for a contract on the (UK IT industry) default standard website Jobserve.

They have a ’service’ called Alchemy, where they email you details of any jobs they have on their database which are like ones you apply for.

It’s doing my head in!

I’m getting half a dozen emails a day, and there seems to be no way to turn it off. I’ve deleted as much info as I can from their site, if it doesn’t calm down I’ll have to delete my whole profile, or maybe change my email address. They give you the option to pause emails for a day, month or 3 months, but no options to FOAD.

It wouldn’t be so made if it wasn’t so dumb – ‘oh look he once applied for a job in Edinburgh – send him an email about any job in Edinburgh’ SAS? Me?

What a crap design, they have a really intrusive ‘feature’ that you can’t turn off. WTF?

.

That’s it!, just got another, I have unregistered myself. what a load of rubbish. Its never been this bad when I have used it in the past.

Are you having the same problems?

cheers

Simon

Super Computing with Excel

I guess its one of lifes little mysteries how Microsoft can put a childish toytown interface on Excel, yet at the same time re-engineer its deepest scariest innards to work in High Performance Computing Clusters. (Noddy and Big Ears go to a 20 node teraflop cluster?)

Anyway its a very interesting proposition, and note this is different to Excel services. This is the full client operating as part of a cluster. This will allow (certain) VBA to be parallelised. This is a big deal. I understand there are a few restrictions on the features this new approach will support but it still sounds massive. (for restrictions think along the lines of current restrictions for UDFs.)

There are now a somewhat confusing array of Excel/Server products, not all of which are endowed with Magnificent Microsoft Margeting Monikers yet.

There is Excel services that lets you stick a workbook on Sharepoint and let people access and modify their version of it via a browser. This does not support VBA, it is well connected with .net instead. In 2010 ES gets some big updates, one of the most useful being the ability to load a workbook with unsupported features and let ES do what it can. In O2007 ES would only work with .xlsx for example, in O2010 you can use an .xlsm with VBA, it will load and the grid part will work. The VBA and other unsupported features won’t work but they don’t force you to use 2 versions, full fat and ES approved anymore.

There are the web apps, I don’t know anything about them. But I assume they are a limited browser based clunky pale reflection of the real office client.

There are thread safe xlls that can be offloaded to a cluster, this is an extension of the multi threaded calc in E2007.

And there is this new richer cluster feature which isn’t quite putting the full client on a server but it allows you to offload certain calculation and VBA activities to a cluster. I’m not sure the full feature set is settled yet but it sounds just the job for massive simulations where you pump in some numbers, calc some stuff, hold some intermediate results then load some new numbers etc etc.

There is some other good stuff in 2010 that I’ll be talking about as time goes on, in particular the development story.

I’d have more to say but I hosed my TP build to make way for the Beta, only to have major external drive hassles trying to install it. So currently I don’t have a working 2010 (or 2007 actually). Ooops!

cheers

Simon

Office 2003 Info Rights fixed

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned an issue I had seen in the newsgroups of folks being locked out of their Information Rights Management protected workbooks.

Opinions seemed to be mixed between ‘never heard of it’ and ‘would never used it’. But a few people did and they got burned in November when it all stopped working and they were locked out of their own files.

Anyway the issue is now apparently resolved by renewing an Office crypto certificate, full info and download available here. If you apply this fix please let us now if it does indeed resolve the problem, or not.

cheers

Simon

Wot, No Spreadsheets? – very OT

I’m gutted that spreadsheets don’t seem to have been implicated in the Climate Research Unit excitement. why read_me_harry.txt instead of read_me_harry.xls?

Spreadsheets are ok for amateur mistakes, but pros use Fortran?

I’m also a little disappointed that the Government Broadcasting Company (BBC) doesn’t seem to be applying its normally fairly balanced reporting to this area.

I’ve had to switch to the Telegraph (FFS) to get some balance. And maybe even the Express!!

Over the last few months I have become more and more sceptical about the motivations and justifications for some of the stuff done ‘to save our planet’. Over the last few weeks I have become more and more sceptical about mans influence on the climate. Over the last few days I have become very sceptical that the research is fit for its current purpose.

As it happens I bought a new USB portable drive last week – 320Gb for 60 quid – I am amazed the CRU couldn’t find a similar amount to prevent the ‘loss’ of their ‘critical to the survival of mankind’ data, out of their alleged budget of 20 million.

What is your take on whether our activities are causing, or about to cause catastrophic changes to our planets climate? And what should we do about it?

Seems to me if the intention was to genuinely cut CO2 rather than fund their mates in ‘green’ industries and carbon trading the govt would be pushing for:

• Those that can to work a min of 2 days a week from home
• encourage local sourcing of everything where possible
• encourage the extending of the lifetime of any and all equip
• reforesting where ever possible
• Local community based power generation

As it is it just looks like they are trying to move us away from oil without actually explaining why. And keep their coffers full of course.

For info here is a climate change is our fault website

Here is a climate change is normal website

Here is a WSJ article highlighting the broader concerns raised by the recent fun.

So a couple of guidelines then feel free to add you view below.

This is a fairly heated topic so I’ll moderate comments pretty tightly. The discussion is about the validity of the claim that human activity is the cause of changing climate. Comments in that area are welcome.

Personal attacks, nonsensical arguments and deceptive statements are not, I’ll delete these and publish the reason for your information.

Please keep your comments short and on topic and as polite as possible.

Irrelevant stuff like references to your own or others ‘green’ credentials etc will also go in the big round file.

Don’t feel compelled to comment, I’ll keep comments open for a day orso then close them to ease the moderation. After that if you want to comment just email me and I’ll add it.

Have fun… (and play nice)

cheers

Simon

Netbook market is 125% of Netbook market

Looks like someone has been using a spreadsheet to calculate the market share of various operating systems in netbooks. (If it was fortran it would be worse – but we’ll save that joke…)

Microsoft claim 93% run Windows, and yet these guys reckon 32% run Linux.

So thats a 125% (added in my head) market – wowzer. Thats some kind of rounding error.

Dell reckon about 33% of their netbooks ship with Linux. so perhaps MS have picked up a (‘accidentally non representative’) sub market in their stats.

I find this really interesting because I thought the netbook world was going to make Linux mainstream, but somehow it never quite panned out. Win XP got a reprieve and somehow Linux netbooks became hard to get hold of. Almost like the whole Linux thing had been a marketing ploy to get MS to negotiate the OEM price of Windows.

We are delighted with the Linux netbooks we have here, for the kids especially.  You can leave them to roam around and all the scareware prompts showing Vista security warnings and goading them to click to install malware are easily ignored.

Have you got a netbook? what OS are you running?

We have Linpus and Ubuntu.

cheers

Simon

Next Monday: D Day for SOX gravy train

It seems some legal beagles in the US are taking the organisation behind Sarbanes Oxley to court on the basis that the way it is set up is unconstitutional.

Whilst mainstream IT think about that from a security industry POV there is the infant spreadsheet management industry to consider too.

SOX, and section 404 in particular have been used to encourage organisations to take some responsibility for their crappy spreadsheets. Ideally they would de-crappify them, but in my experience companies prefer just to list them and claim they are now ‘managing them’.

It will be interesting to see what, if any, impact this legal challenge has, I think the current mood is for more legislation and control (Certainly in the UK!). But maybe those that claim SarBox has damaged US business competitiveness will hold sway.

I have seen a few remediation/migration type roles on Jobserve recently so maybe orgs are taking this seriously now. There are a lot of ingrained habits to change though.

Are you getting much SOX/Remediation business?

cheers

Simon

Bloody Office Marketplace

So today after several months of faffing around I finally did some codematic website updates. Including finally doing some product landing pages as required to be listed on Office Market place.

I have been selling software for over a year now via the Codematic website and for most of that time I have been thinking I must get around to applying to get listed at OMP. Obviously with it being Microsoft there are a few irritating hoops to jump through, enough for me to put it on the back burner, but actually not that hard when I came to it.

So you can imagine the ranting and raving at the Smurfplex having finally sorted my pages to go and try and register and find out registration has been suspended until the spring of 2010! Bunch of Arse! As an indication of the amount of procrastination on my behalf – they suspended new applications in September!

In my defence though I normally cruise t’intarwebs in stealth mode with javascript disabled, enabling it is what gave me the ’suspended’ news. Bugger!

Anyway,

If you are moving to Excel 2007 and want to maintain your 2003 levels of productivity then you may well benefit from the excellent Classic Tab, details here.

If you are moving to Office 2007 and want your FileSearch object VBA code to keep working, you may want to get hold of AltFileSearch, the magnificent drop in replacement for the removed FileSearch object.

If you are fed up of being locked out of worksheets because you have forgotten the password, or don’t have time/patience to wait for the slow old VBA password removers then you should consider the wonderful ultra fast worksheet unprotector, details here.

All are very good value for money, free trial versions are available as is a full money back guarantee.

I am thinking I might have to reduce my session on the Office Marketplace at the Excel dev conf in Feb!

Seriously, putting it into perspective- this is even worse than the Apple iPhone app approval farce. I can only assume OMP not really that important/useful, at least to Microsoft. Did you ever buy anything via there?

If you got in with your product listing before the lockdown, are your servers buckling under the strain of all those highly qualified leads looking to splash the cash? Or was demand so great you had to migrate your fulfilment infrastructure to the cloud?

Any suggestions for other (sensible) marketplaces for listing/selling Excel/Office add-ins?

cheers

Simon

Commercial Excel Add-in Clinic

I am thinking of running a one day event designed especially for people wanting to wrap up their add-ins or spreadsheets for commercial distribution.

Basic agenda would be anything and everything to do with taking some dodgy gizmo you wrote for yourself and polishing it into a saleable jewel.

So things like,

• assessing the market
• decent design and coding
• Packaging your add-in for release
• providing helpful help
• Pricing advice
• Marketing strategy
• distributing and collecting payment
• updating and patching
• protecting your intellectual property
• internationalisation (i18n)
• etc etc anything from deep technical to broad business issues

Initial thoughts are for a 1 day event, smallish group, probably less than 10, maybe as many as 20? At this stage I am thinking Jan or Feb 2010, probably in Londinium, not because I like crap expensive hotels and lots of travel, but because no one would come up to Carlisle. Style would be a mix of seminars, lectures, informal discussions and question and answer sessions.

It would be a chargeable event probably around 300 gbp per person, and I’m thinking of offering some free places to well known Excel bods.

What do you think?

is it something you can imagine people attending? would you want to present or lead a slot?

I’ve had a few queries in this area recently which is what makes me think this may have a bit more momentum than the (non free) beginner level user conferences. I think it maybe worth a punt for a small conf room for a day.

Anyway, leave a comment with your thoughts or drop me an email

cheers

Simon

Information presentation

Not one of my strengths but I like this graphic on the beeb – do you?

That Iraq war looks expensive – good job it is (was?) thoroughly, fairly and honestly justified hey? ;-) (beeb again)

cheers

Simon

 

 

Sunny Cumbria

It seems the media is intent on debunking my climate claims for Cumbria.

Thanks for the concern for those that have been in touch to check we are not affected by the floods. Fortunately (for us) we are not, in fact we are about as far away as you can get in Cumbria from Cockermouth etc. They have had over a foot (300mm!) of rain in 24 hours – across a wide area.

It’s grim oop north as we say!

I’m not saying its not wet or owt:

Here is me after my dinner time ride today – on my way to hose down the bike, and my legs! (those shoes (and socks) aren’t normally brown btw) The photo doesn’t do justice to just how wet it is, I was, or how cold my feet were – I’m only just regaining feeling.

Still – beats working for a living right?

(I know purple is a fashion crime, but I think there is an exception for those over 40 still participating in non armchair sports)

What’s the weather like at yours?

cheers

Simon