Archive for the ‘Misc’ Category

OpenOffice Conversion, Take 3

At this time of year for the last two years, I’ve tried converting away from MS Office to OpenOffice for work. Start of quarter is usually a good time to try these things, and start of year more so.

The last two years, I had to give up, primarily because of poor compatibility between Impress and Powerpoint. However, I’ve had so many compatibility issues between Powerpoint and Powerpoint recently, that I’ve decided to give it another shot.

So starting now (or whenever the download finishes), I’m going to try and kick MS Office again. Almost cold turkey, not sure yet how to deal with Outlook and Exchange, but for the rest I’ll be using OpenOffice as long as I can. I’ll report back here as I go, but any pointers will be most welcome.

Incremental Searching in the Delphi Object Inspector

The sound of a massive forehead slap reverberated around my office earlier today. I think you can still see finger marks on my head.

I’ve been using Delphi for around 13 years, since sometime during the beta program for Delphi 1. I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know everything about the product, but I’ve always tried to learn keyboard shortcuts and anything that will help me navigate my way around the IDE. Even now when I don’t code day-in-day-out, I’m pretty sure I could show an experienced Delphi guy a thing or two.

However, my pride has taken a bit of a dent. I was suggesting some features to the Delphi team today. One of the features I was requesting was incremental filtering  of properties in the Object Inspector, like you can do currently with the Tool Palette. I’ve already mentioned here before that I love the Tool Palette filtering, so much so that I’ve written OpenTools add-ins to let me use it on more stuff. So, I figured this would really help me when I’m having trouble finding a property (especially when the Object Inspector is not sorted alphabetically)
Well, while the filtering isn’t there today, turns out incremental search is, and has been for, oh, 13 years or so (ie. since Delphi 1). Doh!

So here goes, I’m either about to discover that I’m the only Delphi user in the universe who doesn’t know this, or the sound of forehead slaps is about to echo around the world.

  • Press F11 until you have the Object Inspector selected.
  • This will have the caret positioned in the "value" bit of the Object Inspector (ie. the right hand column where the property values go, not the left hand column where the name of the property is).
  • That’s not where we want it, so press the TAB key to position the caret in the "name" column
  • Start typing the name of the property you want. The selection will move down to the closest matching property name as you type.
  • Pressing TAB again will move the caret back to the "value" column so you can start editing the property value.

Here’s a little movie to show you it in action.

So assuming some of you didn’t know this, I’m glad my embarrassment has served some useful purpose 🙂

Liveschool in Sydney – Digital Sandpit

A few weeks back I went along to the free Digital Sandpit class run by Liveschool here in Sydney.

I was unsure how much I would get out of it, as I mostly use Live for guitar-based stuff, and have only skimmed the surface on a lot of the product. However, Adam Maggs, one of their instructors, did a great, informal 90 minutes or so on ‘Making Monster Synths", along the way delving a bit deeper into Simpler and also a few other tricks using Utility. It was also really useful just watching someone with a deep understanding of the product. You can pick up heaps of info just as they navigate around. I had to stop myself a number of times from exclaiming "Oh, I didn’t know you could do that!" (actually, I’m not sure I did stop myself every time)

I came away having learnt a bunch, and with a number of things I want to try and apply. These guys also do courses and private tuition, and if the free session is any indication, it would definitely be worth a look.

Very highly recommended.

Radiohead, NIN and the end of the Music Industry as we know it?

It’s been an interesting few weeks in the music business.

Firstly, Radiohead announced that they were accepting pre-orders for a download version of their new album, In Rainbows. The interesting thing is that they are allowing the purchaser to set the price they are willing to pay, from nothing on up (plus a small processing fee). Their spokesperson came out a few days later and said that most people were paying an amount "similar to what would be charged at a retailer", and not just pinching it for free. I have no idea if that’s true or not. If I were a cynical person I’d say it sounds like something a spokesperson for the band would say regardless. Another explanation might be that so far it has been self selecting, as the folks who are pre-ordering are possibly hardcore fans rather than casual listeners, and are more disposed to giving one of their favourite bands some money.

All that aside, interesting move.

Then, Trent Reznor, who for all intents and purposes is Nine Inch Nails, announced that he has fulfilled the obligations of his contract, and is now effectively without a record label. He’s more than hinted at the fact that he may not be looking for another one anytime soon, as he is now "able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate."

Of course, this has sparked the expected "We don’t need no stinkin record companies anymore!" articles, which probably overstate the situation. All this has really shown us is that established artists probably can now more easily do without some of the support of their labels.

But I think it’s a mistake to assume to much about what this means for artists who are just starting out. Even in this age of social networked everything, for the most part record companies are still going to be the source of most of the marketing clout that artists will need to get noticed. Sure, there are artists like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah who have proven quite successful at breaking through without label support, but I suspect these are the same type of people who would have had the drive and smarts to do this anyway. These are the same types of folks who 15 or 20 years ago were selling demo tapes and then CD’s at their gigs as a way of building some momentum, who were smart enough to be engaging with local street press and promoters, etc. The available avenues of promotion may have expanded., but just as back then, the number who actually succeed will be small compared to the number who are trying.

For a band to really become successful, they’ll still need good marketing. For them to embark on a tour of any significant size, they’ll need logistical support. Well, the people who currently do that are, for the most part, probably going to be those who’ll continue doing it. Record Labels.

As much as I’d like to be wrong, I don’t think this is going to fundamentally change the music industry.

However, all of this is going on at the same time that many are pronouncing the "Death of DRM", with Amazon opening their DRM-free music store, Microsoft announcing the new Zune store will be DRM-free, and even Apple making some DRM-free tracks available on ITunes. So while I don’t think we’re witnessing a massive shake up, I am optimistic that we might finally see the record industry dealing with the realities of how people consume music today, rather than simply railing against it.

And yes, I did pre-order the Radiohead album, and yes, I did pay for it.

The Darker Side Of Newtown – A Self Guided Tour For The Misguided

The National Trust of Australia have released a fascinating little booklet called The Darker Side Of Newtown – A Self Guided Tour For The Misguided. Author Rebecca Ward has been combing through the history of the Newton area and has collected together all sorts of strange and disturbing little tales, tales of hauntings, murders, strange deaths and other weirdness, then researched the locations as they exist in present day Newtown and put together a self guided walking tour in a booklet. It’s only $5, and while I only picked mine up this morning, I already really want to go and check out some of these places. At night of course 🙂

This is the description from the back of the book:

Read about the local hoaxer Henri Grien who fooled the world as Louis De Rougemont. Find where the notorious Baby Farmers – the Makin family – lived and murdered the children in their care. Who poisoned the Constables wife? Where was Dr Vauses private insane asylum?
And what’s buried under Camperdown Memorial Rest Park…..”

Supposedly you can order it from the National Trust of Australia’s website, however I couldn’t find it there. Instead, you can pick up a copy at Le Cabinet des Curiosities in Enmore for $5, all proceeds going to the National Trust.

Storm Botnet : The Rise of the Machines?

Bill Schneier has an interesting write-up about the Storm worm/botnet/virus/trojan/thingumy. I can’t help but be massively impressed with this from a purely technical perspective. As someone mentioned in the comments, "Why does evil have to be so awesome?".

Anyway, it made me think about the myriad of sci-fi books and movies over the years based on the premise of computers achieving "greater than human" intelligence, then rising up and over-throwing humans. Most of the ones I can think of assume that the evil genius computer would be born in some giant corporate conglomerate, or out of government military research, or some such. What’s disturbing is I find it much easier to believe that it could instead come out of some "son of storm"-style botnet. Especially when you read that whoever controls the Storm botnet has up to 50 million computers doing their bidding. Ask Estonia’s Defence Minister what he thinks.

Skynet anyone?