Long time no hear :)
I've been pretty busy lately and as a result this blog suffered accordingly. But at the same time, material was gathering and now I have quite a few things to say.
This post will just be an intro (to help me remember what I have prepared) :) so here's a kind of TOC tor the following posts:
1. First, I'll have to do a short rant on current economic crisis and the way EU + member governments are dealing with it. I just have to rant a little :D
After this I'll follow with some more useful posts, beginning with programming. Since I've had a request from a client to do a rather complex Excel application, I'll begin with that:
2. The first post will deal with Excel and using data queries in macros
3. The second will be about RTF to plain text conversion, also in an Excel macro
4. The third will be about multi line cell auto-sizing, since Excel doesn't quite cut it with it's standard functions
Although I had to research many aspects of Excel macro programming while I was doing this, these three seem worth publishing as the solutions for the particular problems were not readily available on the net.
5. Continuing with programming tips, I'll explain a rather simple method to increase data fetching speed from multiple SQL queries.
Last, but not least, I've been lax in posting about some hardware that I have tested, so you'll have my thoughts on the following:
6. Auzentech X-Fi Prelude 7.1 audio card
7. Zalman Reserator 2
8. Antec P182 computer case
9. To finish up, I have some code that allows one to sort huge amounts of data and still do it in their lifetime. I'm talking billions of records and hundreds of gigabytes of data. This one will take a bit since I have to clean the implementation specifics from the code, but eventually I'll post this too :). Bottom line with this code is that this code helped reduce some reporting from 48+ hours (data in SQL database) down to 20 minutes (data in custom files, but on the same server).
So here goes. Lots of work to be done. I'm hoping to have all these articles done in march, but one never knows :)
