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The Droid we're looking for

Mark Gibbs — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:00:00 +0000

Just in: The Motorola Droid. I'm just at the first impression stage but I like what I see (this may be the droid we've been looking for).

The obvious comparison is with, of course, the T-Mobile G1 manufactured by HTC. Motorola's late entry into the Android, AKA "Googlephone", market has allowed it to produce a more powerful and sophisticated product.

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More randomness and the Synology Rackstation RS409+

Mark Gibbs — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 05:00:00 +0000

In a recent column about my efforts to generate a random sequence of numbers from 1 to 75 I described how I resorted to a labyrinthine system of Web services and proxies because I couldn't figure out how to do it with Excel without resorting to a VBA script.

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STFW, fix Pipes, and repair Mac disks; voila!

Mark Gibbs — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 05:00:00 +0000

The next time someone asks you a question and you know they haven't bothered to do the obvious, to wit, look it up on Google, send them a link to Let Me Google That For You. For example, if someone were to write to me and ask if there's an archive of Gearhead columns, I might reply with "Try this link: http://tinyurl.com/yfg33ty". Voila!

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On Linux and random numbers

Mark Gibbs — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 04:00:00 +0000

Look, I hate to bring this up, but there's something we need to discuss: Why haven't I heard from you recently? (No, not you, you've been in touch. It's this guy over here … ) Really, is it too much to ask that you put pen to paper … oh, all right, fingers to keyboard … and tell me what's on your mind?

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Is it reality or is it augmented?

Mark Gibbs — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 04:00:00 +0000

Augmented reality is becoming a big deal. What started as an interesting, albeit geeky, application of technology is starting to find real-world uses that are impressive, not to mention way cool.

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The Revolution will be programmed, Part III

Mark Gibbs — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 04:00:00 +0000

In last week's column (which was online only) I continued my exploration of a cool programming system called Runtime Revolution, focusing on the tool's object-oriented, event-driven architecture. This week we'll look at the product's English-like language, a style referred to as "candygrammar" by some cynics.

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The Revolution will be programmed, Part II

Mark Gibbs — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 04:00:00 +0000

Last week here in Gearhead I started to discuss a fascinating and powerful programming system called Revolution.

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The Revolution will be programmed, Part 1

Mark Gibbs — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 04:00:00 +0000

When someone describes someone else as "long in the tooth" you know what they mean: That the target of the soubriquet is getting on in years.

OK, but do you know where that phrase comes from? The answer is from the horse world: Horses' teeth grow throughout their lives and, despite getting worn down by chewing hay and such, horses show progressively more enamel as they age. Thus, you can roughly tell the age of a horse from how "long in the tooth" it is. Now you know.

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Putting Yahoo Pipes to work

Mark Gibbs — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 04:00:00 +0000

Last week I began discussing Yahoo Pipes, a service provided by (as you might have guessed) Yahoo. This service is designed to route and transform data taken from one or more online sources and generate an output in RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0 (RDF), JSON and Atom formats.

I discussed the range of input source choices (generically referred to as "feeds") for Pipes, now I want to cover what you can do with the data.

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Improving Excel and Yahoo Pipes

Mark Gibbs — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 04:00:00 +0000

Microsoft Excel is brilliant. Except when it isn't. And a major place where it isn't is when you have an Excel spreadsheet with a number of cells containing strings (any sequence of ASCII characters) and you wish to concatenate all of these separate strings into one big string in another cell.

Excel does provide a function that, to the optimistic neophyte, would seem to do the job: It is, not surprisingly, called Concatenate.

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