Jilles’ weblog

Some forums have a really good signal to noise ratio, and the Joel on Software boards are on of those. Right now there is a really interesting discussion happening on “what little software secrets do you know that noone seems to know?”

The entire discussion can be found here: http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.394956

But let me highlight a few excerpts of handy material:

Just type =rand() anywhere in your [Microsoft Word document] to autocreate a block of text. For more text, pass it a numeric parameter like rand(2). 200 appears to be the max value.

Or, how about when all the capitalization is wrong in your word document?

Fix capitalization in Word:

Highlight the text, and press Shift+F3 until desired result. It allows you to select from All Caps, No Caps, Proper Case and Title Case. Much better then erasing the sentence and re-writing it.

Or for our webdevelopers out there:

In Firefox, if you are working on a page and just care about the HTML source of that file, simply open the source once, and then refresh the source only (similar to a webpage: with CTRL+R), instead of reloading the whole webpage and then view source again.

And for our Windows developers:

When [you] have a messagebox (a.k.a alert box) hitting CTRL-C will copy the text of the messagebox to the clipboard.

And I was allways doing CTRL-ALT-DEL, T to get to the task manager, but this tip is even faster:

Ctrl+Shift+Esc opens up the task manager.

I have something similar like the tip below. For example I can type “ci 12556″ and it will show check in 12556 in Trac. Or I can type “bug 432″ and it will show me bug 432 in my bugtracking system. However, I constructed that allways by hand, here is an easier way to do it:

In Firefox,

-Go to the main page for this group.
-In the search box, right click and choose “Add a keyword for this Search…”
-Name it “Joel” (or whatever you want)
-Keyword = “jos” (or whatever you want)
-OK

Now in the address bar, type “jos hungarian” and it will show you all results for hungarian in these groups.

There you go, hope there was one tip there that you found usefull!

Recently made a few purchases, without doing so much as leaving the house. I really love how that works, really convenient.
First off, I bought a new black, 2nd generation iPod Nano 8GB. I don’t have a ultra large music collection, but I really like the device’s design (duh!) and experience.

(Clicking on the above image will take you to an annotated version)

Second up, I am completely addicted to Lost nowadays and I just finished the 1st Season, so I bought the first part of Season 2 second hand off of Marktplaats.nl. I am anxiously not putting it in the DVD player because I know it will be a ~15 hour time drain instantly.

And last but not least my first shipment of new books came in from Amazon, including:

All except the “The Book of Atrix Wolfe” book came in, which I bought second hand on Amazon.com. You can see my entire book collection at: http://ojilles.listal.com/owned/books (RSS feeds are available there as well).

All this should keep me quiet for a little while…

Herewith a small post, that I will probably revisit later, about my Ski plans for the upcoming season 2006-2007. See the below Google Map indicating the four places that I am most likely going to visit.

Can’t wait to start skiing again! As I said, I’ll probably do a another post describing the exact plans and updating the map with images and the like.

Update: (2007-06-16). The one in Val Thorens didn’t pull through, as it was really close to the one in Zermatt and proved to be logistically improbable. Anyway, 3 ski trips in one season is really helping your condition on the slopes. Definately recommended!

In a recent blogpost, Edward de Leau talks about his notion of “Leanardo” — the person that is primarily responsible for innovation. I tend to agree in principle that these persons are really scarce, and even if you know someone then there is still timing to wreak havoc.

Edward goes on by providing 3 innovative ideas which he intents to revisit in a few years time to see if some came to frutation. In my blogpost I try to make a shortcut and safe Edward a few years:

1 - A site that will crawl the internet in search of structured data (XML) of products that are being sold. After the aggregation, the business model would be similar to existing classifieds sites including features, monitizing eye balls and Google AdSense.

However, such an application already exists. Instead of forcing people to write XML files and put them on a server, EdgeIO allows people to make blog posts on their already existing blogs and aggregate that. Additional revenue stream is redistributing the aggregated content “EdgeSense“.

2 - A Todo list site that brokers between people without time and with time.

This one I have not seen yet in the form I think Edward is seeing this. I envision a generic Todo site like Tadalist, including its “share todo” feature, but then with price brokering system where the person who has the Todo and the person that is willing to execute the Todo can agree a price (and potentially setting up an Escrow service).

3 - A meshup between Google Earth and anything else with a physical location.

GlobeAssistant is a company providing technology to stream locations out of your database into a users Google Earth application. A prime example is the leading Dutch Real Estate site Funda.nl (try this link if you have Earth installed).