I do a lot of work with spreadsheets. Some are pretty simple, and I can inspect them by hand. Some are enormously complicated – hundreds of rows, dozens of columns, etc. It’s not practical to inspect/test them manually. Enter ExceLint. It’s an add-in to Microsoft Excel that “lints” a spreadsheet. (A “linter” is a program…

The PRQL project provides a simple, powerful, pipelined SQL replacement. To make it easier to share the development environment, there is a Dev Container that bundles the dozens of components into a single container. This makes it easier for new person to start using the project: they don’t have to collect the proper (sometimes conflicting)…

I regularly record public meetings in my town and post them on Youtube. This allows residents who could not attend the meeting in person to see what occurred. It also supports creation of accurate minutes. I like to add a label (showing the committee name and date) and a timecode (a running clock showing the…

I was playing with ChatGPT and Klavier.ai the other day. It purports to import documentation so that you can ask questions about it. I let it read in the PRQL Language Book, and you can see the rest of my experimentation at the PRQL site.

I can no longer bring myself to write bare SQL – PRQL makes building queries so easy. I have become enamored with PRQL – Pipelined Relational Query Language, pronounced “Prequel”. It’s a simple, powerful, pipelined SQL replacement. From the PRQL Github page: Like SQL, it’s readable, explicit and declarative. Unlike SQL, it forms a logical…

I had some data in SQLite, and wanted to sort on the columns (and on a pair of columns). I really like DB Browser for SQLite because it’s free, powerful, has a nice GUI. It turns out that a stable sort on multiple columns is easy, but not well-documented. Here’s the how you do it:…

I recently gave a talk to the local Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee Linux User Group describing some similarities between Docker and Ansible. Both give you a repeatable configuration by executing some sort of script of actions. Here is a link to the slides I used for the talk. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1W_vEPSZ-rhareK5q56pd10m2Y7JT2mc-LxrHAE6yaSI/edit#slide=id.g14247b9f80b_2_75 Update: March 2023 – I recently learned about…

What a crock! How badly documented can a facility be? There are lots of tutorials on the basics of Microsoft Mail Merge, but there is a dearth of information for the INCLUDEPICTURE facility to include images, especially if the images are retrieved from a link/url. That said, I needed to use it for a project…

I continue to enjoy using Docker to encapsulate developer tooling so that it doesn’t pollute my laptop with varying versions of software I don’t use regularly. (See Jonathan Bergknoff’s Run More Stuff in Docker and Andrew Welch’s Docker for all the things for further justification.) In addition to using Andrew Welch’s vitejs-docker-dev project for Javascript…