Cosine Jeremiah and his Musings

It is 2009, and it looks like the sky is falling. Perhaps it is, just a little. I think it is a good thing. How can I say that as people are losing their jobs? It is easy if you look at what will bring the greatest good to the greatest number of people. For too long our economy has suffered at the hands of large, lumbering creatures that do not care one whiff about you or anyone else—cold blooded monsters that would stab you in the back and kick your rotting corpse to the curb the minute it thinks you missed a payment due to its own poor accounting practices. I call these companies the dinosaurs. Those that will suffer the most in this down economy are the dinosaurs.

As the dinosaurs continue to fall, the need for the goods and services they have been providing up until now will not disappear. The people that previously fed the dinosaurs (customers and employees) will have new opportunities to feed another kind of creature that has always been around here and there but will explode in numbers to take care of the things dropped by the dinosaurs. These creatures are the mammals.

Mammals are good for economies. Most of them are small, light on their feet, and they are warm-blooded. They do not create a “Customer Loyalty” program to pretend they care; they actually do care, and that care is felt person-to-person in the dealings of business. Because mammals are typically smaller than dinosaurs, it is easier for them to operate closer to home. Your money stays local instead of going to Washington or New York. In the good times when Washington and New York are flush with cash, the dinosaurs are happy to re-invest it everywhere. As times turn ugly, they will cling onto your cash and your locale will see nothing coming back. This is why it is so hard to find a loan these days, even if your credit worthiness is really good.

I urge people to not wait for the dinosaurs they feed to collapse, but to invest today in the mammals available in your area. Your money will be going towards making your local economy more robust and better able to provide new jobs in your area as the dinosaurs continue to release personnel. Times will be tough for the next year or two, but in the end I want to look back at this time as the time of opportunity—our time for building a new kind of economy that will take care of us for time eternity.

Let me repeat one thing before I sign off: invest in your local mammals today. Feed them now so they will be strong enough to feed you back when you need them.

This morning I released AVLTree version 0.1.4. The difference from version 0.1.3 is an idea from modifications made to the code by the Samhain folks to improve performance.

If you are not familiar with my AVLTree project, it is a C library that implements AVL trees and provides an interface for indexing and iterating over objects. I like to think of it as my little C answer to the hashes and dictionary objects available in more advanced languages.

I wrote a little spreadsheet template language for Excel VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). What for? Say you have a report you create often, and you’re thinking of making a macro in Excel to help automate its generation. You want to report on the sales of your widgets from multiple locations, and you already have a template in mind for how the report should look:

Template of Widget Report in Excel

I thought it would be so nice to be able to do this that I wrote the VBA to do it. I call it TemplateKicker. To use it, I copy the TemplateKicker module and the TemplateKickerVariables class module into my spreadsheet from TemplateKicker.xls (this file also contains the example shown here). Then I write a macro to insert the values for each location I am reporting on:

Public Sub Widget_Report()
    Dim Vars As TemplateKickerVariables
    Dim LocationIDs As Variant
    Dim WidgetSales As Variant
    Dim Index As Integer

    LocationIDs = Array("A-12345", "B-22222", "C-33333", "D-2R2", "E-5555")
    WidgetSales = Array(34, 12, 15, 6, 39)

    Set Vars = New TemplateKickerVariables
    For Index = 1 To 5
        Vars.SetVar "location:" & Index & ".id", LocationIDs(Index - 1)
        Vars.SetVar "location:" & Index & ".widgets.sold", WidgetSales(Index - 1)
    Next Index

    KickWorksheet(ActiveWorkbook, Sheets("Sheet1"), Vars).Name = "Widgets"
End Sub

One run of the macro later, and I have a new worksheet with the results:

Widget Report after running macro

TemplateKicker also has the following features that I will showcase in upcoming blog posts:

• Nested ForEach loops
• Rows to insert between items being looped over
• Generation of named ranges for use in formulas

Even with all this, however, TemplateKicker does have some limitations:

• The template language is somewhat “fragile”—spaces must be exactly placed.
• Errors are not reported. Bad syntax or variable names produce undefined results.

Still, I think this is a great start to doing some pretty awesome things in Excel VBA. I do not know if I will develop it further, but if you find it interesting please let me know!

As a side note, CosineWave Technologies Inc. now also offers VBA solutions for business automation now. Please drop me a line if you have need for some tools to automate your workflow when using Microsoft products (or many other products for that matter)!

I have spent a lot of hours in the past week working with Mephisto. Mephisto is a blogging platform with aims of eventually being a full-fledged CMS. Overall I like it, but I am uncertain if it is a platform I ought to continue working with at this point.

Here are the highlights of the pros:

• It is written in Rails, which is a platform I know well and therefore can extend rather easily.
• The site can be split into multiple sections, each of which can be its own blog and have its own RSS feed, or which can be a single page.
• Themes! Mephisto can be themed, and it is easy to write new ones using one or more of several template languages.
• It allows multiple layouts to allow for different looks for each section of the site.
• Articles can be formatted in with Textile, Markdown, or just plain HTML. I was able to integrate TinyMCE without much trouble as well.

But there are also the cons:

• The current version is 0.8. That is not quite 1.0, and I wager that the reason it is not at 1.0 is related to the various little bugs that I have found.
• Sometimes Mephisto will select the wrong layout for a page and it is difficult to figure out why. Fortunately, these situations are limited to “Preview this Post” and the “permanent links” to articles that represent pages that normally do not get linked to.
• Mephisto has plugins and themes, but it is difficult to find useful plugins and more than a small number of publicly available themes.

I think Mephisto is a better platform than Radiant at this point, and in my opinion it gives Rails a reasonably usable blogging platform. Before committing more time to it, however, I think I will take a look at the much touted Drupal. I have been meaning to take a look at it anyway.

Yes, that’s right. Today is my last day at my present employer. Two weeks ago I formed my own company, CosineWave Technologies Incorporated, and I will be working for it as a contractor.

Here are the primary services that I offer today:

• Unix Security
• Security Management
• Application Development
• Internal Training

Please go to the CosineWave website and drop me a line if you are interested in hiring me!

And to all my friends and colleagues that have helped me get here: thank you very much!