Part of my job entails working with multiple Excel spreadsheets simultaneously. You would think with four monitors I would have no trouble. For whatever reason, Microsoft decided that Excel will open all spreadsheets in the same instance of Excel, causing it to be nearly impossible to quickly glance back and forth between sheets.

Here’s the quick fix, thanks to Brian on Google Answers:

1. Open Windows Explorer (win + E)
2. Click on Tools -> Folder Options -> File Types -> XLSX -> Advanced -> “Open” -> Edit
   (note, if you’re using an older version of Excel it may be XLS instead of XLSX)
3. Change “Application used to perform action:” to \EXCEL.EXE” /e “%1″
   (note, you must have quotes around %1)
4. Uncheck “Use DDE”
5. Click “OK”

Voila! Now each time you open a spreadsheet from Windows Explorer it will open in an entirely new instance of Microsoft Excel that you can move to another monitor, minimize separately, etc.

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Today I taught myself how to use Zend_Cache and implemented it within 20 minutes. It’s super easy and very effective. Take a look at the code sample below and you’ll be up and running in no time.

Step 1: Setup the Cache

$frontendOptions = array(
	'lifetime' => 180,	// Cache for 3 minutes
	'automatic_serialization' => true

);
$backendOptions = array('cache_dir' => dirname(__FILE__) . '/cache/');
$cache = Zend_Cache::factory(
	'Core',
	'File',
	$frontendOptions,
	$backendOptions);

Step 2: Use the Cache

$data = null;

if(!$data = $cache->load('data'))
{
	$service = new Service(API_KEY);
	$result = $service->generateReport();
	$data = $service->getReport();
	$cache->save($data, 'data');
}

else

{
	print("Cache Hit!");
}

The page load time went from about 9 seconds to 0.5 seconds! 18x faster and it only took a few lines of code. Awesome.

My main motivation for caching the data ($data in the code example) was actually to reduce the load on the web service which provides the data. We have a good relationship with the company providing the service but there’s a good chance they would become annoyed if we hammered their system to get the exact same data over and over. The load time improvement was a good side effect, though!

For more information on Zend_Cache which comes with the Zend Framework, check out the reference guide and API documentation.

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Connect to your box via ssh and run the following commands to create a backup of your site.


cd ~
mkdir Backup
nohup zip -r Backup/YYYY-MM-DD-HHMM.zip www/ > backup_log.txt &

(Replace YYYY with the 4-digit year, MM with the 2-digit month, HH with the 24-hour format of the hour, and MM with the 2-digit minute)

cd ~ navigates to your home folder

mkdir Backup creates the backup directory in which the backups will be stored

nohup is short for no hangup and allows processes started by users at the terminal to continue running even after the user logs out

zip is a program which combines many files into one and compresses them to make the end result even more portable

-r tells zip to burrow into all subdirectories in order to grab all of the files

Backup/YYYY-MM-DD-HHMM.zip is the path to the backup file

www/ is the directory to backup (it may be html, htdocs, httpdocs, etc. on your box)

> backup_log.txt redirects all output from zip to the backup_log.txt file so you can review the file later

& tells linux to run the zip program in the background so that you can logout or perform other tasks without killing the process

Now all you need to do is download that zipped file. Use your favorite SFTP client to login to your box and snag it. I recommend FileZilla Client for all platforms. If you’re looking for an FTP server, FileZilla Server is perfect.

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Midway through Heroes: Season 3 I realized how quickly video streaming technology has evolved in the last few years. Think about the multitude of ways you can now get your fix.

• Regular old TV
• Digital Video Recorder (DVR): TiVo, MythTV, cable box DVR
• Hulu
• YouTube (and other video-sharing sites)
• NetFlix’s Watch Instantly
• Networks’ websites (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, etc.)
• NetFlix and Blockbuster DVDs to your door
• Video rental stores
• Red Box (at grocery stores and various other locations)
• On my iPhone using NBC’s mobile player.

EDIT:
Loren brought to my attention another category which I left off entirely, which is software/hardware combos for consuming the aforementioned services:

• Boxee
• Apple TV
• Roku Digital Video Player
• Xbox 360
• LG Network Blu-ray Players
• Samsung Network Blu-ray Players

Just 15 years ago that list was a lot smaller: TV, video rental stores, VCR.

What’s your favorite viewing service?

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My back yard is full of bare spots so I thought it was time to re-seed. Since Walmart is usually cheaper than the competition, I check there first when I need something. I searched for “grass seed” on Walmart.com and got results that couldn’t have been more off.

Below are the top four results for “grass seed” as of April 19, 2009 @ 11:53 AM.

1. South Beach Living: Dark Chocolate Covered Soynuts 7 Pk Snack Pack Delights, 4.69 oz.
2. Planters: Slicked Almonds, 6 oz.
3. Planters: Slivered Almonds, 2 oz.
4. Planters: Mixed Nuts, 6.5 oz.

Out of 431 results, 0 of them were for grass seed. I know for a fact they sell grass seed. What’s the deal?

So where did I get my grass seed today? Home Depot. Why? Because when I searched for “grass seed” at HomeDepot.com, 38 relevant results came up. What an interesting concept!

Walmart, take some notes. You’re probably losing millions of dollars each year because of your poor search engine. It’s time to pay someone that knows what they’re doing (*cough* Google *cough*) to rewrite your search engine for you. And while you’re working with Google, why not just merge and become gMart? Imagine the possibilities!

Scotts, Pennington, and Lesco, I would be furious with Walmart until they fixed the issue. Pull your products and make them pay!

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For some reason, Microsoft decided it would be fun to make it nearly impossible to view the HTML source of an email in Outlook.

Below are the convoluted steps to make it accessible. Most of the steps are for the initial setup which makes a new icon available from the quick access toolbar. After you set that up it’s fairly straightforward.

1-time Setup

Standard HTML email in Outlook

Click the drop-down beside the quick access toolbar and then “More Commands…”

Click the drop-down for “Choose commands from:” and select “All Commands”

Scroll down to “View in Browser” and click “Add >>”

You should see “View in Browser” in the “Quick Access Toolbar” list

Click “OK”

Now you have a handy little icon in the quick access toolbar that looks like a globe.

Each time you want to view the HTML source

Notice the new icon in the quick access toolbar that looks like a globe and click it.

Click “OK”

The HTML email now opens in Internet Explorer. Right-click anywhere on the page and click “View Source”.

Take a look at the source

Wasn’t that fun? Microsoft, if you’re listening, how about making that a tad bit easier? Please add a context menu item for the email itself that will open up the source in the default text editor. Thanks!

Related posts:

1. Create Multiple Windows in Excel

Viruses can be tricky. Even if your anti-virus software is kept up-to-date on a daily basis it may not catch the newest threats. What would you do if a virus infected your computer? That depends. Can you run a virus scan? Can you even login? I ran into that problem and came out victorious.

Background: A computer user was surfing the web using Internet Explorer 6 and came upon a website which launched popups saying the computer was infected. The call to action was a “scan now” button promising to remove the infections. The button was clicked which downloaded and installed the Pakes.CPL Trojan horse virus. As you can see from the link, not much information is known about that virus.

Symptoms: After logging in you are immediately logged out.

How to remove the infection:
The first thing I always do when working on someone’s computer is make an image of the hard drive using Acronis True Image Home 11. It comes on a bootable CD which makes imaging the drive very easy. Pop in the CD, boot from it, select “backup”, choose the source and destination drives, and wait. Now that you have a validated backup (Right? Please tell me you validate your backups!), you can dive in and get your hands dirty.

I nabbed the infected hard drive from the machine and hooked it up to my test computer which runs AVG 8 Free anti-virus and is NOT connected to the internet or my local network. During the full anti-virus scan, AVG found the aforementioned virus: Trojan horse Pakes.CPL at location C:\WINDOWS\system32\svchostw.exe. I quarantined the virus.

A few Google searches later and a great tip from a friend led me to an article about userinit.exe. I checked for that file in the system32 folder (where it’s supposed to be) but it was nowhere to be found. Following the steps from that site I was able to restore userinit.exe and copy it to wsaupdater.exe.

Next I took the hard drive out of the test machine and put it back in its regular case. I booted the computer and was able to successfully login. An error message popped up complaining about a missing executable called svchostw.exe. That explains the login/logout problem; the virus was being executed during login which kicked the user back out. I opened the registry using regedit and did a search for svchostw.exe. It came up under a key called Shell and the value was “Explorer.exe svchostw.exe”. So after windows explorer was launched, it tried to execute the virus. I removed “svchostw.exe” from the value and rebooted the computer. I was still able to login successfully and the error message was gone.

To make sure the system was clean, I used SpyBot Search & Destory and Lavasoft AdAware SE to check for malware. All clean. As an extra security precaution, I updated all system components: Windows, Office, Java, Flash, Norton Systemworks, etc. And for good measure I installed Firefox because it’s safer, faster, awesome, etc.

How have you solved virus or malware problems in the past?

Related posts:

1. Create Multiple Windows in Excel

Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

It is simple. So simple.

• Sign up for an account.
• Download and install the awesome S3 Firefox Organizer (S3Fox) Firefox add-on.
• Upload the files you want to be served up like hotcakes.
• Update the links in your HTML files to point to the new location.
  Example: http://s3.amazonaws.com/jeremy/blog/images/large_bandwidth_sucking_header.jpg
  Note that the example is intended to show the format of the URL and does not point to a valid resource.

Too good to be true? Nope. The S3 files are served up lickety split and best of all it takes the load off of your cheap host which allows it to function much more efficiently. So far I have moved my site’s header and the LightBox JS file. Why didn’t I move the other JS files and images? Because Google hosts all of the popular JavaScript libraries for free.

How much does it cost?
Very little, unless your site becomes wildly popular. 1 million requests costs one dollar plus 17 cents per GB transfered. That’s right. 1,000,000 GET requests = $1.00 + $0.17/GB.

Let’s assume the average size of the elements being served from your Amazon S3 bucket is 10KB.
10KB = 0.01MB = 0.00001GB
1,000,000 requests x 0.00001GB = 10GB
10GB x $0.17/GB = $1.70
1,000,000 requests x $0.01/10,000 requests = $1.00
Total Download Cost: $2.70

Your cheap site can now support 1,000,000 requests per month for a whopping $9.65 ($6.95 for BlueHost and $2.70 for Amazon S3). And if your site gets Dugg or on the front page of Reddit, Amazon S3 will scale without sweating a drop.

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Anytime you have to fill out a form with your email to get something “free”, alarms should go off in your head. They do in mine! And in this instance I’m so thankful for a free little service called 10 Minute Mail. Take a look at the picture below and you’ll immediately see why.

In two minutes I received three emails. I could maybe see why I would get two emails: one as a welcome and another with my free ebook. But why the 3rd? And if they did things right, why the 2nd? Why not just make the “free” ebook link in the welcome email be the activation link? I don’t get it.

A beautiful thing happened only minutes later. My email address self-destructed. Ahhhh the bliss! Never again do I have to worry about receiving spam from that awful company. Thank you, 10 Minute Mail!

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1. I made it to the state tennis tournament 3 out of 4 years in high school.
2. I read the entire DOS manual when I was 5.
3. I’ve owned a house since I was 23.
4. In 1993 and 1994 I saw every state in the U.S. and in 1995 I spent 6 weeks in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales.
5. My first Flash game, Stock Rider, was actually quite involved. Check it out!
6. I sold Cutco knives for two weeks and actually got someone to buy the $2000+ set.
7. My wife refuses to read my blog. (oh wait…most of you already knew that.)

Tag! You’re It!

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