James Titcumb

Sometimes I have the need to get on the internet using my laptop instead of my lovely HTC Magic. To do that, I’d have to get mobile internet, which is yet another expense I don’t really want. Before I go ahead, I’d like to strongly discourage doing this on a regular basis. Vodafone’s “unlimited” internet is 500MB fair use policy, which when using a laptop can be used up really quickly – so proceed with caution! In addition, I do not know your contract to confirm that this will not void your warranty or violate your terms of service. You carry out these steps at your own risk and are provided here for informational purposes only. Basically, if you mess things up and Vodafone (or whoever your carrier is) comes knocking on your door, I’m not being held responsible. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not a power Excel user, but as we handle a lot of data, I had to use it earlier today to do some in_array type searching. Basically, I had a CSV with a load of IDs, but we’d already processed some of the IDs. I wanted to remove the IDs from the CSV that we’d already processed. So I have this CSV of IDs, and a list of IDs we’d already processed. Great! In PHP, I could just use in_array on each of them. But I didn’t have time to do a PHP script, so this is how to do a similar thing in Excel – a Vertical Lookup.

Open your CSV in Excel, and add two new columns “vlookup” and “is_processed”. The formula to apply should be something like:

=VLOOKUP(C2,'already processed'!A:A,1,TRUE)

C2 is the ID you want to check if is in the list of already processed IDs (the “needle”). If you want the matching to be non-strict and have the lookup table sorted in whatever order (probably not), set the last parameter to TRUE. Normally you want FALSE to check anywhere, and make sure you sort the lookup table in ascending order.

Add a new sheet, and call it “already processed”, and add your list of IDs in the first column. This is your “haystack”.

If you return to your original sheet, you’ll see the “vlookup” column has either IDs (if the ID is found in your list) or #N/A if the value is not found. To make this neat, add this formula to your is_processed column:

=IF(ISNA(F2),"no","yes")

Where F2 is the vlookup column. Then for the IDs (“needles”) that are found in the search list (“haystack”) the value of is_processed will be “yes”, and all that aren’t found it’ll be “no”. You can then filter on this or whatever you like!

I opened Google Mail on my HTC Magic this morning to find a lovely invitation to the Ubuntu One beta, woot. So I grabbed my shiny Sony Vaio laptop and fired it up, and got straight on with it. Essentially, Ubuntu One is just a sync to a remote network storage, so there shouldn’t be anything too complex about it. The login process is fairly straightforward. First you download their PPA, then the packages themselves; if you use Firefox this is made remarkably simple by just clicking the buttons on the installation web page. Once installed, you start the client, and this should bring up a web page to “Add your computer”. It didn’t do this first time on mine, and I had to manually do:

apt-get install ubuntuone-client ubuntuone-client-tools

to get it to work. Still, after that, it ran pretty smoothly and I’ve just synced up my first few files. As of yet I don’t really have a use for this sort of thing, but I expect backups of certain things would be useful. The free tier is a 2GB plan, or there’s a paid 10GB plan. Personally I’d prefer more storage if I were to use it but the 10GB is USD $10 so the amount of storage I’d need would I guess cost around $50 a month going on $1/GB.

Still, it’s a cool little feature and a welcome addition to my laptop, although as of yet I have no-one to share files with… I’ll figure out how to invite people if someone requests

Now that the fuss over Bing‘s launch is already over (that didn’t last long, did it?), what is the future for it? According to this article‘s source, Bing had a 11.1% share of the US Search market. Microsoft apparently haven’t hit above 10% since 2007, so that could be seen as quite a positive thing. But Google seems pretty confident this is just a blip on the radar and they are unconcerned, and that could potentially be true.

I’m no expert by any means, but it will be interesting to see how this pans out.

Whats more, if Microsoft really love the Bing name, will they start replacing all the Windows Live products after replacing Live Search? Will we start using Bing Messenger, Bing Hotmail and so on? Will they do a last minute re-brand of Windows 7 to be Windows Bing? That would be quite funny…

I think this table (source) pretty much explains itself…

Basically to get the iPhone 3G S 16GB for free, you must be tied into a £73.41 a month contract for 18 months. Pay-as-you-go prices for the iPhones 3G S 16GB and 32GB are £440.40 and £538.30 respectively, which is just disgusting.

The HTC Magic (released back in May) already has most of the features the new iPhone is now touting – so why bother spending all the money when you could get just as good a smartphone, but for much less. I’m on a £35 a month 18 month contract, and my phone was free. The only feature the HTC Magic doesn’t currently have is internet tethering, but I’ve only had a use for that once in my life… so… I’m not really that bothered. And from what I’ve led to believe the HTC Magic hardware does support it, but it requires a little hacking to get working. And despite what you might read in the press, it’s actually a bloody good smartphone, and I got along with it much better than the iPod Touch I tried. Admittedly I’ve only played with an iPhone for about 10/15 minutes, but I found it pretty janky, just like the iPod Touch I tried.

And if you don’t like the virtual keyboard on the HTC Magic, word on the street is that there will be a new Android-based phone released in the summer that returns the physical qwerty… along with a whole host of other Android-based phones from various manufacturers.

Today is a good day for Android, and a bad day for your pocket if you’re an iPhone fan…