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Converting microsoft office documents to PDF

29 October 2009, 12:49 pm

There are few methods to generate document in pdf format. I notice a few friends bought Adobe PDF editor to produce ebooks, manuals and general documents. However, there are few other options which is free. You might want to consider the alternatives if you are on budget and would like to save cost for your business.

If you are Microsoft Office 2007 user, there is a free add-in. The Microsoft Office ‘Save As PDF’ plugin enables you to convert ms office documents such is words (doc, docx), excel (xls, xlsx) and so on, to PDF or XPS format. After installed the addin, you can save the document as pdf format as shown in the Figure1 below:

Figure 1: Office 2007 save as PDF

Figure 1: Office 2007 save as PDF

The disadvantage of this method is you are not able to create PDF file in any software other than Office 2007.

Another free solution to create pdf file is using a free virtual PDF printer. With this method, you can print your documents into PDF format in any software as long as print is supported. One of a good and FOC pdf printers is PrimoPDF.

Hope you can save money with the suggestions.

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Book review: Building a wordpress blog people want to read

28 October 2009, 4:08 am
Building a wordpress blog people want to read

Building a wordpress blog people want to read

Title: Building a wordpress blog people want to read

Author: Scott McNulty

ISBN-13: 978-0-321-59193-7

ISBN-10: 0-321-59193-3

Feel outdated if you haven’t own a personal blog? How to setup WordPress blog for your small business or personal website? Blogging is not limited to computer expert nowadays. To setup your own blog is not hard, but it might not be easy for those who are not familiar with internet and computer.
The “Building a wordpress blog” gave a very detail guides from how to setup wp starts from installation to how to maintain your weblog and covers some advanced setup like using plug-ins. This is a great book for beginner and can be used as a reference for advanced users.

This book is also suitable for webmasters who are interested to manage a blogging website which has many authors in a blog. You will learn how to setup different user profiles, such as administrators, editors, authors, contributors, and subscribers. This is typically handy features in WP which allow people from different area or job function to update the company’s news and so on.

Things that I learnt from this book

Start: 2009-10-04
Finish: 2009-10-12

Filed under Book review, General Computing, Webmaster, WordPress. Tagged , , ,
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Is GPS free?

26 October 2009, 1:05 am

Nowadays many cell phones such as Nokia and HTC phones, come with GPS function. Many user confused GPS and GPRS. And they always curious is gps a free?

GPS means global positioning system while GPRS stands for General Packet Radio Service. GPS is used in positioning, navigation and timing services.GPS navigation devices or GPS receivers get the signal broadcast from the GPS satellites.

Everybody can use the free and open gps signal, FOC. However, the GPS navigation software is not free. For some cell phones, though the software is given foc. Also, some service provider give updated map on regular basis. Normally user have to subscribe this paid service in order to get the most updated maps. Some gps users setup a forum, then update and share the gps map. In this case, you can get free map from the forum.

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8 reasons you should trade future now

23 October 2009, 7:41 pm

Just went to an investment talk tonight organized by the local bank. They are encouraging retail traders to invest in future market and these are the 8 reasons given:

  1. Simple way to sell or short the market
  2. flexibility to trade alternative asset classes
  3. maximize return using leverage
  4. lower trading cost Continue reading ‘8 reasons you should trade future now’ »
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Book review: Framework design guideline

22 October 2009, 8:21 am

Do you realize that Microsoft has been improving on the user experience (UEx) in their products and .NET languages like C# also were designed with user experience in mind?

Do you know that .NET Framework team spent  hundreds of hours in debating on topics as simple as naming conventions and naming style during the design stage?

Should you choose HorizontalAlignment or AlignmentHorizontal as the property name?

Do you know the DateTime.Now property should have been design as a method from the framework design guideline point of view?

Wonder why the Event is not ‘fired’, but it is ‘raised’?

Framework Design Guidelines

Krzysztof Cwalina,…

Reading Framework Design Guideline is like having many designers from Microsoft such as: Krzysztof Cwalina, Brad Abrams, Chris Anderson, Erik Christensen, Jason Clark, Joe Duffy, Patrick Dussud, Anders Hejlsberg, Jim Miller, Michael Murray, Lance Olson, Eric Gunnerson, Dare Obasanjo, Steve Starck, Kit George sharing with you their design experience and best practice in Microsoft .NET Framework. They frankly shares the mistakes they made, debating on guidelines, and how they gradually improve the framework and libraries.

The book is organized with recommendations like Do, Do Not, Avoid, Consider. Not to mention, there are many annotations along with these guidelines, make you feel like these expert programmers and software architects are talking and sharing with you on the topics you are reading.

This book covers the fundamentals of framework design and the guidelines for:

  • Naming Conventions, namespaces, assembly naming, member and parameter naming
  • Type design such as Choosing between Class, Struct, Interface, Abstract Class, Static Class, and Enum
  • Member design
  • Designing for extensibility which consist of Unsealed classes, protected members, events and callbacks, virtual members and so on
  • Exceptions design rules
  • Usage guidelines for Arrays, Attributes, Collections, and so on
  • Common design patterns applications

After reading Framework Design Guideline, you’ll understand a lot of rationale behind the .NET Framework design. It helps you more familiar with .NET and you can apply many best practices.

Start: 2009-09-20
Finish 2009-09-22

Filed under .NET, Book review, Programming. Tagged , , , ,
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Optimized method to read CSV file in VEE

20 October 2009, 12:13 pm

How to read data from CSV file in Agilent VEE? The code can be as complicated as shown in Figure 1 if we dont know VEE’s feature well. The code in Figure 1 is taken from a real application.

Read CSV file in Agilent VEE

Figure 1: Read CSV file in Agilent VEE

The pseudo code shown in Figure 1 is:

  • Open the file dialog, to let user select the CSV file to open
  • The ‘from file’ container open the csv data file, with the setting: “Read text x token exclude: “\n” Array:*; it means to read the csv file, then split the content into 1D array, with the “\n” (new line) as seperator
  • Remove the 1st row of the data, as the 1st row data is the heading/title
  • Use the ForEach loop, to process each row.
  • Use the FromString to split each row into columns, and collect the data into the container
  • save the data into a variable

The problem with this code are:

  • it create too many unnecessary containers, especially the ForEach loop. This is expensive solution in terms of performance.
  • The programmer actually forgot to close the file in the FromFile container. This is a bad practice.

Agilent VEE is design with optimize processing in array. The above code can be simplified and optimized to what shown in Figure 2:

Optimized and simplified way of reading CSV data in Agilent VEE

Figure 2: Optimized and simplified way of reading CSV data in Agilent VEE

The pseudo code for Figure 2 is:

  • Open the file with FromFile container. Read the csv file content into 2 dimensions array, by splitting it with “\n” and “,” deliminators. Close the file afterward.
  • Save the file into a Record variable.

With this solution, the optimized code perform much faster than original program. The 1st program takes 55.26ms for 10 rows of data. While the second approach use about 2.57ms, which is about 21.5 times of improvement. Also, it makes the code much cleaner and easier to read.

Refer to optimize_read_csv.zip file for detail. The UserFunction Analysis_ReadFromCSV shows the original implementation. I make the optimize method into a UserFunction: ReadCSV(FilePath, Number Of Column) which will return the csv data into a 2 dimension array.

Filed under Agilent, Programming, VEE. Tagged , , , , ,
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Extend laptop display external monitor or TV

18 October 2009, 5:50 am

Netbook, also called mini notebook, is getting popular nowadays. It is small, light and inexpensive laptop. Many people like Netbook or laptop over desktop because of the mobility.

The trade off for small laptop is it has small LCD screen. For Netbook, the screen is about 8-10 inch. While for laptop, it can goes as small as 12 inch. So, home users would buy another larger LCD monitor when they use it at home.With the laptop’s external connector, we can extend our display to dual display with both laptop’s LCD screen and external monitor as shown in Figure 1.

Extend laptop display with external monitor

Figure 1: Extend laptop display with external monitor

Continue reading ‘Extend laptop display external monitor or TV’ »

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What is browser, What is search engine?

14 October 2009, 8:47 am

What is browser? And what is search engine?

You might think these are easy questions, I have same thought also. I’m surprise when I watched the video clip below as many people cant really differentiate between browser and search engine. Some even confuse with the browser’s name.

Continue reading ‘What is browser, What is search engine?’ »

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Improve WordPress security with Hash Keys

11 October 2009, 1:52 am

WordPress is one of the most famous blogging platform. With the popularity of internet nowadays, many people likes to setup blogs either for personal or business. If you are running internet business with WordPress and concern on blog security, this post will give you simple steps to enhance your website’s security.
Continue reading ‘Improve WordPress security with Hash Keys’ »

Filed under Internet Security, Webmaster, WordPress, tutorial. Tagged , , , ,
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