An '86 Mac Plus Goes Up Against An '07 AMD DualCore. You Won't Believe Who Wins, And Then You'll Be Inspired

ben_lubar

"DEFCON 5! DEFCON 5!" yelled the panicked @blakeyrat. "THEY SET THE DEFCON TO 5!"

"Don't worry," offered the describable @boomzilla, "my DEFCON goes to 11."

Then, @boomzilla turned the DEFCON knob to 11 and the US military ceased to exist. the end.

Scarlet_Manuka

Slight tangent, but I kind of feel like people who don't understand how and when to use pivot tables aren't really using Excel.

Understanding how to use them is one thing. Actually needing to is another. There's not much that I do that would benefit significantly from using them. I could use them slightly more, but the only reason would be so I could say that I used them.

It probably helps that very little of what I do is intended for an external audience. I work mainly in data integration, and our integration files really don't use pivot tables at all. :) In fact sometimes I have to manually unpivot data that's given to me in table format so that I have a nice flat list to feed to a computer.

dkf

@Polygeekery said:

Around here you can't swing a dead cat without hitting 3 of them.

Which would be an [b]excel[/b]lent use for a dead cat.

@sloosecannon said:

Annunciating.

[speeling triiger warming!]

Gurth

@ufmace said:

it's a royal PITA to find software that works on it, and copy it onto it, considering that all it has is a floppy drive and SCSI

At least a Mac SE can read 1.44 MB disks, can’t it? A USB drive for a modern computer costs next to nothing, but in my case it’s useless to get software onto that Mac Plus because as I recall it won’t read 720 KB-formatted disks (DSDD ones, of which I still have plenty). I have this sneaking suspicion I’d have to fire up my Amiga 500 to read a FAT-formatted disk with software for the Mac and then write the data to an HFS-formatted disk so the Mac can read it — assuming I can find out what software I’d need on the Amiga to do that with :)

accalia

@sloosecannon said:

I introduce you to q

/me looks it over interestedly

this..... this is kind of awesome actually.

"does it have .xslx support?" she asked hopefully

loopback0

If you use Java or SQL Developer there's a JDBC driver that lets you work with CSV in the same way.

@accalia said:

"does it have .xslx support?" she asked hopefully

Unlikely considering it's a different format. Converting XLSX to CSV is trivial though.

accalia

@loopback0 said:

Unlikely considering it's a different format.

yeah....

@loopback0 said:

Converting XLSX to CSV is trivial though.

but that's an extra step!!!!

loopback0

@accalia said:

yeah....

I wonder what happens if q tries to open an XLSX though... wonder if it blows up amusingly or if someone's considered it.

Luhmann

@loopback0 said:

blows up amusingly

I guess that is something that enough C4 could fix

accalia

@Luhmann said:

I guess that is something that enough C4 could fix

"when in doubt, C4" - Jamie Hyneman

Polygeekery

@dkf said:

Which would be an excellent use for a dead cat.

Paging @Groaner.

Polygeekery

@accalia said:

"when in doubt, C4" - Jamie Hyneman

The laugh that accompanied that quote cracked me up. One part mischievous, one part evil scientist.

anotherusername

My Excel spreadsheets tend to diverge pretty far into the realm of "why would you do that".

E.g. pulling an .ics from the web...

and then parsing it...

You'd probably think that would be enough, but no...

All of that, and I have yet to need a pivot table.

rc4

Your entire post is worthy of a front-page article. x1000.

Weng

Yes.

loopback0

anotherusername

You'll note, though, that I didn't use any Excel macros in that monstrosity. It's Excel's data import tool coupled with a lot of functions and conditional formatting. I avoid using macros whenever possible, because they're disabled by default, for security raisins.

However, sometimes they're necessary... for instance, that data import works great, but it has to come from a static, fixed URL... there's no way to alter the URL based on, say, the contents of a cell in the worksheet...

Private Declare Function InternetOpen Lib "wininet" Alias "InternetOpenA" (ByVal sAgent As String, ByVal _
    lAccessType As Long, ByVal sProxyName As String, ByVal sProxyBypass As String, ByVal lFlags As Long) As Long
Private Declare Function InternetCloseHandle Lib "wininet" (ByRef hInet As Long) As Long
Private Declare Function InternetReadFile Lib "wininet" (ByVal hFile As Long, ByVal sBuffer As String, _
    ByVal lNumBytesToRead As Long, lNumberOfBytesRead As Long) As Integer
Private Declare Function InternetOpenUrl Lib "wininet" Alias "InternetOpenUrlA" (ByVal hInternetSession As Long, _
    ByVal lpszUrl As String, ByVal lpszHeaders As String, ByVal dwHeadersLength As Long, ByVal dwFlags As Long, _
    ByVal dwContext As Long) As Long

Sub Button46_Click()
    Dim username As String
    username = Sheet1.Range("Username")
    
    Dim hOpen As Long, hFile As Long
    Dim URL As String
    
    'Download HTML page
    Const ua = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.8) Gecko/20100202 Firefox/3.5.8"
    hOpen = InternetOpen(ua, 1, vbNullString, vbNullString, 0)
    
    URL = "http://***snip***&user=" + Replace(username, " ", "+")
    hFile = InternetOpenUrl(hOpen, URL, vbNullString, ByVal 0&, &H80000000, ByVal 0&)
    If hFile = Null Then
        MsgBox "Unable to connect to website." + Chr(13) + Chr(13) _
            + "Check your internet connection.", vbCritical
    Else
        Dim buffer As String, bytes_read As Long
        Dim html_data As String
        
        html_data = ""
        buffer = Space(10)
        bytes_read = -1
        While bytes_read <> 0
            InternetReadFile hFile, buffer, 10, bytes_read
            If bytes_read > 0 Then
                html_data = html_data + Left(buffer, bytes_read)
            End If
        Wend
        
        InternetCloseHandle hFile
        InternetCloseHandle hOpen
        
        ' *** screen-scraping the HTML... more horrors await ***
    End If
End Sub

rc4

@anotherusername said:

Firefox/3.5.8

As for the rest; I give up. What the actual, complete, total, and entire god damn fuck?

anotherusername

That should give you a pretty good idea of when I wrote it. I briefly thought of anonymizing it, but figured I'd leave it for you to at.

loopback0

@anotherusername said:

Sub Button46_Click()

Button FORTY SIX?

anotherusername

That WTF is Excel's fault. It's the only button in the whole entire workbook...

loopback0

@anotherusername said:

It's the only button in the whole entire workbook...

Ah, that's alright then.

anotherusername

TRWTF was that VBA doesn't have a better way to download a page from the internet. I had to search high and low to even find that method; most of the stuff I found wouldn't work, presumably because VBA !== VBScript.

rc4

@anotherusername said:

VBA !== VBScript

And for good reason, too.

Weng

That's because you're using Excel as a layout tool, rather than a data processing tool. You are TRWTF

anotherusername

Fun fact: the worksheet in the last screenshot where the actual layout happens has somewhere between 70-80 conditional formatting rules. (It's hard to count them, because Excel's window to manage conditional formatting rules only shows 5 rules and can't be enlarged.)

You should see some of the PHP I've written that did TCP sockets and raw HTTP headers... I can't remember if it was before PHP supported allow_url_fopen or if I just wanted to reinvent it... actually, I think it was because I wanted to be able to resume broken downloads, and fopen wouldn't do that.

rc4

You disgust me more and more with each post.

Weng

You're not making it better.

Arantor

The Amiga 500 would require a piece of software called CrossDOS to read FAT disks, Amiga OS 3.0 (A1200/A4000 or upgraded earlier machines) came with it bundled.

blakeyrat

You see the alien spores are in the raindrops. Making the raindrops chubby.

Arantor

What the fuck does that even mean?

I mean, my excuse is that I'm a huge Amiga nerd and spent an inordinate amount of time getting my games from physical disk to a PC to emulate them...

anotherusername

A guy needs a hobby. Mine is finding problems that look like nails and then beating them into submission.

blakeyrat

@Arantor said:

What the fuck does that even mean?

That's why the movie's called "Chubby Rain".

Your sentence about FAT disks reminded me of that.

Arantor

What the...? I don't even...

TDEMSYR

blakeyrat

Did you know Tom Cruise had no idea he was in that vampire movie until two years later?

fbmac

He is talking about this movie

Bowfinger - Wikipedia

blakeyrat

You cannot show it to the Laker Girls. I know you want to show it to the Laker Girls but you can never show it to the Laker Girls. Keep Mr Weenie in the pants. Always in the pants.

ScholRLEA

Oooh, I haven't thought about Creative Whooshing in ages! Mind you, I preferred Bytten and Dr. Troll's Journal of Software Fools, and was even reading YHBT Expert from time to time, but still, fond memories. I remember how it really seemed like the era of 8-bit MAKE MONEY FAST posts had come to an end when it was bought out by Canter & Siegel and renamed Pissy World.

EDIT: How TF did this end up in this topic and not the TIL thread? Is there a way to move it without buggering the mods about it?

sloosecannon

@dkf said:

[speeling triiger warming!]

What our yew taalking abot?

HardwareGeek

@Groaner said:

@fbmac said:
Americans could lose a lot of weight just by adopting the metric system like us otters.

They could also lose a lot of weight by moving to Mars or Ceres.

There are a lot of my fellow Americans that I'd love to have move to Mars.

Tsaukpaetra

I once had to do something similar, but in reverse, and in Google Sheets. In summary, I had to:

Take an Agenda-like layout and try to figure out what, when, and what category the events are, across multiple areas.
Yes, this was a 2-d Agenda.
What is defined by the text in a cell (or series of contiguous cells)
When is defined by the beginning of the colored block representing the event (event text does not necessarily start at the top of the even block, so some backtracking necessarily occurs). Also, there are three days represented in the agenda, so be careful not to look too far in any direction for the beginning/end!
Category of course is defined by the cell's Background color, something not typically programmatically available in the standard available formulas.
This data must be displayed (on a new sheet) as Current event : Next Event (Start Time), according to the area (essentially transposing).
This must be done in real time, as the schedule/agenda is being updated (thanks to the real-time collaboration features of Google Sheets).
Profit?

'Twas a pretty ugly hack, but it (mostly) worked.

Tsaukpaetra

@loopback0 said:

Button FORTY SIX?

At one point they added 45 buttons previously. Since the counter-of-objects-in-the-sheet never decreases, this could have been over a span of time, and the buttons need not have existed simultaneously through the life of the sheet (i.e. buttons could be added and removed without resetting the count).

boomzilla

@Weng said:

using Excel as a layout tool,

The stuff I work on replaced a manual system where they used excel to lay out a calendar of events. Of course, before they laid out an actual calendar, they would plan it ( and would use that as a template multiple times).

Of course, if you got any holidays in there ( these things could be up to several months) they'd have to shift everything manually.

We still have to output something very similar in excel, but that's still much less of a WTF.

( edited for swypos )

Maciejasjmj

@boomzilla said:

hand would use that as a template multiple times).

@boomzilla said:

purse things could be up to several months

@accalia, come out here and stop playing @boomzilla.

Also, all this shit makes me glad all I need from Excel is to export to it. All the pivot grids are officially Not My Problem™.

accalia

@Maciejasjmj said:

@accalia, come out here and stop playing @boomzilla.

what? do i have to start adding more names to my long name like @kuro has?

anotherusername

@Tsaukpaetra said:

At one point they added 45 buttons previously. Since the counter-of-objects-in-the-sheet never decreases, this could have been over a span of time, and the buttons need not have existed simultaneously through the life of the sheet (i.e. buttons could be added and removed without resetting the count).

I was the only person to touch it, so apparently I created and destroyed 45 buttons in the process of testing and getting it working correctly.

@boomzilla said:

The stuff I work on replaced a manual system where they used excel to lay out a calendar of events. Of course, before they laid out an actual calendar, they would plan it ( and would use that as a template multiple times).

Of course, if you got any holidays in there ( these things could be up to several months) they'd have to shift everything manually.

Oh, that reminds me... my calendar spreadsheet does automatically shift any work holiday if it occurs on a weekend: (if there's a date in the highlighted cell, M1, it displays the month for that date; otherwise it uses DATE())

Including New Years Day, which can be observed in a different year than it occurs:

(the year's 2021, for the curious-minded)

MathNerdCNU

Hah, read you post, saw the title of the movie and was immediately reminded of:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD1Cl1L8WFQ

FrostCat

@boomzilla said:

Dammit...your doing that on porpoise.

...says the guy who says, well, that.