Older blog entries for jmcnamara (starting at number 3)

I have been adding support to Spreadsheet::WriteExcel for Excel's function names in other European languages.

The longest function name is in French, LOI.NORMALE.STANDARD.INVERSE (29 chars), followed by Finnish, NORM.JAKAUMA.NORMIT.KÄÄNT (25 chars). The shortest function name in all languages is T.

Here is the same function name in nine languages: TIME, ZEIT, TEMPS, NSHORA, TEMPO, TIJD, AIKA, ORARIO, KLOCKSLAG.

Waylaid myself in an implementation of Excel's comments. Represented by a small red triangle in the upper right hand corner of the cell. Which way does madness lie? This way.

Version 0.30 of Spreadsheet::WriteExcel was released on time. It now includes the facility to write formulas and functions. Despite the fact that this had been one of the most requested features I received only one email in relation to it. A bug report.

The author of the email said that with the inclusion of formulas the module had gone from interesting to useful. A fair observation.

Life (and how to live it)

Blood Simple was on T.V. The Coen brothers first feature. It doesn't contain the humourous undertone of their later films. I haven't seen it in a number of year. It is still really good.

I am updating the documentation in preparation for version 0.30 which will include access to formulas and functions. The target release date is the 28th of February.

The documentation, testing and distro preparation take at least half the development time of each new release.

Work (the most important thing is)

Went to the UK for a course on VoIP. "All your IP traffics are belong to us."

If it had been a week later I could have made it to London.pm to hear Damian Conway's talk.

Life (and how to live it)

Spent an evening in Oxford. The colleges were already closed. It is a nice town. Not as pretty as Urbino but more realistic. Ate a pizza at Quod.

Received a report of a subtle bug. The format string '00000' should pad leading zeros to a zip code in Excel but nothing was happening. It turned out that '00000' was matching as a number and evaluating to zero. Nice.