2015 Aug 16, 9:56
2015 Aug 2, 10:14
2015 Mar 8, 9:44
2015 Feb 12, 6:29
2013 Aug 15, 10:04
PowerShell nicely includes ConvertTo-CSV and ConvertFrom-CSV which allow you to serialize and deserialize your PowerShell objects to and from CSV. Unfortunately the CSV produced by ConvertTo-CSV is
not easily opened by Excel which expects by default different sets of delimiters and such. Looking online you'll find folks who recommend using automation via COM to create a new Excel instance and
copy over the data in that fashion. This turns out to be very slow and impractical if you have large sets of data. However you can use automation to open CSV files with not the default set of
delimiters. So the following isn't the best but it gets Excel to open a CSV file produced via ConvertTo-CSV and is faster than the other options:
Param([Parameter(Mandatory=$true)][string]$Path);
$excel = New-Object -ComObject Excel.Application
$xlWindows=2
$xlDelimited=1 # 1 = delimited, 2 = fixed width
$xlTextQualifierDoubleQuote=1 # 1= doublt quote, -4142 = no delim, 2 = single quote
$consequitiveDelim = $False;
$tabDelim = $False;
$semicolonDelim = $False;
$commaDelim = $True;
$StartRow=1
$Semicolon=$True
$excel.visible=$true
$excel.workbooks.OpenText($Path,$xlWindows,$StartRow,$xlDelimited,$xlTextQualifierDoubleQuote,$consequitiveDelim,$tabDelim,$semicolonDelim, $commaDelim);
See
Workbooks.OpenText documentation for more information.
csv excel powershell programming technical 2011 Oct 18, 4:52
I haven't been updating my blog recently. But I have three excellent reasons:
2010 Jun 29, 1:24

An excellent movie I'd never heard of. An entertaining and humorous sci-fi indie romance comedy. It stars Emma Caulfield (who I recognize as Anya from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) who obsesses over
her timer, an implanted device that counts down to when she'll meet the love of her life. Thematically its similar to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind which similarly adds a scifi device to
society in order to examine the value of failed relationships on a persons life.
movie review netflix TiMER 2010 Jun 3, 6:32Angie's photos from my wedding. There are some excellent bunny slipper photos in there.

wedding angie-sommer photo photography personal 2010 Jan 28, 2:32A typical blog post with typical blog post comments... "This comment gives a link to a YouTube video which is proffered as an excellent example of the thesis of the post, but, is actually only
tangentially so at best."
humor blog web troll 2009 Dec 12, 12:56Gizmodo has a list of some excellent Android apps. Includes an OpenTable app, Flixster, and others. But doesn't mention the Aldiko, the ebook reader I like.
reference android g1 cellphone app 2009 Feb 5, 7:31Excellent retro intro! Be sure to watch the other two high-five videos too.
humor video obama awesome high-five funnyordie 2008 Oct 2, 9:37Cool graphical ANTLR IDE! They didn't have this the last time I used ANTLR. "ANTLRWorks is a novel grammar development environment for ANTLR v3 grammars written by Jean Bovet (with suggested use
cases from Terence Parr). It combines an excellent grammar-aware editor with an interpreter for rapid prototyping and a language-agnostic debugger for isolating grammar errors. ANTLRWorks helps
eliminate grammar nondeterminisms, one of the most difficult problems for beginners and experts alike, by highlighting nondeterministic paths in the syntax diagram associated with a grammar."
antlr ide graph grammar tool free download development opensource java 2008 Sep 9, 8:33Wired's excellent and awesome photos from CERN's LHC. "On November 27, 2006, the final superconducting main magnet was delivered to CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) -- the most ambitious physics
experiment ever created."
wired photos lhc cern science photo 2008 Sep 9, 8:29Article on the data centers that backup the Internet Archive and handle CERN's LHC's data. "CERN embodies borderlessness. The Swiss-French border is a drainage ditch running to one side of the
cafeteria; it was shifted a few metres to allow that excellent establishment to trade the finicky French health codes for the more laissez-fair Swiss jurisdiction. And in the data sphere it is
utterly global."
lhc history internet cory-doctorow nature physics network hardware library science cern internet-archive 2008 Jun 19, 11:10Most excellent! "Because time travel is still one of the most interesting motifs used in games, movies and on TV, we bring you this fine piece of cotton. Oh, and it comes from the future!"
tshirt timetravel bttf purchase wishlist shirt 2008 Mar 19, 11:30Excellent rant on the history and state of IE8's decision to default to super-standards mode vs IE7 mode.
browser internet browser-war ie microsoft history w3c standard standards html css joel-on-software 2008 Feb 15, 6:47A bug in Excel causes values that should be 65k to be 100k.
excel humor miscalculation bug 2007 Oct 22, 4:47
I purchased the
Orange Box off of Steam a bit ago and like
others before me who have
discussed elsewhere, I already owned two of the five games that come from the Orange Box. However, the combined price of
HL2E2 and Portal, the two games I actually wanted was supposedly equivalent to the price of the Orange Box bundle. Incidentally, if anyone would like HL2 or HL2E1 I can
gift them to you.
HL2E2 was excellent of course but the big surprise for me was Portal. (Mild spoilers follow) It has a sort of zen simplicity: there are a few simple game-play mechanics, a handful of textures and
objects, and a deceptively simple story all used well and tied together to produce an entertaining and polished game. It seems a bit short but its probably better to end with the gamer demanding
more. The humor and the sort of
play within a play aspect of the game is what really sold me though. It has the funniest
ending theme I've heard (also
blogged
by the creator). The voices of the automated turrets are so adorable I would feel compelled to hug them if they weren't always trying to kill me. Additionally the
weighted companion cube seems like an experiment in understanding gamers' attachment to NPCs. In this case the NPC is a box
and yet I still felt awful incinerating it. The whole time I was vaguely reminded of
Solitary the reality show that sticks contestants alone in small rooms
forcing them to endure various tests all the while being watched by a humorous computer with a female voice. Someone should sue...
RPS has articles on Portal including
a Portal review, a page
suggesting Portal is a tale of
lesbianism, and
others.
hl2e2 game hl2 solitary valve portal nontechnical