OpenOffice.org Base

If you haven't tried out the free officesuite http://www.OpenOffice.org I would strongly recomend you to do so. But is it capable of replacing the MS Office or Star Office suite? Short answer, No, not yet. Several things need to be adressed before it can be conciderd a serious contender in the office market.

One of the most recent additions to the OOo suite is extending the database of OOo and making it a standalone application called Base. This is what I'm going to discuss in this post. I've been a casual SQL student for a while now, trying my best to find uses for pure text based database front ends but never finding anything that would allow me to make much use of it. Thanks to my busy schedule i don't have the time it would take to learn a dynamic page language such as PHP to build fun applications with.

Well that all changed when I accidentally clicked the unknown Base icon in my OOo installation, Databases. Fun fun fun.


Base is a very recent addition to the OOo suite, and suffers from a great deal of problems (among other things smoothing out the integration with the other OOo components, general stability issues etc.) that needs to be adressed before it becomes a real alternative to the Access database. But besides that the whole thing is amazing to work with for somone who might not be a hardcore SQL hacker.

Everything is visual, more or less, you can hack the code if you want but for all the different ways of doing things there is bound to be a visual way of doing it as well.

Anyway I digress, because it is so new, there aren't much written about it, but I did find a good place with some decent tutorials for the Base application.

http://sheepdogguides.com/fdb/fdb1main.htm

This place is very simplistic in it's layout but it covers all the basics you need to know to start using Base to play with.

Due to the still unreliable nature of Base I would suggest not to make it the main database for your business just yet. It still has a lot of kinks and problems that needs to be smoothed out, but aside from that it is a great application for building your own databases over your home library, record collection etc.

Timbland - The Way I Are

Another really good song, Just love Keri Hilson's voice in this video.

Build your own Enigma Encryptor/Decryptor

Enigma-E

Found this site a while back, here you can order your very own Enigma building kit. Perfect for those who love a challenge and a look into how the actual machine worked.

Probarbly the best music video ever

Without a doubt the best music video ever made. I just love it...

Viewing video in an image?

• The Magic Color Out of space (shameless H.P.Lovecraft reference)

A while back there was a blog post about this but when I tried to search for it it turned up with broken images and for some reason the Author had put the color codes etc in the images so I had to back engineer the way he did it to get the contents of this post.. Anyway, I figured it would be a neat trick to be able to play video in the background of my text editors when I was working on something. (Don't ask me why, I just get these kinds of ideas sometimes.)



The principle behind it is that when playing a video in a player like VLC Media Player the hardware renders a one colored image that the video is then overlayed on, this is why problems occur when you try to make a Print screen screenshot of something in the video. The screenshot is of the overlayed one colored image instead of the video. There are ways around this but it isn't the topic of this post.



Now I was thinking, what if I could use this color to do some neat tricks.



Enter:

• The video everywhere mode

Now this color is a very simple color (at least in VLC Media Player, haven't tried it in other players). Its color coordinates are #000001 or Red 0 Green 0 Blue 1.

You can easily get this color by simply taking a print screen screenshot of video playing.



But how is this useful? Since I'm writing a lot (it's one of my main hobbies), I figured: If I could play a video in the background of the text editor and still be able to work with the text I could have some real fun with this.



Enter:

• The Text Editor Trick

Now since in editors like Notepad2 and SciTE you can define your own background color I figured I could have some real fun with it. (this also works in other programs where you can set your background color to a custom color. like IRC clients etc).



The basic idea, In either Notepad2 or SciTE is to change the background color to the color #000001 you can easily do this yourself (for a simple description  on how to change the background in SciTE check out my earlier post, and for Notepad2 I recommend switch to the second default color scheme and edit the background color)



Now that we have the background color set we can play around with VLC Media Player a bit. Since the Media player has a Wallpaper mode it already uses this technology so getting it to work is piece of cake. Just make sure you can play the video in Wallpaper mode and you should be all set.



Open the video in VLC Media Player and resize the window to fit your text editor window, then just minimize the media player and the video should still be visible.



If you have trouble with seeing the text over the video try changing your font color around a bit or got to Settings > Extended GUI in VLC Media Player and change the hue, saturation and contrast around a bit and you should be able to get a good clean image while still being able to see your video.

• How is this usefull?

I haven't got the faintest idea, it's a cool trick but it can be a bit distracting. But since we can have wallpapers at our desktops why not wallvideo as well. It's a fun trick and it demonstrates some of the fun you can have with the video technology that is available for free on the net.

Multiplication Trick Video

Easy Graphical Multiplication Trick Video

This is a fun and easy way of solving multiplication without having to use a calculator. Once you grasp it you can solve almost all forms of multiplication simply by drawing some lines.
Watch how it's done, very simple, lowtech way of of doing it, but it works wonders.

Scite Colours, when the white is too white

I decided to write about the changes I made in SciTE to not strain my eyes as much as the white background did. So lets start off by making the whole background black shall we:

In SciTE press the options button -> Open Global Options file

The hit Ctrl + F and write this in:
style.*.32

When you locate it it looks kind of like this:
style.*.32=$(font.base)

I will list the settings I did to change it to a black background instead.
style.*.32=$(font.base),back:#000000,fore:#ffffff
caret.fore=#FFFFFF

Hit Ctrl + S and viola, you now have a black screen instead of that eye piercing white one. Make sure to poke around with the other settings found in this file aswell, just click the Help -> SciTE help drop down menu to be taken to a very good list of what most of the options here do.

Must say that I love the SciTE editor just as much as Firefox because they are both highly coustomizable.

Trues quote ever:

"Computers don't do what you want them to do, only what you tell them to do." - 2003 Chris Pine

Learning Ruby the fun way

This is the really fun way to learn Ruby it is an interactive guide and console available freely on the web.
Make sure you allow javascripts on the page otherwise the console won't work.

No get going, you are not going to regret it, Ruby is fun!!