SXSW 2010 - Intro

I just got back from a trip to SXSW 2010 with my old college roommate, Ed. Well, not that Ed's old, it's just that our roomie days were so long ago. Which, I guess, does make us old.

Old or not, we had a blast! If we could go every year, we would. Here are some observations about SXSW, to help us for our next trip (or maybe it will help someone else out).

• Hotels: We stayed in the Hyatt, just across thee Congress St. bridge from the "real" downtown area. It's a nice enough hotel, but we did wish we had stayed at the Hilton, Marriott, etc., all located closed to the Austin Convention Center (ACC).
• Registration: We bought full-access music badges. It was pretty expensive (~$700), but I didn't understand the differences between badges and the cheaper wristbands (<$200). If the badges only get you access to the music industry panels and the trade show floor in the ACC, then it's not worth it. And the Registrants' Lounge (under a tent in Brush Square Park, across from the ACC) with its one-free-drink-per-day doesn't justify the cost. Next time, look into the wristbands!
• Day Parties: There were a ton of official day parties, and plenty of unofficial parties too (check out the Austin Chronicle and Do512 for some of these listings). These are usually sponsored by a country, records label, etc., and usually include free food and drinks. As badge holders, we were able to get into plenty of these. We pre-registered for many of them, but they never checked our names against a guest list, so I don't think pre-registration is necessary. Are wristband holders allowed into these parties? If not, it would be worth the badge price to get access to these - they were fun! Apparently, there are "unofficial" parties (and private parties too) that aren't in the official SXSW schedule. .
  
• Night Concerts: Most of the official SXSW concerts occur at night. It turns out that there are plenty of clubs and bands playing in Austin during SXSW that are not officially part of SXSW, just like with the day parties. Check out the Austin Chronicle and Do512 again for these.
• Venues: Some of the favorite venues we went to include Maggie Mae's (lots of music under one roof, and even on the roof!), Galaxy Room (the floor rises up in the back, making viewing easy), Billiards (a huge place, with plenty of pool tables and other games), and the Central Presbyterian Church (for the quieter concerts with much clearer sound).

There really is so much to do at SXSW, it's hard to keep it all straight! There is an official iPhone app (my.SXSW) that works with the iPod Touch too (it caches all of the information). You can do this on the my.sxsw website too, but I'm only going to cover the app here. It's great for finding events by day, by genre, by band name, by venue, by time... you get the idea! The biggest drawback comes from if/when you overbook your schedule. It would be nice to assign colors/priorities to the events you want to see. Also, it lists everything linearly, scrolling down the page. So, if one event starts at 11pm and another at 11:30, you might forget about the 11:30 event if you don't scroll down that far.

Thankfully, you can subscribe to your my.SXSW calendar in another tool like Google Calendar. This is a read-only view, and it appears to only get updated infrequently, so it's better for planning things before you get to SXSW, but this worked well for us. Using Google Calendar, you can "copy" your important SXSW events to one of your Google Calendars and using the different calendars/colors to prioritize your events. With only an iPod (not an iPhone), this again is something you need to do before SXSW. But, you can print out your schedule (with events shown side-by-side instead of linearly!) and use that as a preliminary plan. Just be flexible - there's so much that pops up at the last minute, a newly recommended band you just heard about, etc.

Twitter and Facebook

I just signed up for a Twitter account. I can't say that I'll be updating it that often (heck, look at my blogging frequency), but I thought I'd give another "Web 2.0" app a try...

Visual Basic (VBA) code to find text in any Excel worksheet

I've always been baffled that Excel's Find function only works on the current Worksheet. How hard would it be for Microsoft to search across all sheets in the Workbook?

It shouldn't be too hard, because I figured out how to do it in Visual Basic. You'll need to understand some VBA to get this inserted into your environment (recommendation: record a macro to your Personal Workbook, open the VB Editor, and then paste this subroutine into the Modules section of your Personal Workbook), but it should work as is. I tested it in Excel 2003 for XP and Excel version "X" for Mac OS X.

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Sub FindEverywhere()
   ' Prompt the user for the searchText
   Dim searchText As String
   searchText = InputBox("Find what:", "Search All Worksheets")
  
   ' If the searchText is NOT an empty string, begin the search
   If Not searchText = "" Then
       Dim r As Range
       Dim findNext  As Integer
       findNext = vbYes
      
       Dim i As Integer
       ' Use For loop, not a For Each loop, as it's the only way to handle hidden/macro sheets!
       For i = 1 To Sheets.Count
       ' Loop through each sheet in the workbook.  This does NOT change the activate/visible sheet.
       ' That will come later if we're still searching (findNext=vbYes).  I'd prefer a method to
       ' "break" out of the For loop, but VBA doesn't have one?
           If Sheets.Item(i).Visible = xlSheetVisible Then
               ' This sheet is visible, so let's work with it (you HAVE to skip macro sheets, so just skip all hidden sheets)
               Dim sheet As Worksheet
               Set sheet = Sheets.Item(i) ' don't do this until you're sure this sheet is Visible!
              
               ' The firstFind and looped vars are used to determine if we've looped thru every find on this page.
               Dim firstFoundCell As String
               firstFoundCell = ""
               Dim looped As Boolean
               looped = False
              
               Do While findNext = vbYes And Not looped
                   ' This is necessary to search on the right sheet (?), but it also means we'll switch to every sheet,
                   ' including ones which do NOT contain searchText.  So, if you search the whole Workbook, you'll end up looking
                   ' at the last sheet, whether or not it contains the searchText.  :-(
                   Sheets(sheet.Name).Select
                  
                   ' Here's the search!
                   Set r = Cells.Find(searchText, ActiveCell, xlValues, xlPart, xlByRows, xlNext, False)
                   If r Is Nothing Then
                       ' Nothing was found.  Exit this WHILE loop (the FOR loop will still go to the next sheet).
                       Exit Do
                   Else
                       r.Activate ' Activate (select) the cell that was found
                       ' Check/Set the firstFoundCell and the looped variable.
                       If firstFoundCell = "" Then
                           sheet.Activate
                           firstFoundCell = r.Address
                       Else
                           ' We've found at least one cell already.  Check to see if we've looped back to the firstFoundCell.
                           If r.Address = firstFoundCell Then
                               looped = True
                           Else
                           End If
                       End If ' end of checking for firstFoundCell
                      
                       ' If we haven't looped around, prompt the user to findNext.  (If we have looped, the WHILE loop will finish, causing the FOR loop to go to the next sheet.)
                       If Not looped Then
                               findNext = MsgBox("Find Next?", vbYesNo)
                       End If
                   End If
               Loop ' end of Do While loop
           End If
       Next i
      
       If findNext = vbYes Then
           MsgBox ("No more matches found!")
       End If
   End If
End Sub

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As always, let me know if you have any comments or questions!

Make a Mac keyboard easier to use with a Windows PC

I know there aren't too many reasons to use a Mac keyboard with a PC, but if you're reading this article, perhaps you found yourself in the same situation as I did. I have a dual-input monitor (a rather nice HP LP2065), so I decided to hook my G4 MDD Mac and my Dell D620 laptop up to same monitor. The max resolution on the laptop's built-in LDC is 1440x900, but the external HP LCD gets 1600x1200, so it's substantially more real estate. However, it's just not practical to type on the laptop's keyboard and look over at the HP LCD, nor did I really want 2 keyboards cluttering up my limited desk space.

So, I bought a simple USB switch, plugged the Mac keyboard into the input and the Mac and laptop into the outputs. I press 2 buttons (one on the monitor and one on the USB switch), I can switch between Mac and PC very quickly!

That left me with my next problem, and the reason for this post. While the Mac keyboard can map to all main Windows keys, I was not happy with the default mapping. Take a look at standard Mac and PC keyboards:



The Mac keyboard puts the Alt key right next to the Control key, but a Windows keyboard puts the Windows key (opens the Start menu) between Control and Alt. I'm not really a touch-typist, but this throws me off something fierce. So, I start looking at ways to re-map keys in Windows, and the easiest way I found was KeyTweak. Here's a screenshot (click to see the full-size image):


I won't try to explain all of KeyTweak's features here, but it's pretty easy to re-map "normal" keys like Alt and Windows just using the GUI. If you have both keyboards available (as I did by using the laptop's keyboard), you can also use a "teach" mode to re-map some of the harder keys, like Volume Up/Down, Mute, and PrintScreen (one of my favorite keys - use Alt-PrintScreen to take a screenshot of the active window and store it in Windows' clipboard).

My exact setup is shown in this "raw map" view:

Feel free to download my Mac keyboard mapping for KeyTweak to use as-is or as a starting point for your own custom mapping.

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P.S. If you're looking for the opposite functionality, MacWorld has a nice article on using a Windows keyboard with a Mac or you can try DoubleCommand.

A "fix" for the barrage of Deleted Items created by Google's Outlook Calendar sync

This article was written when Google's Outlook Calendar Sync tool was first made available to the public. Since then, Google has fixed this problem in their tool. I'm leaving the post here, as the general principle of having Outlook take specific actions (that couldn't be accomplished in a Rule) when new items show up in any Outlook location is still valid.

Google's new Outlook Calendar sync is a terrific idea. Unfortunately (but not unexpectedly) it has some problems. The first thing most people notice is that Outlook Calendar items that involve anyone besides yourself (i.e., you Invited others or someone else Invited you) don't show up in Google Calendar. The FAQ is suppposed to contain a "fix" for this, but people don't seem too happy with this.

The other problem takes longer to notice. The sync tool creates TONS of Appointments on 12/31/1979 at 7:00 pm - and then deletes them. When I say "tons", I mean it. At one point, I had >12,000 items in my Deleted Items, most of which were these 12/31/1979 appointments.

I don't know how to stop the sync from making these Appointments (I assume they're used as some temporary scratchpad (or someone really messed up their code)), but I do know how to keep all those items out of my Deleted Items.

This does require that you turn on Visual Basic (VB) for Applications (VBA) macros in Outlook. This is NOT a security risk that I know of, as I think you're the only one you can add macros in this manner.

In Outlook, go to Tool -> Macro -> Visual Basic Editor. In the left-hand column, there should be a hierarchy that looks like Project1 -> Microsoft Office Outlook Objects -> ThisOutlookSession. (If that's not there, you might need to record a macro and then delete it. This should create the ThisOutlookSession item. Click on ThisOutlookSession in the left-hand column, and then paste this into the main window:

Private WithEvents DeletedItems As Items

Sub Application_Startup()
 Dim objNS As NameSpace
 Set objNS = Application.GetNamespace("MAPI")
 Set DeletedItems = objNS.GetDefaultFolder(olFolderDeletedItems).Items
 Set objNS = Nothing
End Sub

Private Sub DeletedItems_ItemAdd(ByVal myItem As Object)
If myItem.Subject = "" Then
   ' Google's Outlook Calendar sync causes a bunch of Appointments to be create on 12/31/1979 at 7:00pm.
   ' After the sync, they get "deleted", but you can have THOUSANDS of these in your Deleted Items.
   ' This will permanently get rid of them (as well as any other items with no Subject).
   myItem.Delete
End If
End Sub

BTW, the same idea can be extended to create an event handler to handle items getting added to a folder that collects all of your automated or junk email. Add a "Private WithEvents" line, and then add this to Application_Startup():

  Set AutomatedItems = objNS.GetDefaultFolder(olFolderInbox).Folders.item("Automated").Items

And then add a new handler to do something like:

Private Sub AutomatedItems_ItemAdd(ByVal myItem As Object)
 myItem.UnRead = False
End Sub