Mike Schaeffer's Blog

This post spoke to the use of ClearType to improve text rendering in vCalc.

Since ClearType depends on the unique properties of LCD's, it won't look as good on a CRT. (I still think it looks better than normal, though).

Lately, I've been finding myself spending lots of time toggling between two Excel spreadsheets to make edits. This little macro makes it easy in Excel 2000 to toggle between two spreadsheet windows. I reccomend you bind it to a keystroke.

Option Explicit

Dim lastWindow As Variant

Sub HereAndThere()
    If IsEmpty(lastWindow) Then
        Set lastWindow = ActiveWindow
    Else
        Dim currentWindow As Window
        Set currentWindow = ActiveWindow

        lastWindow.Activate

        Set lastWindow = currentWindow
    End If
End Sub

Here's how you use it:

• Run the macro once to save your current location.
• Switch to your other spreadsheet
• Now, running the macro will switch back and forth betweeen the two worksheets.

The "saving excursions" in the title is a reference to the save-excursion special form in Emacs Lisp. This macro isn't quite the same (and not nearly as powerful), but it reminded me of the Emacs feature. If it turns out to be useful, I might generalize my little macro to include some of the capabilities of Emacs' save-excursion.

This is a little add in for Excel that takes formulas and reformats them in a more readable style.

I've been shopping for a laptop recently. My target specs are these:

• Any modern laptop processor is probably adequate.
• 1GB RAM.
• 30-60GB Disk.
• A DVD writer would be nice, but not necessary.
• 14-15 inch display, the highest dot pitch I can find.
• Reasonable 2D graphics performance, 3D is not that important to me.
• Touchpad pointing device.
• 3 year warranty, accident insurance is a nice plus
• Long battery life, >3 hours.
• Reasonable expectation of 2-3 years of reliable life.
• Can run a couple small Windows applications I need to do my job.
• Can run MS Office.

That's a long list, but nothing on it is very demanding. Let's see how close a couple vendors get:

So, as ever, Apple is the most expensive choice, even when compared to nicer PC's like the ThinkPad.

Maybe the thing that suprises me the most about this is that Apple isn't even close to the bleeding edge of display technology. Given the energy they've put into OS X's desktop rendering pipeline, I'd expect them to have displays that could compete with Sony's XBrite or maybe the 2MP 15" widescreen that Dell makes available on the D810. OS X could drive those displays better than pre-Avalon Windows. Maybe this is a artifact of the suppliers Apple is using?