Matthew Skelton

Burn ISO images to CD in Windows XP

Posted on July 21, 2009March 4, 2012 by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

There are some curious anomalies when it comes to writing CDs/DVDs in Windows XP, and one of these is the lack of inbuilt support for writing ISO images to CD.

However, Alex Feinman has an ISO Recorder V2 for Windows XP SP2/SP3, which even comes recommended by Microsoft.

Petri has more information, including use of CDBurn.exe from the Windows 2003 resource kit, and the screenshots of ISO Recorder V2 (above).

If you just need to use an ISO image (without burning a CD), then software such Daemon Tools or Alcohol 120will mount ISOs as virtual drives.

Default values skew data

Posted on June 11, 2009March 4, 2012 by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

In Raymond Chen’s brilliantly diverse blog The Old New Thing, he asks:

Why are so many fake LiveJournal blogs written by 29-year-olds?

The answer probably lies in default values for datetime variables: January 1, 1980 is the “year zero” for DOS date/time values, and – lo and behold – anyone born on that date is 29 years old in 2009.

LightWindow – an excellent LightBox implementation

Posted on June 9, 2009March 4, 2012 by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

LightWindow is perhaps one of the best of the LightBox-type implementations around, supporting almost every media type currently in use.

screenshot

I found a few gotchas, but these were very minor:

needs XHTML pages with correct DOCTYPE for it work in IE
Might need to edit lightwindow.js to correct the hardcoded paths to the skin elements
Replace the first line with the second in the HTML HEAD:

You can grab the files here: http://www.stickmanlabs.com/lightwindow/lightwindow.zip

Array formulas in Excel

Posted on January 21, 2009March 4, 2012 by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

Perhaps one of the most useful yet least known features of Excel is its array formulas. Essentially, array formulas are standard Excel expressions which are evaluated over a range of cells, rather than just a single cell.

In my case, I needed to aggregate the status of various DevDoctor projects, tracked in an Excel workbook:

Each row against a status (D5:D9) must aggregate a count of that status from a “status” column (here, column F). Using standard formulas alone, this is not possible (unless you resort to VBA scripting); however, using array formulas, this becomes a breeze.

The formula in cell D5 (counting the projects in Pending status) is:

=SUM(IF((F$12:F$42=C5),1,0))

When you press CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER on this formula, Excel converts it to an array formula, and indicates this with curly braces:

The expression is slightly strange, with a conditional being evaluated over a range of cells (F$12:F$42), rather than the usual single cell. In effect Excel calculates the inner IF expression once for each cell in the range, and the outer SUM expression then produces the required summation.

UPGRADE: MCAD Skills to MCPD Web Developer by Using the Microsoft® .NET Framework

Posted on November 19, 2008March 4, 2012 by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

I passed my 70-551 upgrade exam a couple of days ago, giving me MCPD Web Developer certification.

Having developed web-based applications in C#/.Net 2.0 for the past few years, this was relatively straightforward. There are some tricky questions on things like: