Austin Java User Group Meeting July 28, 2009

Since my daughter has been playing volleyball on Tuesday nights, I've missed the JUG this summer so it was fun to get to go back and see my friends at the JUG.
As is sometimes the case, the most important things happen outside the regular meeting talks. Rob asked how many people were looking for jobs and about half of the 36 people attending raised their hands. Usually it's only a handful of people looking for work.
Steve Romohr gave a good overview of several talks at the recent NFJS conference. Kevin Graham talked about SCALA and Clojure.
During his talk, Cheng mentioned the space station, shuttle, and Russian supply ship were doing to pass overhead at 9:15, so we all went outside and watched the amazing spectacle. Below is a picture of the shuttle speeding its way across the sky.
(If you look carefully you can see the slight damage to one of the tiles on the left side about 2/3 of the way down in the middle).


Thanks to Rob for organizing the meeting!

Excel: Counting The Occurance Of Values in a Range

Today I had an interesting Excel challenge. I needed to know for a column of numbers how many fall into a particular range. For example, how many numbers in column A are between 0.1 and 0.2? This is the formula I used from info at contextures.com:

=COUNTIF($A2:$A642,">" & L1) - COUNTIF($A2:$A642,">" & L2)

Where A2:A642 is my range of numbers and L1 is the lower bound of the range and L2 is the upper range.

Launchy - The Path to a Clean Desktop in Windows XP

My new best friend is Launchy, a program launcher. After installing, you type "Alt-Spacebar" and Launchy pops up.

You start typing the first letters of the app you want to start and it starts guessing which binaries in its path you want to start. Launchy learns quickly what you usually want. With Launchy you don't need all those icons on your desktop to launch programs. You can add directories to search and all the options you'd expect.
I've been able to clean my entire desktop of all those cluttering icons and reduce it down to just two icons, "My Computer" and "Recycle Bin".
Ahh.... the zen-like experience of having a clean desktop:

(Ok, it doesn't take much to make me happy.)