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If you work with raw data on a daily basis, you are probably more than familiar with Microsoft Excel. But do you really know how to use Excel to its fullest extent? My goal is to be a master of efficiency, and many of Excel’s native features allow me to achieve that and are only a click away.

I would like to make a habit out of posting Excel tips, so if this first installation seems rudimentary to you (it is Excel 101, after all), make sure you check back for more advanced tips over time. But don’t run off too fast, even Excel 101 might teach you a thing or two.

Continue reading “Excel 101: 4 Tricks Everyone Should Know”

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We’ve released our second iteration of Wosaic just in time for the Engineering Open House at the University of Illinois. At the Engineering Open House, we created over 120 mosaics for people, and won 3rd place for the non-technical theme.

This new release represents a major rewrite in the code for the GUI and general control flow. While this won’t be immediately apparent at first glance, this means major efficiency gains and better stability. You can now create multiple mosaics in the same session, and even cancel processing mid-generation. Also, the resolution parameters don’t take effect until saving, which means you can save a Mosaic at a variety of different resolutions.

For more details, check out the Release Notes, which also contains links to other useful wiki pages. Or, head straight for the download page to grab a copy of the latest version. Keep reading below for a walk-through to create your first mosaic.

Continue reading “Wosaic 1.0 beta– Faster, Cleaner Mosaics From Your Own Photos”

My recent changeover to Ubuntu Linux has had me searching for easy replacements for all of my Windows programs. The Linux community has made this a pretty easy task, especially with Ubuntu. Ubuntu provides you with Gimp (Photoshop), Firefox (Internet Explorer), Thunderbird (Outlook Express), and the OpenOffice Suite (Microsoft Office Suite). One thing they do not provide you with, however, is an easy replacement for Adobe Flash. Adobe Flash was one of my commonly used programs on Windows, because I do a lot of intro movies for my youth group. Not having a replacement for it was a major downfall for Linux.

Seeing this problem, for about two weeks I searched around for a good replacement for it. I ran across programs such as Flash-4-Linux and OpenLazlo. I heard good things about both of these programs, but found that the install was a bit difficult for a Linux newbie. Then I ran across a program called Synfig. It looked like it had good documentation, and a pretty easy install. All you had to do to install was open up a terminal and put in:

sudo aptitude install synfigstudio

After installing Synfig and opening it (Applications > Graphics > Synfig Studio), I found that I really liked the interface. The synfig interface is broken up into multiple windows, much like that of GIMP. This makes it very easy for me to customize it to my specific needs and project. I also noticed that it had a very easy tool selection menu. Choosing a brush, color, and all the other properties of the brush is very simple.

One of the main features I found in synfig that I have come to love is the different keyframe setup from Adobe Flash. Instead of having the keyframes, time, motion tweens, and everything else all bunched up onto a single window like Adobe Flash, synfig seperates all of these components. This means that creating keyframes is a much simpler process, and is much easier to get them at the precise moment you want.

The only downfall, however, is that Synfig is not made to do intense visual editing. Synfig only allows you to go about as complex as creating a simple gradient. Anything greater than that, such as opacity, blending, or even just adding text is not implemented. This means that if you want to make a very nice looking flash movie, you’ve got to couple Synfig with GIMP.

I would say that, if you are a fan of Adobe Flash, you should definately give Synfig a try. It is a great alternative for Linux, it’s got plenty of documentation, and the interface is very simple. Check out the website to get started, or use the terminal command above.

Ever wondered what you could do with all the hundreds of digital pictures that you’ve accumulated? Why not make a mosaic?

Wosaic is a software project that I started working on as part of a programming class. My partner and I enjoyed making it so much, that we continued working on it, and today we had our first “public” release. From the project webpage:

Wosaic is an open source project that allows you to recreate an existing image by using many smaller images, as shown above. It was started as a project for CS 242 - Programming Studio at UIUC, and will be continuing on to Engineering Open House in the Spring of 2008.

Wosaic is not the only program of its kind. Several other solutions already exist, however Wosaic aims to be free, easy to use, fast, and accessible. These qualities are yet to be found in any single existing solution. We’re also aiming to make use of interesting sources for images. Currently, we support Flickr, Facebook, and local sources, but we hope to expand this to possibly include images from Picassa, and hopefully other sources as well.

Features

• Easily create a mosaic out of an image on your disk
• Utilizes Flickr, Facebook, and local directories for images
• Supports concurrency to provide fast results
• Shows progress by constructing the mosaic right before your eyes!
• Programmed in Java
• It is FREE and released under the GNU GPL v2.

We’re really excited about the release. It’s a beta version, so it’s not quite as polished as we expect future releases to be. But, give it a try– we’d love to hear your feedback. Binaries for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux can be found on the downloads page, and documentation for installing and using Wosaic is available in the wiki.

Have you noticed consistent spikes in your CPU usage, even when you have no programs running? Moreover, are the spikes all in one CPU core (as shown in the Task Manager), rather than distributed between cores? It could be the case that you have a rogue background process eating up precious CPU cycles. To see if its the case, follow these simple steps:

1. Open up the task manager by right clicking on the taskbar and selecting “Task Manager.”
2. Then, click on the “Perforance” tab, to confirm you’re having this issue. (It should look similar to the above screenshot.)
3. Next, select the “Processes” tab. Sort by CPU by clicking on the CPU column. The entries should have CPU entries in descending order.
4. The process at the top of the list is your culprit. You can do a Google search on the process name to find out what it is, and if it safe and easy to disable it.

In my particular experience, the rogue process was “bigfix.exe”. According to AuditMyPC.com,

BigFix.exe is a tool used to download support information from hardware manufacturers and software vendors. It will also perform checks over your system and try to locate configuration errors and security vulnerabilities. If you find that this process causes problems for your system, it should be terminated.

bigfix.exe is an application that does NOT appear to be a security risk

The Process Server database currently registers bigfix.exe to Bigfix.

So, it came down to a program that was installed with Windows, and running at startup. It was non-essential, so a simple uninstall of BigFix solved the problem.