Software – Computer Aces

Seagate GoFlex Satellite + Hack Seagate Satellite

For years I have been looking for portable, battery-powered external hard drive. I do a lot of consulting and always keep backups of my work, so I keep a portable external hard drive with me. I also have an extensive music library that I want to have readily available to access from my laptop and portable devices, but I hate constantly moving music files to my “iDevices” just to keep the selection fresh, and all too often, I’ll want to hear some songs in my collection that I didn’t think to move.

Wait, I could do all of that on iCloud (or any other cloud service), right? Sure, if I want to wait for files to upload / download, and I want to pay for all the bandwidth to move the data – I’m usually on the road or at a client site when I want to move data and I don’t jailbreak my devices anymore – it’s just too much of a hassle for limited benefit and extra instability.

Microsoft Excel – A Developer’s View

I have this love/hate relationship with Excel, especially Excel 2007. I haven’t played with Excel 2010 yet, so this may extend to it as well.

I won’t go into a lot of history here, but I had Visicalc a gazillion years ago, then Lotus 1-2-3 (the text version). In fact in Enron’s early days, I automated some of the curve calculations one of the VPs had built in a version of 1-2-3 running on a Sun workstation using Lotus’ macro language they had extended from the original Visicalc.

The Origin of the Buddy List

Did you ever wonder who actually invented the “buddy list” that has become so ubiquitous on computers worldwide? I guess it was a couple of years ago while chatting with a “buddy” who I have known online since 1987 that it hit me: I invented the “buddy list”!The documentation for AOTools tells the story about how I got the idea.Quick note: The documentation shown here is for the last version of AOTools that I released in 1992 to work with AOL v.2. I created the first AOTools for AOL v.1 with all the same features. The first version worked on Windows 3.0, and I initially developed it using a beta version of Visual Basic. I was an early beta tester for several Microsoft projects.