Archive for September, 2006
September 30th, 2006 by matt
I’m copying a post I wrote on my swimming blog - BeneaththeSurface.ws - about an upcoming weekly “Internet radio” / podcast about competitive swimming. I think it’s applicable to “happy, healthy, effective online living” as well as it highlights the growing reach of digital media and the various groups using it.
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No sooner did I write about the Speedo podcast than I learn that Scott Goldblatt and Nathan Jendrick are starting a new weekly Internet radio show dedicated to swimming called Deck Pass. See Scott’s comment on my Speedo podcast post and see the Deck Pass website.
Scott writes the TimedFinals swimming blog, which he started in February, where he shares his insights and commentary about swimming, as well as some great interviews with great swimmers. Scott is a silver medalist from the 2000 games in Sydney and a gold medalist in Athens, and has already shown his interviewing talent on the Speedo podcast and a couple of his own on his blog.
Nathan is married to Megan Quann Jendrick, also an Olympian from Sydney and Athens.
I’m very excited to hear about Deck Pass and will be listening tomorrow. I’m not sure if the title of “Internet radio show” implies this will be a streaming live broadcast, but presumably it will be at least a podcast as well.
It’s great to bring swimming media content into the podcast / netcast realm. Please join me in listening and spreading the word to other swimmers and fans of swimming.
September 30th, 2006 by matt
There’s more and more talk lately about Digital Rights Management, or DRM for media content - how cumbersome it is, how it seemingly just penalizes the honest people who aren’t trying to violate copyrights, how it creates bigger and bigger obstacle between you and your music or video.
There is another area, however, outside of music and video where we experience an even greater lack of portability of our data - personal financial software. I’m talking about the Big 2 personal finance software packages, Quicken and Microsoft Money.
If you thought it was difficult to figure out how to get your purchased music back from iTunes after you just wiped your hard drive, or if you think the Windows Media Player 11’s non-backup DRM solution sounds crazy, just look at how much fun you could have trying to switch from one finance application to another.
About 2 years ago I purchased Microsoft Money 2006. I had used Quicken in the past, but wasn’t using it at the time, and simply wanted to try an alternative. I was actually using gnucash, an open source alternative to the Big 2, which actually has some really nice features. However, it wasn’t quite up to the level of what I needed and wanted to do.
Continue reading ‘The DRM-Like Bondage of Financial Software’
September 28th, 2006 by matt
Another week, another round of voting for MyDreamApp - the American Idol of Mac software development ideas. The field has been narrowed down from 24 to 18 contestants after round 1, and it’s time to take away another 6.
Here is everyone that is still standing at the beginning of Round 2:
I still like Mickey’s iVlog, Windy’s iStyleit, Dan’s Blossom and Farzad’s Portal. However, some of these are in danger of being eliminated. If you like any of these, or any of the others listed above, go vote!
Even if you’re not a Mac user, Mac owner or if you don’t even like fruit, you should pay attention to MyDreamApp. The concept of applying audience voting to application development is innovative and potentially lucrative. This first attempt at bringing a totally new idea to reality as a for-profit venture will be an interesting experiment and one, if successful, that will no doubt be repeated.
Next, MDA also highlights the power of ideas, as each of these contestants who have submitted ideas are simply the idea-generators, not the code generators. The winning idea will come to fruition at the nimble coding fingers of some already-selected and proven developers, not the person who had the idea.
Finally, the creation, participation by some of the Internet’s current pop icons and groundswell of response from the target audience - in this case semi-sophisticated and technical Mac users - reveals the potential that still exists for new an innovative uses for the computer. There are still many things that can be created that people will love and purchase.
Keep your eye on MDA - the innovative process, the winning idea and how that winning idea turns into a real application. This will definitely influence the future of application development in some way.
BTW, all voters in Round 2 will receive a free copy of Mori, the digital notebook and information collection application from HogBay Software. Voting ends Friday Sep 29 at 11:59 pm PDT.
September 27th, 2006 by matt
No sooner do I write about getting back to basics with Getting Things Done and Kinkless GTD, then the Omni Group announces that they are developing a GTD app called OmniFocus. For those not familiar with the Omni products, they are all extremely well done: high functionality, smooth and effective user interface and extraordinary though put into how it will actually work.
They now have several different applications, and some are fairly expensive. The one I’d really like to have is OmniGraffle, which is something like Visio, but easy and intuitive to use and makes prettier drawings. It’s out of my budget, though.
The guys at Omni have involved two of the principal proponents and innovators in the area of simple GTD methodologies and GTD on a Mac - Ethan Schoonover, the creator of the Kinkless GTD framework, and Merlin Mann of 43Folders, who is quite adept at understanding and communicating the essence of a productivity system (and also now the “King of Spackle“). Ethan writes about his involvement with Omni in his latest blog post, and I think all Kinkless fans are excited that Omni has asked for his input.
I am both excited and a bit apprehensive. Having seen what Omni can do by using OmniOutliner myself, and seeing OmniGraffle at work on a friend’s Mac, I know that they will create something innovative, simple, highly functional and “comfortable”.
I’m apprehensive because I don’t want to lose the simplicity and lightweight-ness of the Kinkless-OmniOutliner system that is in place today. I hope that by turning this into an official application, Omni doesn’t try to add so many features that the user has too many opportunities to play around with the system rather than focusing on doing the work.
I think the tinkering that comes so naturally for many of us actually hurts us if gone unchecked. I love to play around with something until I get it just right, and I don’t know what just right is until I try a lot of combinations and then do some fine-tuning and then think about it and then do some more adjustments. The beauty of the Kinkless system today is that you can’t really tweak too many things about how it works - you just focus on getting your tasks defined and in the right context and the right project and sub-project(s), then away you go to do your work.
My plea to you, Omni, is to ensure that you keep OmniFocus as simple as possible as you add in all the features you are planning. I’m sure Merlin and Ethan have given you similar input, but remember how many of us are so easily distracted.
I’m really looking forward to see what is next.
September 26th, 2006 by matt
I mentioned my search for an equivalent of Roboform on the Mac, and I think I’ve found it. I’ve been using 1Passwd for a couple of weeks now and really like it. I’m planning to write a more detailed review shortly, but today only on MacZot you can purchase 1Passwd for 30% off the normal price.
The number of licenses is limited, though, and it’s a deal for today only, so if you’re even remotely interested in a great Mac password manager that seamlessly integrates into your browser, head over to MacZot and grab 1Passwd for only $20.
September 25th, 2006 by matt
I mentioned that the MacCast was one of my favorite podcasts for hearing about and learning about Mac-related info, news, tips and tricks. Adam Christianson puts a lot of work into each show and is obviously very passionate and diligent about sharing what he knows with all his listeners.
You may have heard about his hosting problem last week - it seems that one of the posts on the MacCast blog was dugg last Wednesday, and created a huge increase in traffic in the course of just one hour. The traffic was apparently so significant that it caused the shared server that is hosting his blog to start impacting the service of the other websites on that server.
Adam has hosting service from GoDaddy, and apparently their policy is to simply shut down a particular domain if it starts to bring down or negatively impact the shared server it’s on. This is exactly what happened to the MacCast domain last Wednesday, but Adam was never informed. He eventually found out and for now he’s upgraded his service with GoDaddy to a dedicated server to eliminate this from happening again. He’s also upgraded his cost per month by 900%.
Apparently this sequence of events is not rare and certainly not unique to GoDaddy. From the hosting company’s perspective, it’s only reasonable for them to temporarily shut down a domain if it resides on a shared server and if it starts to negatively affect the service of other domains on that server. They can’t let one site’s sudden increase in traffic negatively impact other paying customers, can they? Sure it’s inconvenient for the domain with the spike in traffic, but hey, that’s part of the hosting agreement.
But is that the best way to do business? I think a subtle change is required in the approach to hosting service to truly meet the customer’s needs.
As a hosting company, you provide a service to content creators and publishers to put their content on the Internet. You provide a platform on which they build and display their content. Without the platform, the content is meaningless because no one can access it.
Presumably, the goal of the content creators - i.e. your customers - is to attract traffic to their site and to varying degrees, depending on the purpose of the website, to increase that traffic. Thus, success for your customers is increased traffic.
But what you do when you shut down your customers’ domains when they experience a spike in traffic is to penalize them for achieving their goal. A truly successful hosting service must figure out a way to partner with their customers to allow and enable them to succeed.
Here’s my suggestion. As far as I know from the little research I’ve done, no one currently offers this service.
For your shared hosting plans, offer an optional service to automatically manage traffic spikes by quickly replicating a specific domain on a dedicated server and temporarily transfer traffic to that dedicated server. You could charge $2.50 - $5.00 a month for this option, then charge a specific rate per hour or day that the dedicated server was in use. If traffic levels tapered off to a more predictable and manageable level after 8 hours, then the customer could make the call to go back to the shared server, assuming the hosting company determined there would be no impact to the server.
Technically I don’t think this should be too difficult. It would require some utilities to quickly replicate a domain’s storage on another server, but this is just some intelligent copying. I’m guessing that on average, sites that would be affected by a traffic spike have less than 1GB of storage. You should be able to transfer 1GB in less than 1 min (that’s only 133 Mbit/s). Add an additional 1 minute for changing your internal DNS tables. Then, add a 5 min timeframe for detection of a true traffic spike event (you would need to be detected through software monitoring of traffic levels and possibly through CPU monitoring of the server). You have a 7 minute maximum downtime and possibly less. If you have only 1 such event a year and actually have a 7 minute period of downtime, that’s still 99.9987% availability for that domain for the year.
As a hosting company, you get additional revenue - first from the monthly service charge of having the service available, and then from the specific events when you have to temporarily move a domain to a dedicated server. Your customer is satisfied because it’s likely that he or she will never even be aware of any downtime, but will be aware that you could handle the sudden increase in traffic without any problems.
Additionally, you have the chance to upsell your customer to a dedicated host if the traffic appears to be steadily increasing or leveling off at a higher level - they would already be on the dedicated host. You would of course need to invest in additional servers to handle all the temporary scaling up.
Perhaps I’m over simplifying some of the technical factors. But even if I am, technical factors can be overcome. It’s the fundamental approach of enabling your customers to succeed with your service, rather than penalizing them for succeeding, that makes the most sense to me.
Why wouldn’t you want to offer this traffic increase protection to your customers? Who will be the first hosting service to offer this (if one isn’t already)?
September 24th, 2006 by matt
Horse Flies by Vicr of Flickr
For about 6 months I’ve abandoned the formality of the Getting Things Done principles and have basically just kept it all in my head and done very little planning. GTD is supposed to help you do just the opposite of this by providing you a framework for keeping track of things and diligently planning. I’m not sure what it was that threw me off, but my lack of discipline and diligence has caused more than a couple of missed commitments and forgotten follow-ups.
Rather than simply beating myself up and bemoaning my lack of attention to the GTD principles, I’m simply jumping back in and restarting. Perhaps it’s like falling off a horse - you can sit on the ground and pout and think about how much that fall just hurt, or you can get back up and get on again.
So as I get back on, I’m starting with a GTD tool developed specifically for the Mac called Kinkless GTD. Author / developer Ethan Schoonover has created a set of add-on scripts for OmniOutliner Pro that create a task management system based on the GTD methodology. I’ve tried many different tools and software incarnations of GTD and this one by far is the most simple and elegant solution.
If you’ve purchased a new Mac recently, then you have a version of OmniOutliner bundled with OSX. If not and you haven’t tried OmniOutliner yet, go get it and try it out. It’s really an app that defies a specific genre. The best way I can describe it is an outlining system with style and brains. You can use it to take notes, organize info, brainstorm, collect and present data in a simple and elegant way. It’s kind of like MindManager without the mapping.
Kinkless GTD, or KGTD, requires OmniOutliner Pro, which provides a few extra features. You can upgrade to the pro version from the standard version which comes bundled with new Macs for $30. Then, you can download the KGTD scripts and follow a few short instructions to setup OmniOutliner to be your GTD management center.
Ethan has a great demo video / screencast in which shows some of the basic functions of KGTD. I admit that I was pretty confused when I first tried to use it and having never used OmniOutliner didn’t help. Once I read through some of the forums on the KGTD website, watched the video a couple of times and played around with it I did finally figure out what i was doing.
To me there are three factors that determine whether you will ultimately be successful in implementing a GTD (or any other task management and prioritization) system:
- simplicity
- scaleability
- discipline
Simplicity means that it must be extremely easy to do the basic operations of the system and require very little overhead of time or resources. Simplicity is why a lot of people just use paper and pencil to implement GTD rather than a software-based approach, as it is far too easy to get caught up in the workings of the software and lose sight of the actual job of task management. OmniOutliner and KGTD make it extremely simple to add tasks, projects, notes and due dates. With extensions for QuickSilver and tie-ins to iCal it becomes even easier.
Scaleability means that the system you use must scale up or down according to your needs. If you have a software utility that handles multiple, complex tasks and interactions between tasks, resources and other elements and then produces amazingly beautiful graphs and task lists organized and sorted according to your predefined rulesets … but requires 10 minutes to setup a simple new task, then you have a system that doesn’t scale down. Conversely, if you can quickly whip out your hipster PDA or other scrap of paper to write down a newly-though-of next action, but can’t make that system work for big complex long-term projects that you find yourself doing, then your system doesn’t effectively scale up. Either way, if you can’t make your system adjust to the different types of work and tasks that you manage, then you’ll eventually stop using it.
Discipline is simply your own decision, made over and over, to use your system. It is largely influenced by the first two factors, but even if you have ultimate simplicity and perfect scalability, you still must choose to actually look at your list of next actions and start doing them. It doesn’t really matter how cool your software is or how many ways you can show your task lists if you don’t actually spend time with them.
For me, KGTD with OmniOutliner Pro fits my needs perfectly. After using it for what amounts to about 2 weeks, I have some feature requests and things I’d like to see improved, but the core system and interface integrates nicely into my workflow … as long as I discipline myself and decide each day to use it. More to come…
September 23rd, 2006 by matt
The voting for Round 1 in MyDreamApp is complete. Two of my picks didn’t make it:
- Peter’s BubbleFish - very interesting idea, though I agree with one of the judges that it would be very difficult to implement - gathering data from many different sources (language translation, wikipedia, google, etc.) quick enough to pop up a window before a user loses interest. I thought it may make it through based on the potential, but nope.
- Joe’s Puppet Constructor - now I really think this would be something people would use. It has nothing to do with productivity - quite the opposite. The idea is that you can create a graphical puppet and then make it do stuff. I think if you somehow added a peer-to-peer or multi-session type of experience this would be a really fun time-waster: having your puppet play / dance / fight with other people’s puppets online. Probably also difficult to implement and would require a lot of streamlined animation coding.
My other 4 picks made it past the first round and there are a lot of interesting ideas. Congrats to Peter and Joe for making it to the top 24.
September 23rd, 2006 by matt
I previously mentioned the MyDreamApp contest to identify great ideas for new Mac applications. The analogy is American Idol for new software ideas, as we, the people, get to vote on which applications we think have the most potential. The winner will actually have his or her idea turned into a real software application.
The initial screenings are done and round 1 voting is open - through 6:00 pm EDT today (Saturday September 23) only. There are 24 contestants in this first round (equivalent of making it to Hollywood on AI) and six of them will “go home” after round 1. Everyone who registers and votes in round 1 will also receive a license for pzizz and the Energizer Plugin, a $40 value. pzizz generates music and sounds that help you relax.
My favorites among the 24 finalists are (in no particular order):
Check them out and vote!
September 23rd, 2006 by matt
I was just looking through my Applications folder at all the neat stuff that’s accumulated there in the 120 days since I’ve become an official Mac switcher. I’ve been fairly careful to not download every shiny new toy that I see, but I have tried out several apps and have kept the ones I find useful and spiffy.
Today I wanted to just pick 3 of the apps I use and briefly explain why I like them. I’ll do this more from time to time.
Todos. The first app I’ll mention has as its main purpose to simply show you all your apps. It’s actually pretty neat and useful. Todos scans your entire Mac, based on common folders where applications typically reside (you can define which folders to check) and then creates a graphical collection of each app.
You can assign a key combination to trigger the display of all the apps, and / or put an icon on the menu bar that displays the app window when you click it. It’s kind of like CoverFlow for your applications, though not quite as animated. Here’s my todos display of all my apps - how many can you name?:
Todos is a free download from OpenSoft Development, which distribute Todos under the GNU GPL (General Public License) - which basically means that they’re not charging you anything for it and you are not allowed to charge anything for it - and make the source code available on their website.
Retrospect Express 6.1. When I bought an external hard drive from OWC, it came with a copy of Retrospect Express - a backup utility from dantz (now EMC). Retrospect seems to be somewhat of a de facto standard for incremental backups for the Mac, and the Express version will do all you need it to do for backing up a single machine.
It is a PPC app, however, which means that it doesn’t run natively on the Intel Macs - it must go through the Rosetta emulation layer. This emulation slows things down a lot and I’m sure that’s why my backups seem to take a lot longer than they should. I do backup every day, though. For a great step-by-step of backing up your Mac with Retrospect, see Bob LeVitus’ series of articles on the MacObserver.
Retrospect Express is only available as bundled with new hard disks, as mine was.
TextMate 1.5.3. TextMate is ostensibly a text editor, but in reality it does so much more than just edit text. Geared towards the developer and anyone who routinely edits files that contain some sort of computer language (CSS, HTML, Perl, C++, etc.). TextMate is as much of an environment for application development as it is a simple editor, as it’s quite extensible.
There are numerous “bundles”, or plugins, each of which contain several actions that perform specific formatting, update other applications, or perform some language-specific common tasks. You can use TextMate as a blog editor (see it in action on a screencast). TextMate is just an amazing and powerful tool, and so far, I’m only scratching the surface of what it can do.
TextMate runs 39 Euros, so it’s on the higher end of Mac utilities in terms of price. I went ahead and purchased it, however, and really enjoy using it.
Hopefully this little glimpse into my Applications folder was useful for you. I’ll work my way down through the list of great apps I’ve installed thus far, and feel free to let me know your favorites.
September 22nd, 2006 by matt
With still no crossgrade love from MindJet on MindManager for Mac, I’m expanding the level of what I will accept and use for mind mapping. Since I’m not willing to pay the $229 for the Mac version when I’ve already paid for the much-more-fully-featured PC version, I look elsewhere.
A reader of this blog, Belinda, sent me a note this week about FreeMind, an opensource mind mapping project. I had actually used FreeMind before I bought MindManager and actually was fairly impressed with it. Belinda’s note reminded me of FreeMind so I’ve got it up and going now on my Mac.
FreeMind is a java app, so it can easily work on multiple OS’s; java also makes it fairly fast and lean. With FreeMind, you can do all the basic functions of building and formatting a mind map - great keyboard shortcuts, text formatting, node formatting, basic connector line styles, and “clouds” that go around a group of nodes. There are stock icons that you can add to your nodes with one click, and you can define node formats and map them to a single key shortcut to quickly format nodes according to a specific and frequently-used styles.
You can custom-space nodes as well - move each node around to get it right where you want it rather than where the app puts it by default. You can also drag the screen around the window to easily move the map around.
With FreeMind you can add links to other nodes in the map (”local hyperlink”), typical URL links including mailto: links, and even links to other files, e.g. other FreeMind maps. This effectively emulates the MindManager ability to link to sub-maps from a main map.
And, you can add notes to nodes; as a nice touch, the note window at the bottom of the screen automatically appears when you select a node with a note, and disappears when you select another node without a note.
FreeMind also allows export to a variety of formats, including as HTML, XHTML, picture (JPG or PNG). You can also export to OpenOffice.org’s Writer app.
All these features make FreeMind a very workable mind mapping application, especially for basic brainstorming, info gathering, organizing thoughts and ideas, etc. Where FreeMind falls short of the great MindManager is really in the area of extended formatting and extensibility.
MindManager integrates into MS Office apps near-seamlessly and allows you to turn nodes into tasks, emails into nodes, maps into PowerPoint presentations. You can even embed Excel spreadsheets and charts into a MindManager map and edit them within the map. MindManager also lets you define and use several distinct map layouts - i.e. not just the branching out from the center in all directions, but also layouts like top-down, left-to-right, and org-chart. There are also more node-specific formatting options in MindManager, as well as a full-features template and style management system.
But with no olive branch from MindJet to their existing PC customers who’ve now switched to a Mac, FreeMind has the potential to fill a real need. I am starting to use it again as my only mind mapping app on my Mac, and perhaps you should, too - at least try it out.
September 20th, 2006 by matt
I just discovered the Ma.gnolia social bookmark service. Why do we need another social bookmark service, you may ask? Doesn’t del.icio.us set the standard and provide everything we need? It’s easy, simple, minimalist, has a nice API and it’s what most people use. Not to mention the other services (Blinklist, Furl, Simpy, etc.).
Ma.gnolia offers something unique - an entire “package” of features, neatly and simply integrated in a useful way. With del.icio.us you can store bookmarks, tag them, send them to others, and explore what other people are bookmarking. You can search everyone’s bookmarks and set a list of people for whom you want to watch their bookmarks. But Ma.gnolia takes these features to another level of user experience by adding the element of community.
One can be social (i.e. a social bookmarker) but not necessarily be in a community. A community implies some sort of common thread and or purpose to a group of real people. The best example of an online community to me is Flickr, where the unifying thread is pictures, but people come to interact, to consume, to enjoy, to be inspired, to create in this community. As such, there are multiple sub-groups that naturally form, and people actually develop relationships by being together in the group as they comment on pictures, share more of themselves and communicate with others.
Ma.gnolia offers much the same type of experience, but with the unifying thread of bookmarking Internet content rather than pictures. You can add bookmarks and tag them, but that’s only the beginning. That’s like taking your pictures and posting them on the Internet somewhere for people to find them. But just as Flickr enables you to do more than simply post pictures, Ma.gnolia offers the dimension of community as part of a bookmarking service.
In Ma.gnolia you can create contacts so that you can see their bookmarks instantly, and vice-versa. You can control privacy on each of your bookmarks. There are groups within Ma.gnolia focused on a theme of bookmarks - e.g. the Apple group, which contains bookmarks about all things Apple. Along with the groups there are discussions related to groups and to social bookmarking in general. There are user-to-user messages, just like Flickr.
And one very unique feature Ma.gnolia offers is a saved screenshot of each bookmarked page you add. They create both a small thumbnail and a full-sized saved page when you add your bookmark. This innovation allows you to remember what a particular site was in case it moved or was updated since you bookmarked it. I never would have thought about this feature for a bookmarking service, but it’s fairly useful as I think about it.
There is a way to import all your del.icio.us bookmarks into Ma.gnolia, which I’m going to do shortly. I’ll start using this service and report back in a week or two about how my experience has been. If you’re interested in more, see their Why is Ma.gnolia Different tutorial and just peruse their very well-designed website.
After an initial investigation, however, Ma.gnolia appears to set the new standard in social community bookmarking.
September 20th, 2006 by matt
Two weeks have passed since the world lost Steve Irwin (see my small tribute to him). Animal Planet is playing his public memorial service on tv, but they’re also streaming it on their website as a flash video. I just watched it on tv and it’s a fantastic tribute to Steve.
September 20th, 2006 by matt
I have long asserted that Excel is one of the most powerful tools ever created. It’s also one of the most underutilized - many don’t even realize all the things it can do - as well as one of the most mis-utilized, at least compared to what was intended to be used for.
People use Excel for project plans, taking notes, making lists, as an address book, and a new use that I just saw today - keeping a list of motivational quotes (you know who you are, Steve!). Part of the problem is that there is not an app like OmniOutliner on the PC - one of the cool surprises that I had when getting my Mac.
One of the things you would expect to be able to do with Excel is some statistical analysis. Excel does come with some stats functions that are pretty useful and go way beyond my knowledge of math, but there’s one basic thing it doesn’t do - at least not without some coaxing: plot a frequency distribution curve of the values of a set of data.
For example, I recently wanted to analyze a set of data that represented the times, in minutes, that a certain process took to complete. I had about 40 measurements of this process, and I wanted to see how they were grouped together. I wanted to draw a graph of the instances of the various times to get a visual representation of how the times were distributed across the different values. I wanted to have something that looked like this:
After playing around in Excel a bit I couldn’t find a way to make one of these graphs. After a bit of searching, I found a host of Windows apps that can draw nice frequency distribution graphs - some of which appear useful, most of which are expensive. I worked with Excel for a while and came up with a way to effectively draw a frequency distribution graph.
You do this by making use of the frequency function in Excel and then drawing a graphs with two series of the same data.
First, you decide which frequency groups you want to plot. My data fell in the range of 1 to over 1500 minutes, with a lot of the data towards lower numbers. I decided to group my data in blocks of 25 minutes. This means that I want to see how many of the processes I measured took between 0 and 25 minutes, how many took between 25 and 50 minutes, etc. I set a maximum of 450 for my analysis, so the final group was how many of the processes took 450 minutes or more.
I then setup by data groupings as numbers in successive cells of a column in a spreadsheet:
Next, I used the frequency function to have Excel count the number of occurrences of my data values that fall within each group. When you use the function across a range of cells like this, you have to enter it as an array function. Array functions in Excel are very powerful, but somewhat difficult to understand at first. Essentially they let you do operations on a group of cells at one time, rather than just one cell at a time.
The formula I will use is the following, where the DataSeries!B2:B42 is the group of cells that contain my actual data, and the A7:A25 is the range of cells that contains the frequency groupings I just talked about above:
=FREQUENCY(DataSeries!B2:B42,A7:A25)
To enter this, you first highlight all the cells in the output range - B6 to B25 in my case above. Note that I highlight one cell past the last number in my grouping range so that Excel will put the number of instances greater than the last number in the grouping range.
After you highlight all the cells in the output range, you then enter the frequency formula above in the data entry form at the top of the Excel window:
Now, rather than pressing <ENTER> after typing in the formula, press <CTRL><SHIFT><ENTER>. This enters the formula as an array formula and tells Excel to apply the formula to all the highlighted cells. After doing this, I had the counts of data that I wanted:
You can now quite easily create a graph with this data that almost is what we’re after. I chose to use an area graph like this:
To make this look a little bit nicer and less choppy, I added another series to this graph using a line graph and smoothing the line. First, I simply created a copy of the data values in column B, e.g. cell C7 would be
=B7
Now you have a copy of the frequency data in the worksheet:
In the graph, add a data series (right-click on the graph, choose Source Data, then click on the Series tab, and click add) consisting of the values in the copied column (column C in my example). Then make this data series a line graph (right-click on the new data series on the graph, then select graph type, and choose the line graph.
The line graph now forms a line along the top of the area graph. But, we want to make it smoothed. So, double-click on the line graph and select the Smoothed line option like this:
Now, we have a nicer looking frequency distribution graph:
For a nice touch, you can paste the graph as a picture in somewhere like PowerPoint and then draw a vertical line to represent the median.
There you go - hopefully you’ll be able to use this to visually represent your data better in Excel.
September 18th, 2006 by matt
Michael Arrington yesterday wrote about a new online storage solution, Carbonite, which offers some compelling features … for Windows machines. The unlimited storage, incremental backups, transfer encryption and background backup / upload activity for $5/month sets a new standard in the growing group of online backup solutions. The problem for Mac users is that the Carbonite backup software only works for Windows.
One commenter on Michael’s post suggests that many online storage services may now be wary of the forthcoming Time Machine in OS 10.5 Leopard and the probably bundling of an integrated and enhanced online storage offering from Apple or other vendors. That argument makes sense if you’re looking to offer more of an end-to-end service model - storage, backup software, file sharing, media streaming, etc. - for which you can charge slightly more.
However, there are many - myself at the front of the line - who simply want to pay for secure off-site easily accessible storage that we can access via WebDAV so that you essentially have a network drive mounted on your machine. Sharing, media streaming and hosting are nice, but I’d like to have a lower-priced service that focuses only on storage.
The two services that comes closest to this today as far as I can see are OmniDrive and Jungle Disk.
OmniDrive has a Mac client that allows your external storage to integrate into the Finder as just a regular drive. They also allow you full editing capability on your remote files - you can open, edit and save the files directly from the remote drive without having to download them first.
(screenshot taken from the OmniDrive website)
OmniDrive is currently in public beta and are accepting requests to be included in the fun. I just submitted my request, and will wait to see how they respond. It’s unclear to me what their pricing strategy will be.
JungleDisk offers a flat rate $0.15 per GB stored and $0.20 per GB transferred, and is offered as a service from Amazon. JungleDisk creates a virtual drive that attaches to your machine just like a real drive. You read and write files to this virtual drive, and then the JungleDisk software securely uploads and downloads from the servers in the background based on the changes you make to your virtual drive.
Had JungleDisk been available at the beginning of this year I probably would have gone with them. In stead, I purchased the Streamload MediaMax service. Streamload offers a very compelling 25G of free storage, and charges on a storage and bandwidth basis. Their paid plans include $5/month (100G storage / 10G transfer/month), $10/month (250G / 25G) and $30/month (1TB / 100G). Streamload has just migrated all their users to their improved MediaMax service, which enhances the user interface, refines some of the sharing and hosting features and standardizes the pricing plans above.
I’ve been satisfied with Streamload, but the Windows upload and download clients they provide are very rudimentary and unstable. They don’t offer a Mac-specific client but do support ftp access, allowing you to easily upload backup sets created with another backup program, e.g. Retrospect Express.
Carbonite indicates on their website that they’re working on a Mac version, expected by the end of 2006. OmniDrive states their service will officially launch at the end of 2006. Streamload suggests they are working on a Mac client but do not provide any details.
So what is the ideal solution today for Macs? I think JungleDisk is probably best at present, though there are some interesting possibilities coming, including what surprises Apple may offer with Leopard and Time Machine. For now, I’m staying put on Streamload - mostly because I payed for 12 months - but will keep my eyes open.