Posted on 24 August 2008
The former is a local crab. Discovered by me and will probably only ever get a mention in its lifetime in this post. Radius around 5 cm.
The later is the Helix Nebula located 650 light-years away in constellation Aquarius. Discovered by Karl Ludwig Harding, probably before 1824. (according to wikipedia). Often been refered to as the eye of the God. Radius 2.87 light years.
Image Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech. http://gallery.spitzer.caltech.edu/Imagegallery/image.php?image_name=sig07-016
The local crab is ...
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Posted on 24 August 2008
Image Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech
It's interesting to know that light too *echos*. This
document , hosted at caltech, is worth a read on how modern telescopes detect light emitting from eminating from a cosmic event hundreds of years later. The images towards the bottom show what astronomers observed in the space surrounding the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant.
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Posted on 24 August 2008
According to
www.gebco.net, work on the creation of the GEBCO world map began as a laboratory workshop project of the Nippon Foundation/GEBCO Training Project at the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping of the University of New Hampshire, USA.
Just thought it was the most gorgeous map of earth that I have seen in a long time !!! "Image reproduced from the GEBCO world map, http://www.gebco.net"
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Posted on 24 August 2008
NY Times came up with this flash based graphic representing the medals won by various countries in every Olympic since 1896. The nice thing is how the bubbles rise and collapse. Also note the how the tally of medals won by african and asian nations has grown and the medals being won over by a much wider array of countries.
http://www.nytimes.com/MEDALCOUNT_MAP.html
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Posted on 23 August 2008
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Just playing around and having fun. Pretty simple code but one that realy works. You can have a look at the file
here.
Image courtesy www.dialaphone.co.uk
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Posted on 23 August 2008
Update: You can download the
Sudoku Solver in Excel with brute force
here (latest version) here.
For the uninitiated, Sudoku is a grid of 9x9 cells where each cell can and must have a value from 1 to 9 such that no number must be repeated in a row, column or any of the 9 groups of 3x3 grids.
And not onto the circumstances behind this sudden urge to develop a sudoku solver. ...
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Posted on 23 August 2008
If you have followed this till now (silly me, if you’re reading this, you likely might’ve :-)), you’ve completed the first of the three important phases in the development of your dashboard. You may want to use these formulas to get your data up to scratch for the next important step – Data Modeling and the generation of pivot tables.
Generating a Pivot Table
Once your data has been properly scrubbed, cleaned for errors and filled up, its time to us ...
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Posted on 23 August 2008
60 useful excel formulas that are a good to know
DATE = Returns the serial number of a particular date
DATEVALUE = Converts a date in the form of text to a serial number
DAY = Converts a serial number to a day of the month
EOMONTH = Returns the serial number of the last day of the month before or after a specified number of months
MONTH = Converts a serial number to a month
NOW = ...
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Posted on 23 August 2008
20 Excel formulas you should know
DATEVALUE = Converts a date in the form of text to a serial number
DAY = Converts a serial number to a day of the month
MONTH = Converts a serial number to a month
YEAR = Converts a serial number to a year
LEFT = Returns the leftmost characters from a text value
LEN = Returns the number of characters in a text string
RIGHT = Returns the rightmost characters from ...
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Posted on 23 August 2008
Having our first view of the data
More often that not, dashboards get prepared with a large amount of data. Even if that’s not the case, it always makes send to have your data nicely laid out. That way, whenever you have to go back and check the accuracy of the data, it becomes so much easier.
Let’s work with an example. Suppose we've just been provided with one year’s worth of sales and target numbers for the regional and ...
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Posted on 22 August 2008
Also useful would be to arm yourself with some shortcuts, they can be a ton of help when working with large amounts of data. The idea is to just work with the keyboard without having to use the mouse....things work much faster that way.
Basic (and necessary)
Cut Ctrl + x
Copy = Ctrl + c
Paste = Ctrl + v
Minimize all = WinKey + m
Move to first row = Home
Move to last row = End
Ctrl + ...
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Posted on 22 August 2008
I'll be using excel 2002 and 2003 for most of this so many of the things that work on these versions may not work on some of the earlier ones.
There are certin excel "add-ins" that allow excel to do more things when they are turned-on when they are turned-off ! (Isn't that the case with everythign else though in life :-)) Please be sure to click on Tools -> Add-Ins... and in the add-ins box that appears, check/turn-on "Analysis ToolPak". ...
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Posted on 22 August 2008
"A dasboard is a collection of data and/or graphic elements that allow the reader to make better sense of what's taking place."
That's my definition and I'm sticking to it!!!
Often times authors will make this definition more complex. A dashboard no matter how complicated or sophisticated, is in the end, just a compilation of data and possibly, graphics. What they do......well they allow the reader "to make more sense of what's taking place". Special emphasis on "more sense". A dashboard will ...
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Posted on 20 August 2008
Two Apache, two php, one MySQL, one JVM, one WAMPserver later......finally seems to be working!
Greetings everyone!
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