Respect is a commodity to be bought nowadays, as it sometimes seems.

Many people desire the respect of those in the community.

Many people desire the respect of their peers.

However, forgotten in the desire for respect is the giving of respect.

Is there any respect given to parents and family?

Is there any respect given to friends, or colleagues, or elders, or those in authority?

A wonderful example of people caring about their own desires and nothing for others is found in the TV show "Aussie Ladette to Lady".

The women shown within are self-centred and care only for their own desires.

They have no cares for what anyone else thinks, and the only "respect" they get is from equally disfunctional company.

They care nothing for what their family thinks, and in fact they seem to be proud to "air/wash their dirty laundry in public".

They care nothing for what damage their behaviour and actions cause to their families, to their employers, and to their communities.

Endeavour always to be respectful in your behaviour, your thoughts, and especially in your communicating (written or spoken).

Airing one's dirty laundry in public is certainly not respectful.

Recently I had the need for doing some set operations on a spreadsheet.

OpenOffice.org Calc doesn't natively support any of these, and I couldn't find any extensions to add the functionality either.

Maybe it's time to look at making some custom macros.

Some people have need to get the sum of the digits in a number.

For example, the sum of digits for 12345 is 15 (which is = 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5).

To do this automatically in OpenOffice.org Calc, it can be done in the following manner:

1. Create a new spreadsheet
2. Type the number into cell A1
3. Press Enter
4. Type the following formula into cell A2: =SUM(VALUE(MID(A1;ROW(INDIRECT("A1:A"&LEN(A1)));1)))
5. Do NOT press Enter. Instead press Ctrl+Shift+Enter (this will enter the formula as an "array formula")
6. The sum of the digits in cell A1 should now show in A2

This is lifted from Andrew Pitonyak's OpenOffice.org Macro document at http://www.pitonyak.org/oo.php

I believe this formula relies upon a number of important things.

The first point is it must be entered as an array formula.

The second point is the use of the INDIRECT() function, which allows an address to be constructed and then passed as an address.

The third point in that the ROW() function, when entered as an array formula, returns a single-column array containing the row numbers of the address range which was passed in.

My understanding of the formula, is that the ROW() function returns an array of row numbers starting from 1 through to the number of digits, and using each element in the array we use it as the index of the character in the number to be summed. The resultant numbers are then summed together.

The limitation of the formula is the maximum number able to be expressed as plain text in a spreadsheet cell. This seems to be an integer of about 15-digits in length.

For longer numbers, I agree it would be better to create a custom function for this.


Note: It took me a while to hopefully figure out what this formula was doing...

How many mobile phones are in the average modern household?

How many laptops does the modern household have now?

How many different chargers are there in the household?

How much easier would life be if there was only ONE type of charger for laptops and mobile phones?

Pop-up windows can be annoying when they occur too often, and without good enough cause.

Some pop-up windows are required for things such as internet banking, or gaming, etc.

On this occasion, my wife's Firefox was not creating pop-up windows for her internet banking website.

These were the things I did during diagnosis:

1. restarted Firefox with a new session
2. checked the built-in pop-up blocker didn't have an entry relating to the website
3. whitelisted the internet banking website for pop-ups
4. checked the addons to see if there was anything newly installed which might interfere
5. checked the about:config for any hidden configuration which might prevent pop-ups

After all of these steps failed, I deleted the XPC.mfl and XUL.mfl files from her Firefox profile.

This fixed the problem, and my wife was able to do her internet banking again (along with a lot of other usual tasks).

This morning my wife booted up her laptop like usual, and came back later to login.

After entering her password and hitting Enter at the login screen, she saw it automatically logout.

She tried it again, and the same result.

I suggested holding down the Shift key immediately after hitting Enter, since this can prevent some startup items from launching. But it didn't make any difference.

Tried rebooting the laptop in Safe Mode, but that didn't get me to the Desktop either.

Went back to my own laptop, and a quick search on Google returned a few results relating to something called "NoeNoeJetma.vbs" (an annoying piece of malware which, if not removed correctly, can cause the login/logout loop due to the userinit.exe Registry entry being corrupted).

The fix involved getting access to the registry, and correcting a particular value at HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon (for the curious: The "Userinit" value needs to correctly point to the actual path and instance of the "userinit.exe" file in system32. It also should not be referencing anything else by default)

Rebooted the laptop with a Ubuntu 8.10 Live CD (Intrepid Ibex), and mounted the laptop's primary partition. Checked the userinit.exe file was intact on wife's laptop. While I was there, I also renamed wscript.exe (this handles Windows Scripting), so there wasn't an obvious way .VBS files would execute (and also renamed the backup copy in the dllcache as well, since I didn't want it automatically restored by Windows).

Now I needed to check the registry.

To be able to check and edit the registry, I needed a way to get into it without being able to boot into Windows on the local machine.

One option was copying the registry files to my own computer, and then edit them there. This is messy and horribly error-prone, and prone to messing up the NTFS permissions.

So I went with another option: I got a copy of BartPE, created an ISO, burned it to CD, then rebooted wife's laptop into BartPE using the CD.

Launched the Registry Editor, highlighted the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE branch, selected "Load Hive...", then loaded the USER.DAT relating to the most often used Profile.

Edited the relevant registry entry (as earlier mentioned), unloaded the hive (extremely important!), then rebooted without the BartPE CD.

Logged into the usual Profile on the laptop, and waited...

The laptop didn't automatically logout. For wife's purposes, this made her laptop usable again.

Notes:

• I have not enabled the Windows Scripting yet, since there are extremely few legitimate instances where Windows Scripting would be needed. It is easy enough to enable this later, if required, but I don't foresee this happening any time soon.
• It's extremely useful having both the Ubuntu Live CD, and the BartPE CD available at hand. Luckily I had broadband available to be able to download what I needed, and I had an ISO copy of Windows XP SP2 on one of my hard drives to use with BartPE.
• Malware authors should be strung upside-down and flogged for wasting our time (about 2.5 hours, all waiting time added up)

"Intellectual property" is a term bandied about quite a lot in the past few years. Typically people use this term to refer to copyrights and patents.

Originally, copyrights and patents described ideas or concepts created by a person for which the government granted exclusive right to profitably benefit from it was granted to the creator.

By their very nature, once an idea or concept is communicated to another person, there is no actual way to prevent its further spread. This is the nature of a non-tangible.

It is also in society's interests that an idea be freely available and usable by anyone in the future, so that new and novel things can be created from it.

This is also why copyrights and patents originally were intended to only have a short lifespan (usually the lifespan of the person creator).

Commercial interests have no such desire to serve the public good, nor to serve society as a whole. This is why they created the term "intellectual property". It has all the implied connotations of being able to control physical property, while avoiding the issue that physical property cannot be shared infinitely like ideas or concepts can be.

Once an idea or concept is shared, it cannot be taken back.

An idea or concept may be independently "discovered" by another person without any knowledge of any prior developer; should they be punished for merely coming up with the same idea or concept?

If a musician composes what they believe is an original song or tune, but it shares some common notes with another song or tune, should they be punished for this?

Does society benefit from the time-unlimited restriction of ideas and concepts? Does society benefit from music which cannot be copied at all, even if there are only (for example) 12 shared notes in sequence?

A more accurate term to describe copyrights and patents would be "Intellectual Monopoly". This term has all the connotations of what is actually being ascribed, and the intentions for copyrights and patents (make as much profit as quickly as possible before expiry).

It also allows society to comfortably rest assured that ideas and concepts will eventually be freely and widely available for anyone to use as they see fit.

Being able to use ideas in new and novel ways has always been human nature, and to artificially restrict this for the increasing benefit of large corporations or wealthy individuals is NOT beneficial to society.

Microsoft Word has had "Outline View" for quite some time, and it is a quick and simple way to do in-place document re-organising, getting an overview of a document, and being able to collapse (and hide from printing) different sections.

OpenOffice.org Writer (OOo Writer) doesn't have this capability, despite being requested for many years.

There is a currently open feature request for adding the Outline View to OOo Writer.

The explanation given by the developers is that a lot of foundation work needs to be done before Outline View can be added to OOo Writer.

For the vast majority of users, it is only important to have Outline View, and there is no need for being able to simultaneously view the document in a different way.

Intuitively, this feels true, and applies directly to this author too.

My siblings are all an elder brother could want in siblings.

My only regret is that they haven't had the elder brother they deserved (and still deserve) as a role model, nor the elder brother they should've had.