use Perl

As such I thought that it would be nice to have a Data::Dumper::Perltidy module that would do both steps in one go. I didn't find such a module on CPAN so I wrote one.

John.
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A lot of people use Spreadsheet::WriteExcel I think. At least I get a lot of emails related to it. At the same time I don't generally get an insight into what people use the module for. There are some obvious tasks that I can imagine such as invoices or inventories or balance sheets and the email addresses of the correspondents suggest a heavy usage among financial companies. The occasional example Excel file that I receive isn't usually very exciting, not least of all when viewed in a hex editor. As such Spreadsheet::WriteExcel is used for the mundane reporting we all have to do occasionally. (Apart from me that is. In the eight years with my current company I've only used Spreadsheet::WriteExcel once and that was in the last six months. So much for eating your own dogfood).

That's why I was blown away when Rick Lavigne contacted me to say he was using Spreadsheet::WriteExcel to produce Tulip Diagram roll charts for motorcycle navigation. If you don't know what that is, and I certainly didn't, have a look at Rick's website rollcharts.org where it is all explained in detail. In particular the quality of the finished worksheets really impressed me.

In fact it impressed me so much that I felt obliged to help Rick out. He had written to ask if a document properties feature was planned. It was on the TODO list but with a low priority so I moved it up the list and implemented it. There probably aren't many advantages to running your own Open Source project but at least you can set your own priorities.

John.
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I've added a Roadmap for Spreadsheet::ParseExcel on the Spreadsheet::ParseExcel Google Group.

John.
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I've taken over the maintenance of Spreadsheet::ParseExcel from Gábor Szabó.

I didn't want to because I barely get enough time to maintain/extend Spreadsheet::WriteExcel. However, Gábor is very busy with other projects and ParseExcel needs to be kept ticking over since it is so widely used and ultimately I'm probably the best person to deal with the Excel internals that are at the heart of the module.

Initially I plan to clean up the documentation, add more working examples and deal with the more egregious bugs. I may try to clean up and document the internals as well so that someone else can take over maintenance and so that patches are more consistent. It will also give me a chance to get ParseExcel and WriteExcel working better together.

Anyway, I've set up a Google Group for discussions relating to the module:

        http://groups.google.com/group/spreadsheet-parseexcel

Feel free to join, post, chat if you are interested.

John.
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It is about 1300m and I did it in about 45 minutes. It was the first time I'd swam it and I'd hoped to do it under 40 miunutes but I went a bit off course. Swimming in the open(ish) sea isn't quite like doing the same distance in a pool. :-)

The overall winner gets the The Richard Harris Memorial Trophy in memory of the actor who initiated the competition in his youth.

John.
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In the case of the Excel file format, which I am interested in, the February specs offered little information over what was already in the public domain (for loose definitions of public).

Then less than a month ago, to much less or perhaps no fanfare, Microsoft released a second round of file format specifications, the June specs: "Microsoft Takes Additional Steps in Implementing Interoperability Principles". Surprisingly these were much more detailed. The newer Excel specification, for example, is 1100 pages as compared to 350 pages in the previous one although the information is much more complete than a mere page count indicates. It is also cross-linked within itself and with supporting documents and all in all it feels more like a real specification than the February doc.

Which is great. As Joel Spolsky pointed out, in relation to the first round of docs, having a spec doesn't mean that it is easy to deal with these particular file formats. However, having such a detailed document certainly helps.

Which leads to the question, why didn't Microsoft release the detailed specs in the first place.

Anyway, since this is a Perl blog I should add by way of technical content that although Perl is often seen as a good text processing language it is also very flexible at processing binary data thanks to the pack()/unpack() functions. And binary data processing in Perl is much more portable than C solutions which suffer from more loosely defined data sizes and differently padded structs.

John.
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I make a Muxtape.

I'd like to make others mixes to express different themes but you can't currently do that without setting up another account. So I'll leave it like that for now and redo it some other time.

John.
--

Joel Spolsky has an article up call Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (And some workarounds).

"Last week, Microsoft published the binary file formats for Office. These formats appear to be almost completely insane. The Excel 97-2003 file format is a 349 page PDF file. ...

If you started reading these documents with the hope of spending a weekend writing some spiffy code that imports Word documents into your blog system, or creates Excel-formatted spreadsheets with your personal finance data, the complexity and length of the spec probably cured you of that desire pretty darn quickly".

Indeed.

Also worth reading in his recent journal is TripIt is Awesome. TripIt is in fact awesome. Possibly teh.

John.
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"On Saturday 6th May 2006, legendary Australian singer-songwriter and member of The Go-Betweens Grant McLennan died in his sleep at his home in Brisbane".

The Go-Betweens were my favourite band and I was very sad to hear that Grant McLennan, one half of the singer-songwriter team, had passed away.

I acknowledged Grant in the dedication of my masters thesis and I quoted him in an early version of Spreadsheet::WriteExcel and in the current version of Spreadsheet::WriteExcelXML.

Over 10 years ago on one of my first webpages I wrote: "If Lou Reed had been two people, had grown up in Australia and had been able to write a better love-song, he would have been the Go-Betweens".

Bye-bye Grant.

The 500,000th node was posted on Perlmonks yesterday.

By way of comparison comp.lang.perl.misc has had approximately 550,000 posts since May 1995 based on the data here.

Using the same data I created some charts that show the number of monthly posts on clpm and Perlmonks and the total number of posts.

These results aren't exact. For instance only about 90% of the nodes on Perlmonks are actual questions or answers.The rest are administration or home nodes. Also I don't know if the figures reported by Google Groups for clpm are accurate.

Nevertheless, the data is interesting. It shows that clpm's peak was in July 1999 (about the time that I started hanging out there but I doubt that has anything to do with its decline). It also shows that currently Perlmonks is getting about 8,500 posts a month in comparison to 2,500 on clpm.