I’ve released version 2.2.1 of Weight Tracker ODS, my open source weight loss spreadsheet for OpenOffice.org. Visit my page The Hacker’s Diet with OpenOffice.org for more information.
New to this release are charts and signed macros. It also contains numerous bug fixes, the removal of unnecessary options, and a complete overhaul on how trends are calculated.
Download Weight Tracker ODS v2.2.1 [100k ZIP]
Detailed Changelog:
- Project renamed from WT2 to WTODS.
- Replaced Charts button with new Chart sheet.
- Official (non-trunk) releases have had their macros signed, to protect against malicious tampering.
- Fixed #VALUE/Err:529 bugs arising from behavior change in OOo Calc 2.4. (See bug)
- Fixed the bug where you couldn’t see your month’s progress until the next month.
- Simplified calculation complexity and maintenance requirements by removing morning/evening weights and the buggy “no-carry” option.
- Fixed trend calculations to better handle starting in the middle of the year.
- Fixed calculation flaws for maintaining trend data into new years.
- Fixed calculation flaws regarding leap years.
- Reorganized dialogs to give more room for fonts on Windows systems.
It’s been 21 months since I last updated the spreadsheet, and once I cracked it open for development again, boy did I have my work cut out for me. Thanks to all the feedback about the previous version! The emails and comments really helped motivate me to get this new version out.
/jon
Lately I’ve been getting a bunch of great feedback on my weight tracking spreadsheet, and even noticed a jump in site hits the day after Christmas.
Looks like people are ramping up for their New Year’s resolutions! I’ve been hard at work updating the spreadsheet, reducing the unnecessary calculations that slow the sheet down or cause weird bugs. I hope to have a new version out by next week.
But no need to wait, the current version works fine, and there is a “one-click” migration feature so you can easily upgrade to the newest version and not lose any of your entered weights. Go check out the official Weight Tracker ODS site and get started entering your weight today!
/jon
The month is over, and once again I’ve won NaNoWriMo! Though I’ve only “finished” the first two acts, of five planned, I hit the 50,000 word requirement on November 29th.
The plan now is to take December off, then ramp back up in January to finish those last three acts, and then get to editing. I’ve also got a ocuple of short stories on the back burner, as well as some of my software products I’ve been neglecting.
First day of NaNoWriMo done, on track for 100,000 words by December
My goal last year was to just hit the 50k, and I succeeded. A couple of strong weekends, and not going home for Thanksgiving gave me the edge I need to finish at ~52k.
This year, the goal is 100k words, or at least, to complete the entire story (no sequels this time!) in more than the required 50k. I also hope to have most of this done before the holidays, and this year I will be flying home, and don’t want to have to worry about hitting my word counts. I want to be well over 50k before then.
To that end, I’ve mapped out a schedule for the next thirty days. So far I’m on track, I’ve already written 6,003 words today alone! If I hit 3k on weekdays, 6k on each weekend, then with only 2k on the 25th (giving me time to pack) and 1k per day after that, I’ll hit 100k exactly on November 30th.
Wish me luck!
/jon
November is National Novel Writing Month, and I’m getting pumped. I participated and won in 2008 with over 52,000 words. Even though I’ll be going home for the holidays, I’m planning on writing much more than the required 50,000 this time around.
I aim to re-imagine a story that I’ve tried multiple times to get out of my head in the past. Here’s the quick-and-dirty synopsis for this year’s tentatively titled “Granger”:
Danny Granger was proud, arrogant even, but a damn good firefighter. The other men said he was strong, tough like his father: who’d given his life to the noble work. They loved his mother too: everyone had read her books growing up. And Dan’s girlfriend never failed to catch peoples’ eye.
Everything seemed to be working out for the up-and-coming lieutenant. Then came the call.
Dragging himself along the floor of his childhood home, choking on the thick plumes of smoke, Danny failed to rescue his mother from the blaze.
So when he wakes up a week later in a hospital bed, spouting crazy stories about a quest to save the fantasy land of his mother’s books, everyone assumes that the loss and grief have gone straight to Dan’s head.
But his right hand wasn’t scarred before the fire. And his mother’s notes tell a story far more fantastic then what trickled down into her books.
His world is crashing around him, and he’s faced with a choice: does he choose to disregard his mother’s fantasies as such? Or does he risk everything and try to go back and save her world?
This week I need to get the outline finished. I’ll start writing the actual story this Saturday at midnight.
View my profile on the NaNoWriMo site.
Also, it looks like I won’t be finishing the port of PunishPad in time for this year’s novel. Not that I’m too concerned, as I’ve found that I haven’t really been needing it for my own writing. I do intend on finishing it, as I need the practice with wxPython.
Starting to port PunishPad from .NET to wxPython for some cross-platform writing via negative re-enforcement
With NaNoWriMo just around the corner, I’ve decided to take up the work of porting my PunishPad software from .NET to wxPython. The first goal being to have the existing functionality available cross-platform. Fom there, the sky’s the limit.
I’ve started a new project on Launchpad, so go there to check out the new PunishPad site. So far there’s just some initial commits with the skeleton of the project and the GUI xml file. The original program isn’t that complicated, basically a text editor with a monitoring system that does mean things to you when you stop writing for too long, so I hope to get this port done fairly quickly.
But if you’re running Windows and can’t wait to get to writing, you can download the original version for .NET here: PunishPad 1.0.0.1 Setup [116k EXE].
/jon
Due to user interest (and to fix some rather glaring new bugs) I’ve resuming development on Weight Tracker 2, which I’ve now rechristened Weight Tracker ODS.
If you don’t know, WTODS is the weight tracking spreadsheet I created so that I can manage my weight following the Hacker’s Diet while using OpenOffice.org. You can find more information about it here.
Well now I’ve got the whole thing up as a project on Launchpad, go check out the new Weight Tracker ODS site. I’ve just finished the rather tedious process of manually importing the revision history for each successive version into launchpad’s version control system. Tedious because I wasn’t using version control before, just keeping snapshots ofeach release. I wanted to make sure that I didn’t “lose anything” by just starting with the most recent version.
But now that I’ve seeded the project, I can get to work on the next version. I hope to get the obvious bugs fixed, then clean out some of the the overcomplicated logic that slows it down. And of course, graphs. 
/jon
It’s been a couple weeks in the making, but I’ve finally finished and uploaded my latest piece of writing: Pawsgaard.
It’s a short story, a little over 16,000 words, inspired by the long-standing tradition of children’s stories where animals speak. I introduce the mice of Guineawick, and the new stranger in town, the warrior-rabbit Sven Pawsgaard.
Please read it. I appreciate any and all feedback!
Enjoy,
/jon
Discalimer: I take no responsibility if you screw up your computer or can’t connect to the internet after following this! If you do mess things up, do what I do, head on over to Ubuntu Forums and ask for help.
What:
This howto will show you how to setup your Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 machine to use OpenDNS to resolve DNS names, and keep local cache that will survive machine reboots. It’s a modified set of instructions that I first posted here.
Why:
There are several reasons why you’d want to to this.The quick one-liner: faster, more reliable web browsing. For a little more detailed response read on, otherwise, you can skip straight to the How below.
Need more info, okay. First, it might be a good idea to know what DNS is. Basically, it’s the address service that translates the domain google.com into it’s IP address 74.125.45.100. People generally find it easier to remember domain names than IP addresses. But the computer needs the IP address to load websites, so when you make a request for any files on google.com, your computer asks a DNS server for Google’s IP address. 99.9% of the time, your ISP provides DNS servers for your computer to use, and you don’t have to think about it.
But this address lookup takes time. Over the course of loading just one file, you might not notice it, but when browsing a web page, you’re probably loading dozens of files (images, scripts, etc.) This can mean lots of DNS requests if the files are on different servers. And ISP-run DNS servers don’t always have the best track records on being the fastest or the most reliable. Ever have your router tell you that you have an internet connection, but you can’t get to any websites? Usually, it’s because the ISP’s DNS server is having issues. So yes, technically your computer can access the internet, but you can’t really use it, unless you happen to know the IP addresses of everywhere you want to go. But, most of us get to Google through google.com, not by remembering 74.125.45.100.
So why use OpenDNS? Because generally it provides a faster, more reliable DNS service than what your ISP service provides. OpenDNS lets you setup filters, and much, much more. And why a persistent local DNS cache? Because even requests to OpenDNS take some time. And most websites rarely change their IP address, so why constantly lookup an address that isn’t changing? By using a local cache, your computer won’t have to keep asking the DNS server for addresses, because it will remember addresses that you’ve already been to. Sure, every now and then your computer will need to ask a real DNS server for an address, like when you go to a new website, or even occasionally for sites you visit often, just in case their IP address has changed.
Otherwise, even if your computer only remembers an address for 15 minutes, that’ll improve your browsing experience significantly. So, ready for faster browsing?
How:
Okay, so we’re going to install the local DNS server called pdnsd, and a support package called resolvconf. Pdnsd will be responsible for remembering DNS addresses, and resolvconf is responsible for letting your computer know to use pdnsd.
In a Terminal window, run the following to install both resolvconf and pdnsd in the correct order:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install resolvconf && sudo apt-get install pdnsd
When prompted during the pdnsd install, select “Use resolvconf”. Then run the following to create a config file for resolvconf:
gksudo gedit /etc/resolvconf/run/interface/opendns
In the new document, paste the following so that resolvconf will know how to use OpenDNS:
nameserver 208.67.222.222 nameserver 208.67.220.220
Finally save the document, exit gedit, and run this command in the Terminal:
sudo resolvconf -u
Congratulations, welcome to faster browsing. To check that everything is working, try the following:
dig google.com
Verify that the SERVER line shows 127.0.0.1#53(127.0.0.1), which means you’re pointed at your local cache. Look at the Query time, which should show how long it took to ask for google’s IP address from OpenDNS the first time.
Now, if you run that command again:
dig google.com
You should see a significant time drop, like Query time: 0 msec. That means that everything is working, that instead of asking OpenDNS for the IP address, pdnsd responded with the cached information, which took no measurable time.
Well, a hop, skip and a jump later (really 5 minutes of clicking and $10) and now jon.thysell.us is now pointing to my new location here on WordPress.com!
I’m happy to be officially back in the WordPress fold. Now to work on the content here on the site, since I’ve migrated all the old stuff over only.
Onward!
/jon
