Build 4.5.0.46 of xlsgen fixes a problem related to parsing minuses and substracts with extended functions.

If Windows 10 is more secure, as Microsoft and their chills out there are hammering it, then why is Windows 10 part of the list of Windows versions that needs to be patched every month to address new vulnerabilities ?

Is it me, or Windows 10 just look more like Windows XP every day, or perhaps even Windows 95.

That must be strange for anyone who regards Windows over the years as a sign of progress on fronts that address actual user problems, one problem being security.

Windows is almost 40 years ago and yet Microsoft patches it massively every month. Not just that, Microsoft even ships patches in between. Wow, just wow !

When you thought Microsoft could not get any stupider, here is what they are announcing (emphasis mine) :

extrait : "Windows Sandbox: an isolated, temporary, desktop environment where you can run untrusted software without the fear of lasting impact to your PC. Any software installed in Windows Sandbox stays only in the sandbox and cannot affect your host. Once Windows Sandbox is closed, all the software with all its files and state are permanently deleted."

The sandbox is completely inoperent actually. Even Notepad stores a bunch of settings (in the registry). With the sandbox, notepad will start in next session as if it was running for the first time. Ever wondered how an application works ? Application certainly need to store a lot of settings : settings, license file, work files...

By preventing to do the very thing that an application must do, this is the perfect recipe for allowing nothing but the stupidest apps out there to run perfectly, and every time.

Indeed!

Build 4.5.0.45 of xlsgen adds read, write and calculation support for spill ranges.


Spill range example (notice =SUM(A2#) in the formula bar)

Spill range is a special cell range where the beginning of the range is specified, but not the end. Spill range have been announced on September 2018 by Microsoft and they will be avalaible in the course of 2019 in Office 365. It's important to realize that this feature is not going to be made available in any regular Excel version included Excel 2019 (released on September 2018).

xlsgen provides read, write and calculation support for spill ranges, so as long as your scenario does not imply opening the resulting Excel file in a version of Excel that does not support them, which is many of them, xlsgen can get the scenario up and running, regardless of your Excel version (in fact xlsgen does not expect any Excel version installed on the computer where xlsgen runs).

Spill range is of interest whenever the cell area being referenced changes over time. Indeed, every time a new row is added, or removed, a fix cell area would break the integrity of calculations, whereas a dynamic cell area would include both new rows and removed rows. This is exactly what spill range is.

The notation is subtle. An anchor sign is added to a cell reference. This anchor sign means the bottom of the range isn't specified by the user, which in turn means it's up to xlsgen to calculate it based on what's in that range, that is whether that's raw data or an existing array formula, i.e. a formula that spans across multiple rows.

In the screen shot above, it's very easy to understand the result of suming the spill range A2#, as in =SUM(A2#). It's the equivalent of =SUM(A2:A11).

As everyone can verify, Office 2019 is just a snapshot of Office 365. Office 365 is a moving target, it gets updated all the time. Office 2019 is just a snapshot that was taken this summer, officially shipped on September 24.

You would expect the system requirements for installing Office 2019 to be equivalent to those of Office 365, given that those are basically more or less the same exact binaries with same dependencies.

And yet, here are the system requirements for Office 365 wrt the operating system :

Windows 10, Windows 8.1, Windows 7 Service Pack 1, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2012, or Windows Server 2008 R2

And here are the system requirements for Office 2019 :

Windows 10, Windows Server 2019


So a slight discrepancy between the two. How come you can't install Office 2019 unless you are running Windows 10 but you can install Office 365 with just Windows 7 ?

The answer is plain obvious. Total shameless Microsoft. Microsoft ships Office 2019 because they have to, otherwise corporations out there would sue them for forcing the purchase of software subscriptions, because that's the commercial reason for Office 365, there is no technical reason for Office 365 to exist at all otherwise. But Microsoft makes sure you will never want to purchase Office 2019. So that's just lipstick on a pig. This corporation cannot be trusted. Move on guys!

Build 4.5.0.44 of xlsgen adds read and write support for Excel 365 functions related to the recently announced (by Microsoft) dynamic array functions, namely :

• =RANDARRAY([rows],[columns]) : returns an array of random numbers between 0 and 1.
• =SEQUENCE(rows,[columns],[start],[step]) : generates a list of sequential numbers in an array, such as 1, 2, 3, 4.
• =FILTER(array,include,[if_empty]) : filters a range of data based on criteria you define.
• =UNIQUE(array,[by_col],[occurs_once]) : returns a list of unique values in a list or range.
• =SORT(array,[sort_index],[sort_order],[by_col]) : sorts the contents of a range or array.
• =SORTBY(array, by_array1, [sort_order1], [[by_array2], [sort_order2]],…) : sorts the contents of a range or array based on the values in a corresponding range or array.
• =SINGLE(value) : returns a single value using logic known as implicit intersection.

Etonné par l'annonce en février 2018 dernier par Doro de la sortie imminente d'un téléphone portable à l'ancienne Doro 7060, à clapet, 4G, avec support de VOLTE, j'ai pu constater qu'arrivant à Noël 2018, toujours aucun Doro 7060 n'était sorti dans le commerce.

La réponse officielle de Doro sonne comme un glas :

Malheureusement il y eu quelques complications avec le Doro 7060. Puisque nous ne voulons pas vendre un téléphone qui ne fonctionne qu'a moitié, nous avons préférer repousser la sortie de ce dernier.

Cordialement.

SUPPORT TECHNIQUE DORO



Sans commentaire...

J'espère que Doro saura relever le défi et sortir un téléphone à clapet 4G le plus rapidement possible.

The announced open-sourcing of several libraries such as WPF or XAML won't make developers use them more. Microsoft would like developers to forget their original sin, which is to stop supporting libraries randomly after some time and for no sound reason. Developers are better off sticking to WIN32, should they have to write native Windows applications, because that's the only stable thing, and that's provable. Of course, suffice to say that the last ten years, Microsoft has made life miserable for developers when it comes the time to deploy and sell software because of the gratuituous warnings bombarded to customers for daring to install foreign software, and false flags from anti-virus software including Microsoft's own anti-virus software.

Build 4.5.0.43 of xlsgen has a fix for the calculation engine, for disambiguating parenthesis in criterias used in the following functions : IFS / SUMIF / SUMIFS / AVERAGEIF / AVERAGEIFS / MINIFS / MAXIFS / COUNTIF / COUNTIFS.

Après le terrorisme, concept super vague qui permet d'appliquer tout à n'importe quoi, et de faire voter des lois fourre-tout qui seront exploitées ad nausem par des associations militantes, dont le nom est toujours tû par les médias, étonnament, voici donc les lois s'appuyant sur ce concept fumeux de discours de haîne.

Ce sera quoi l'étape d'après : une loi pour mettre les gens en prison qui auront osé dire non dans un commentaire ?

Il faut se rendre compte que la France est dans la merde. Et, bizarrement, empêcher les gens de ventiler leurs pensées sur des sites, fussent-elles en effet éventuellement violentes, est ce qui va sans doute inciter les mêmes gens à recourir à la violence au sens propre du terme. C'est à se demander si ce n'est pas ce que cherche le gouvernement, notamment pour faire diversion vis-à-vis du rouleau compresseur libéral qu'il fait avancer par ailleurs, au détriment de l'essentiel de la population. La seule solution va bientôt être de cesser de consommer, qu'on se le dise !

En tout cas, tous ceux qui ont voté Macron vont avoir des comptes à rendre à leur famille. Il ne faut pas l'oublier, Macron est arrivé au pouvoir par un vote libre. C'est nous qui avons voté (pas moi, mais que peux-je y faire ?).

The fact that an activated Windows OS license becomes unactivated only means that your computer is asking Microsoft, at every single reboot, or routinely, is this license is legit and depending on the answer whether it should destroy itself.

This is appalling in every sense. Governments should sue Microsoft for their anti-customer behavior.

If you need a new computer with Windows on it, my advice is to buy it along with a Windows 8.1 license DVD, and then reformat that new computer's main disk and install Windows 8.1 on it. Problem fixed.

[Update Nov 10] : Microsoft has publicly said the problem is fixed and should be fixed for any customer within 24 hours without having to do anything. So this actually reveals that your computer is phoning home every 24 hours. Now, you can keep using this surveillance tool, just so you know what you are doing.
I sense that perhaps Microsoft will deplete the availability of Windows 8.1 OEM license DVDs, just in case the fraction of users who know what they are doing change their mind about Windows 10 and install Windows 8.1 only to stopped being harmed by Microsoft, a corporation that should be sued up their ass. Governments out there, please act! it's time !

Je traduis la logique du gouvernement Macron : pour éviter de payer 10 ou 20 centimes d'euro supplémentaires par litre de carburant, soit quelque euros de plus pour un plein, pensez donc à acheter un véhicule électrique, dont la plupart sont à vingt mille euros au moins.

Petit calcul : pour rembourser un achat de vingt mille euros à raison de quelques euros tous les quinze jours, cela vous amortir votre achat en 5000 mois environ (à raison de 4 euros de fiscalité de carburant par mois), soit 416 années. Autrement dit, cet achat ne sera jamais amorti.

C'est vous qui voyez. Qu'est-ce que ne ferait pas un gouvernement libéral libertaire pour pousser à la consommation...

Et je pense que c'est la même chose pour les panneaux photovoltaïques, pompes à chaleur, etc.

Je l'annonçais il y a plusieurs mois, le gouvernement va partager les données médicales personnelles des français sans même leur demander leur avis. Et comme chacun sait, c'est particulièrement problématique si ces données sont mises entre les mains des banques, des assureurs, etc. L'information peut leur parvenir car elle peut l'être pour des raisons commerciales. Par exemple, je ne vois pas bien ce qui va interdire aux pharmacies de le faire, sans vous le dire.

Sur RTL, un article annonce que cela va se faire sans prise de risque. La preuve qui tue :

extrait : "Courant novembre, les assurés vont recevoir par courrier un identifiant et un mot de passe. Pour activer son DMP, il suffira de se rendre sur le site dmp.gouv.fr. et de créer son compte. Vous pouvez aussi le créer avec l'aide d'un conseiller de votre CPAM, ou encore de votre pharmacien.

Si vous craignez que votre banque, votre mutuelle, votre patron ou même l'Assurance maladie puisse accéder à ces informations, rassurez-vous : ce dossier médical en ligne est protégé par un code et ultra-sécurisé. À part vous et votre médecin traitant, personne d'autre n'y a accès."

Rien à craindre car "le code est ultra-sécurisé". N'importe quel spécialiste en chiffrement sait qu'il n'existe aucun système de sécurité infaillible. Par conséquent, je conseille soit de s'abstenir totalement, soit d'attendre quelques années histoire que les vulnérabilités de ce système ne se fassent pas contre vous.

Build 4.5.0.42 of xlsgen introduces a new chart : overlay line chart.


Overlay line chart example

The overlay line chart makes it possible to, as the name implies, overlay more than one time series one on top of another.

What's of interest is that whenever a data series spans across multiple years, this chart splits it into multiple series, one per year, sorts the data points according to the timeline, and makes it possible to overlay the series on the same chart in order to compare time periods year over year. xlsgen hides the complexity of this : this chart cannot be built in Excel without a number of step calculations and sorting that xlsgen does.

C/C++ code

xlsgen::IXlsWorkbookPtr wbk = engine->Open( L"EURUSD1.csv", L"output.xls" ); xlsgen::IXlsChartPtr chart1 = wbk->WorksheetByIndex[1]->NewChart(xlsgen::charttype_overlayline, row1, col1, row2, col2); xlsgen::IXlsChartDynamicDataSourceSeriesPtr serie1 = chart1->DynamicDataSource->AddSerie(); serie1->SeriesValuesFormula = L"=R1C3:R100C3";

A little bit of nostalgia with this video related to the Silicon Graphics SGI Onyx RE2.


(courtesy Motherboard)

I remember using it for research work and it was certainly plenty of graphics rendering power. Something that other Silicon Graphics workstations such as Indy could not meet. Graphics were using either the OpenGL or OpenInventor library. If I remember well, OpenGL was closer to the metal, and OpenInventor had a few abstractions for making it easier to solve the problems you were trying to solve.

None of these supported ray tracing, let alone radiosity algorithms.

Build 4.5.0.41 of xlsgen fixes a problem related to calculations, and in particular to the not equal operator (<>). Its behavior is improved for dealing with arguments of different data types.

Build 4.5.0.40 of xlsgen fixes a problem related to setting an active pane by default (bottom right) whenever both panes are frozen or split.

On dira ce qu'on voudra des ultra-riches, qu'ils captent une partie importante de la richesse produite par les entreprises, qu'ils sont égoïstes, qu'ils fonctionnent en ghetto et en réseau, n'empêche, ces gens là n'ont qu'un trou du cul, qu'un cuir chevelu, qu'un foie, qu'un estomac, etc. Je parle là évidemment de Steve Jobs mort d'un cancer non traité du pancréas, bien que multi-milliardaire, de Steve Ballmer, chauve bien que multi-milliardaire ou encore de Paul Allen, mort d'une autre forme non traitée de cancer. C'est bien la preuve que la quantité illimitée d'argent ne solutionne pas tout. Ca me paraissait important de le dire, car il me semble que les médias déforment complètement, ce regard pensé pour nous qui en réalité est assez faux.

Build 4.5.0.39 of xlsgen fixes a problem related to writing extended formulas in XLSX files, by adding a prefix to it whenever the functions were introduced in Excel 2010 or a more recent version of Excel. Nothing changes in XLS and XLSB files since in both files the functions are written as bytecodes instead of strings.

Build 4.5.0.38 of xlsgen fixes the reading of HTML entities of the form &#XY; inside XLSX files, by properly decoding them.