Many tools for many jobs

Creating multi page tiffs or pdfs from multiple images is super easy with ImageMagick. After installing it you run it from the command line. "d:\whereveryouwant>convert image1.tif image2.jpg image3.tif mymergedimage.pdf" This simple command appends your multiple images, they can be anywhere, and makes a multi page tif or pdf. There are other options to the command if you want to look it up.

Hellsyeah Gmail style message origination in Outlook 2010

I got bored and Googled Office 2010 tweaks. To my joy I found that you can get Gmail style message consolidation in Outlook 2010. This means when there is a thread of emails Outlook will chain them together instead of keeping a copy of each individually. It was my main complaint about Outlook and its solved. WOOT!

Read the link for this and other 2010 tweaks.


Office 2010 tweaks

Breaking up large files

I have been running into tables that are too big for Excel and needed an easy way to break them into smaller chunks. Unix to the rescue on that. If you have a Unix box like Ubuntu or emulator like Cygwin all you need to do is run the command line code split option filename prefix. Split has two options -l (by line number) or -b (size in bytes, I think).

So I had the giant table in a csv, I ran "split -l 500000 d:\folder\folder\bigfile.csv smallerfile" and my big csv was broken up into 500k line csvs. From there I just opened them in a text editor and copied the header line into each new file. 

Whats the point?

I need to remember that when I work on a project the point is to create a solution that is good for the end user. Sometimes that is not whats best for customer, or me, or my computer, or the timeline. But if the end product is something that doesn't meet the end users needs then there was no point.

Becoming more familiar with the work of Government offices like the BLM its clear that sometimes projects loose sight of the end goal and get lost in the sea of "this might be useful someday" or "its cheaper if we leave this out."

Whats the point of this post? To remind me to think about why I am doing what I am doing

Blogging might be easier

I decided that maybe the best way to keep track of the little things I learned was to blog it out. So I am putting the idea of a google website aside and blogging.