Unique Column Count in Open Office

Sandra complained about compatibility issues while teaching an online course, and in response, I and several others recommended using Open Office instead of excel. She responded with a list of reasons why she prefers excel, which included the use of pivot tables to count unique items in a column.

To prove that this is easy to do without using pivot tables in OO Calc, I whipped up a short screencast:

It’s a little small, but you can see the details by viewing it full screen.

I used recordMyDesktop to do the screencast, which makes it dead simple.

Using vpnc to connect to a Cisco VPN on Ubuntu

First instal vpnc:
sudo apt-get install vpnc

Now, find the .pcf file that your office provides you. Open it in a text editor and use the relevant info to create file /etc/vpnc/default.conf. The contents shoudl look something like this:

IPSec gateway 123.456.789.123
IPSec ID
IPSec secret
Xauth username


There’s one hold up, though, as many companies provide their secret phrase pre-hashed. This means that it can’t be entered correctly into the configuration file for vpnc.

(your pre-hashed secret string will look something like this)

E6A01097705A303C1128DC224D959D741A708AA5A
AE8D5DAA8E982A5AC5328B76639038E03A8620395
A11C5C1732D5149FB4743293B4E50A

The solution is to hop over to this cisco vpnclient password decoder, pop in your hash, and retrieve the key. If you’re really paranoid, you can download the C source code and run it on your machine.

Finish filling out the conf file, save it, then run
sudo vpnc --natt-mode cisco-udp /etc/vpnc/default.conf

To disconnect, run
sudo vpnc-disconnect

DIY Screen Door

Houston has some nice weather this time of year. The days are warm and evening temperatures hover around 70 degrees. They’re the perfect type of evenings for opening up the windows and enjoying some fresh air.

Unfortunately, my apartment’s windows don’t open. The only way to get fresh air in is by opening the sliding glass door in my living room, and there’s no screen door on it. So for the last six months, I’ve had to choose between stale air and higher A/C bills, or opening the door and letting all sorts of bugs in.

This weekend, I had had enough, and decided that I could build a screen door myself. After some quick measurements and mental calculations, I headed out to Home Depot and rounded up my supplies:

• 25 feet of half-inch PVC pipe
• A roll of fiberglass screen
• 4 ninety degree PVC connectors
• 2 ‘T’ PVC connectors
• 1 small roll of foam rubber weather stripping
• Total Cost: About 20 bucks.

Assembly was pretty simple. I cut up the PVC into the right lengths, assembled the frame with the connectors, then used my staple gun to attach the screen. After making sure that it fit into the track properly, I added the weather stripping so that I could close the sliding glass door up against the screen and prevent bugs from slipping through the crack.

I think it looks pretty good:

I have to slip it into place every time I want to use it, so it’s not quite as convenient as a sliding door, but it works well. Painting the PVC black would have also made it look a little nicer, but I was going for cheap.

All in all, I’m pretty satisfied. I figure I’ll more than make my 20 bucks back by running my air conditioner less this summer. And as long as the weather holds, my apartment won’t have to smell like what I’ve been cooking for days afterward.