Sydney Opera House and Peter Rice

Posted on 05/07/2013 by dougaj4

This year is the 40th anniversary of the opening of the Sydney Opera House, and to mark the occasion the ABC and the Sydney Opera House Trust have put together an interactive web site documenting the history of the structure:
The Opera House Project

Have a look at the Youtube video below for background on what the site has to offer, and how and why it was made:

or go direct to the Operahouseproject site below, (note that if you are running IE 10 you will get a message telling you to “upgrade” to a more modern version, like IE 9; it worked without problems for me in Chrome).

OperHouse1

Coincidentally, I discovered on Colin Caprani’s site a video on the life and works of Peter Rice, who spent a significant part of his early career working on the design and construction of the Opera House roof structures in London and Sydney.

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More from Renbourn and Friends

Posted on 30/06/2013 by dougaj4

For all its faults, Youtube does have some extraordinary material, such as this Danish documentary on the music scene in London’s Soho in 1967.

It starts with a very atypical 30’s style duet from Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick, followed by commentary in Danish up to about 3:35, then:

  •  Live performances from not Davy Graham, but Marc Sullivan, but certainly showing Davy Graham influence, and Wizz Jones (possibly)
  • Some shots of Carnaby Street, backed by Beatles
  • Back to the folk club for John Renbourn
  • A street interview (in English)
  • Bert Jansch and John Renbourn jamming in their shared flat, while an unknown friend sits in the background, doing a crossword!
  • An interview with a painfully shy Bert Jansch
  • Finishing up with some (much more typical) jigs and reels from Carthy and Swarbrick

Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick still play together, the clip below being from a UK folk festival in 2009  (10 years after Swarbrick’s premature obituary in the UK Daily Telegraph!):

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John Renbourn

Posted on 26/06/2013 by dougaj4

John Renbourn has had the occasional mention here for his work with Bert Jansch and The Pentangle, but to my mind he is really at his best when playing solo, so here is a collection of Youtube clips which exemplify his unique style:

And a more recent live performance:

John Renbourn site (biography, gig guide and more)

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Using Index() as an array function

Posted on 23/06/2013 by dougaj4

As promised, this post looks at using the Excel built in Index() function to operate on arrays; it also provides a VBA user defined function (UDF), VBIndex, which simplifies working with arrays within VBA, and also provides improved functionality when called from the spreadsheet.   A spreadsheet with full open-source code and the examples given below can be downloaded from:  VBIndex.

The Excel Index function returns the value of a single cell when provided with a row number and a column number.  If either the row or the column numbers are omitted then the function will return the full column or row respectively.  The screenshot below shows Index used to return the 4th row and the 3rd column of the sample data (see Useful Gayaan for more examples):

Using Index() to return an array

Using Index() to return an array

Note that the function must be entered as an array function to return all the data; see Using Array Formulas for details.

As well as a single value or omitted (or 0), the Index function will accept an array to define both the rows or columns to be returned.  The array may be a spreadsheet range (either a single row or column), or a list of values surrounded by {}.

Returning specified rows or columns with Index() and VBIndex()

Returning specified rows or columns with Index() and VBIndex()

The screenshot above shows the use of the UDF VBIndex() and the built-in Index() function. Note that when using the Index() function the list of rows must be entered as a column array (either a single column range, or values separated by a semi-colon), and the list of columns must be entered as a row array (either a single row range, or values separated by a comma). If this is not done correctly the returned array will not be the required values, as shown shaded in blue and pink.
To simplify the input, and also to simplify the use of the function from within VBA routines, I have written the UDF VBIndex, which will accept either a row or column array (or range) to specify both rows or columns. Examples are shown returning the 1st, 2nd, and 4th rows and columns with a variety of different forms of input.

Posted in Arrays, Excel, UDFs, VBA | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Two new blogs

Posted on 17/06/2013 by dougaj4

Two new Excel/computer related blogs that I have found recently are:

Useful Gyaan (Sharing Stuff to Make life @ work easier)

and

MS EXCEL UNPLUGGED (which looks like a good resource on using pivot tables)

In the near future I will be having a closer look at:
VBA Trick of the Week :: Slicing an Array Without Loop – Application.Index
from Useful Gyaan.

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