• Business,  personal

    Statistical Models and Same Sex Marriage

    As you’ve likely heard, if you live in the United States (and possibly elsewhere), same sex marriage has now been legalized. And it’s legal inĀ Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Canada, South Africa, Norway, Sweden, Portugal, Iceland, Argentina, Denmark, France, Brazil, Uruguay, New Zealand, Britain, Luxembourg, Finland and Ireland already. The trend to legalize same sex marriage started in 2001. And it’s been gaining popularity. At some point, it’s likely that same sex marriage will be universally legal. But when? Let’s ask Excel, using polynomial trendlines. To get started, let’s look at how many countries have legalized same sex marriage. The below spreadsheet lays out how many countries have legalized same sex marriage…

  • Mac OS X,  Windows XP

    Produce Random Complex Passwords in Excel

    Recently, I’ve been spending a lot of time normalizing data in Excel. And when I needed to generate a bunch of passwords for a project, I almost switched to another tool to do so. But I decided that I was already in Excel so I might as well do it there. Excel has a couple of random (pseudorandom) number and character functions in RAND() and RANDBETWEEN(). In its simplest, let’s just pick a number between one and ten: =RANDBETWEEN(1,10) Now let’s pick a number that’s 9 characters after a decimal: =RAND() Or make it a regular nine character number: =RAND()*1000000000 Regrettably numbers are OK for passwords. So let’s bump up…

  • Mac OS X Server,  Windows Server

    From Open Directory to Active Directory

    Whether you’re going from Open Directory to Active Directory or from Active Directory to Open Directory, chances are you’ll encounter csvde along the way. Csvde is installed on Windows Server and allows you to interface with Active Directory using csv files. cvsde can import files using the -i switch, followed by the -f switch to indicate the file that you are importing, followed by the path of the file. So if you save a file called toimport.csv to the root of your c drive temporarily you would use the following command to import the objects in the rows of the file: csvde -i -f c:toimport.csv Now, what’s that file need.…