For the first time in my programming career (spanning more years than I care to tell ;o), I had to round to a negative number. In other words, to a number on the left side of the decimal. If, like me, you're not a math person, you might be saying, "huh?"

I needed to print some mailing labels, and purchased Avery 8160 mailing labels for that purpose. These are 1" x 2 & 5/8" labels, 30 to a sheet. I wanted to use InDesign for the mailing labels, and did a quick internet search for a template. Avery had one, which I tried to download, but what downloaded was a file called "OffercastInstaller_AVR_U-0087-01-P_.exe". No way am I going to run an EXE just to get a mailing label template, and absolutely no way if it is has "OffercastInstaller" in the name.

So I whipped up my own Avery 8160 template for Adobe InDesign, one that I'm pretty sure is a lot better than what Avery was providing.

An application I work on has a reporting engine that uses Excel for report templates. When a report is generated, the code adds a "Data" worksheet to the Excel template, and populates it with named ranges of tabular data. User-defined template worksheets can then use formulas such as VLOOKUP and MATCH to reference and display values from the Data worksheet's named ranges.

For a particular template I needed to get the maximum value of a column of numbers in one of the Data worksheet's named ranges. The problem I ran into was that I didn't know at what row the named range would start, and how many rows it would have, because each time the Data worksheet generates, the various named ranges could have a different number of rows.

There are lots of tools out there for downloading YouTube videos to your computer. Many of them cost money, others purport to be free, but require you to install software on your computer — something you should avoid doing unless you are absolutely certain the program is safe.

I was in the process of implementing Telerik's Kendo UI for ASP.NET MVC into a mixed ASPX / MVC 4 application when I ran into a problem that stopped me dead in my tracks for longer than I care to admit. Here is the main portion of the error message:

(refer to the bottom of this post for the full error message)