Just in: The Motorola Droid. I'm just at the first impression stage but I like what I see (this may be the droid we've been looking for).

The obvious comparison is with, of course, the T-Mobile G1 manufactured by HTC. Motorola's late entry into the Android, AKA "Googlephone", market has allowed it to produce a more powerful and sophisticated product.

Read more

In a recent column about my efforts to generate a random sequence of numbers from 1 to 75 I described how I resorted to a labyrinthine system of Web services and proxies because I couldn't figure out how to do it with Excel without resorting to a VBA script.

Read more

The next time someone asks you a question and you know they haven't bothered to do the obvious, to wit, look it up on Google, send them a link to Let Me Google That For You. For example, if someone were to write to me and ask if there's an archive of Gearhead columns, I might reply with "Try this link: http://tinyurl.com/yfg33ty". Voila!

Read more

Look, I hate to bring this up, but there's something we need to discuss: Why haven't I heard from you recently? (No, not you, you've been in touch. It's this guy over here … ) Really, is it too much to ask that you put pen to paper … oh, all right, fingers to keyboard … and tell me what's on your mind?

Read more

Augmented reality is becoming a big deal. What started as an interesting, albeit geeky, application of technology is starting to find real-world uses that are impressive, not to mention way cool.

Read more

In last week's column (which was online only) I continued my exploration of a cool programming system called Runtime Revolution, focusing on the tool's object-oriented, event-driven architecture. This week we'll look at the product's English-like language, a style referred to as "candygrammar" by some cynics.

Read more

Last week here in Gearhead I started to discuss a fascinating and powerful programming system called Revolution.

Read more

When someone describes someone else as "long in the tooth" you know what they mean: That the target of the soubriquet is getting on in years.

OK, but do you know where that phrase comes from? The answer is from the horse world: Horses' teeth grow throughout their lives and, despite getting worn down by chewing hay and such, horses show progressively more enamel as they age. Thus, you can roughly tell the age of a horse from how "long in the tooth" it is. Now you know.

Read more

Last week I began discussing Yahoo Pipes, a service provided by (as you might have guessed) Yahoo. This service is designed to route and transform data taken from one or more online sources and generate an output in RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0 (RDF), JSON and Atom formats.

I discussed the range of input source choices (generically referred to as "feeds") for Pipes, now I want to cover what you can do with the data.

Read more

Microsoft Excel is brilliant. Except when it isn't. And a major place where it isn't is when you have an Excel spreadsheet with a number of cells containing strings (any sequence of ASCII characters) and you wish to concatenate all of these separate strings into one big string in another cell.

Excel does provide a function that, to the optimistic neophyte, would seem to do the job: It is, not surprisingly, called Concatenate.

Read more