The Hacker's Diet: Excel Computer Tools
The Hacker's Diet
is accompanied by a variety of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets (or
“workbooks” in recent Microsoft-speak) which permit
hands-on experimentation with the techniques presented in the book,
forecasting diet plans, meal planning with automatic calorie counting,
and a system for logging the progress of a diet and subsequent weight
management which produces progress reports and charts.
You don't need a computer to use The Hacker's Diet;
easy-to-work paper and pencil methods are presented in the book. But
if you have a computer with Excel, the companion spreadsheets may save
you time and provide more insight into the engineering underpinning of
the methods described in the book, while producing an illustrated log
of your progress.
Computer tools are also available for the handheld
Palm Computing platform.
Download
Due to reasons explained in the following section, Excel macros and
spreadsheets of more than trivial complexity often “break”
with each successive “upgrade” of Excel, requiring costly
and time-consuming modifications. Even simple packages such as this
one cannot dodge all the torpedoes emanating from Redmond, and
consequently a a number of archives are available for downloading,
each suitable for a different release of Excel. If an archive is not
available for the release you're running, choose the next available
earlier version. All the spreadsheets and macros are completely open
to user examination and modification (they are “protected”
to avoid inadvertent modification to internal formulæ, but without a
password, so you can unprotect them at will), so if you encounter
problems you have the wherewithal to fix them yourself.
Each of the downloads listed
below are about 250 Kb and are supplied as
Zipped archives.
Downloads are available for:
This software is in the public domain
and may be used in any manner without permission, restriction,
attribution, or compensation, but is utterly unsupported; you're
entirely on your own.
Why So Many Versions?
The Hacker's Diet spreadsheets were originally developed
in 1990 with Excel 2.1 on Microsoft Windows 3.1. Some of the
components in the package use Excel macros which are, for the most
part, relatively simple and straightforward compared to those found in
a typical corporate Excel application. Nonetheless, thanks to
Microsoft's practice of “strategic incompatibility” and
utter contempt for the investment made by their customers, these
rudimentary macros have required specific modifications for every
single new version of Excel in the decade since they were originally
released, and things have gotten worse, not better, since Microsoft
introduced the new Visual Basic programming language for Excel (itself
a cesspool of release-to-release incompatibility), due to what appears
to be a deliberate Microsoft strategy to destabilise the original
macro language in order to force customers onto the new one (at a cost
to Microsoft corporate clients I estimate on the order of a hundreds
of millions of U.S. dollars).
The upshot of this is that while in a reasonable world spreadsheets
and macros would be capital, created once and then used
thereafter with no additional attention, in the world of Microsoft,
software developed for their platforms is a “wasting
asset” more like a stock option with an strike date about 18
months from the time it was developed. By then Billy Boy or one of
his Kode Kiddies will have changed their mind about something (or
simply introduced a gratuitous incompatibility, whether for strategic
reasons, due to sloppiness or incompetence, or just for the
Hell
of it) which pulls the carpet out from under the application and its
users when they “upgrade” to a more recent Microsoft
release (which is increasingly involuntary as more and more new
computers are sold pre-loaded with the latest releases of Microsoft
operating systems and applications, offering the customer no option
but to pay the “Microsoft Tax” bundled in the cost of the
system).
Update: A work-around for this bug was introduced in the
Excel 2003 Spreadsheet release. If you're using that version
of the macros, clicking on a yearly log spreadsheet should work
fine.
A bug was introduced in Version 5.0 of Excel, which is present in all
subsequent releases, which causes “File not found” errors
when opening multiple documents linked to a macro sheet, even though
all the linked documents are in the same directory (folder). The
Hacker's Diet weight log spreadsheet consists of a log for the
current year and a historical database of all log entries, both linked
to a macro sheet which generates charts, performs analysis, and
provides administrative functions. When you open the current year's
log file, the macro sheet and historical database are supposed to be
opened automatically (and were in all versions of Excel prior to
5.0). In 5.0 and later, if you launch the log file document from its
icon in an Explorer window or even from the recent files menu in
Excel, you'll get a “File not found” macro error claiming
the history database cannot be found. This is courtesy of the Excel
bug.
You can avoid the problem by always opening the weight log document
from Excel's “File/Open” menu, navigating to the directory
where it's kept, then selecting the current year's weight log.
Opening the main document in this manner manages to pound into Excel's
pointy little head the fact that the linked documents may be found in
the same directory, and consequently everything will work as
intended. This isn't as convenient as clicking the log document icon,
but has the considerable merit of dodging the Excel bug.
Only the weight log speadsheet uses multiple linked
documents; all of the other Excel computer tools may
be opened by clicking their icons or from the recent
files menu.
by John Walker
August 3rd, 2006
