ThoughtAsylum

It’s been quite a few weeks since I’ve been able to devote any time to blogging. It has just been a really busy time for me. However I’m currently sat on a train between Edinburgh and York so it’s an excellent opportunity to have a bit of a catch up. Specifically I wanted to post something about one of the biggest things I’ve worked on recently - The Higher Education Academy Conference 2009.

I like using VBScripts and the Windows Script Host to resolve issues as it has proved quick and flexible for most tasks.  One thing I have found problematic on occasion is the installation of the scripts on a user’s PC.  It takes time to do if it is not being deployed using logon scripts, group policy, etc.  To this end I decided to write a function to allow a script to install itself.   The script below is primarily made up from three functions/routines.

Sometimes I need to create shortcuts with VBScript especially if the script is being installed and a shortcut needs to be created to the script.  The code to create a shortcut is quite straight forward,  but the CreateShortcut() function presented here pulls everything together into a single reusable form.  Optional parameters that you don’t want to use can be filled by the use of NULL and environment variables can be included in file paths to make this as flexible as possible.

I’ve seen a few variations over the years on how to create a progress bar and an update window in VBScript.  I’ve taken many of the ideas and some of my own to create what I hope is a flexible solution that not only allows you to display updates, reports, etc., but also a reasonable looking progress bar.   If you want to skip ahead then the code is at the bottom of this post and includes an example, but for those of you who want to know a little more about how to use it or how it works I’ll explain some of the whys and wherefores.

Power saving options on computers are something that I personally think are great.  They not only help reduce carbon footprints, but they also help draw out even more life from your laptop battery.   One of the main ways in which this is done (others being things such as disabling hardware) is by having an inactivity option that turns off the screen and the hard disk after a period of inactivity.  Unfortunately there are times when this isn’t something you want.  The primary example of this is when you are giving a presentation.

National Rail Enquiries in the UK have cornered the market for iPhone apps for UK rail.  It used to be open and there apparently used to be a pretty reasonable app out there for free.  National Rail’s app on the other hand is not as nice and costs a few too many pennies for many people.

On Windows XP you may find that you need to carry out some tasks as an administrator for which you would logon as  an administrator (local or network/domain).  If the user is already logged on then you can choose to run as administrator for many activities by selecting run as from a file’s context menu.  However not every type of file has this option.

I spend an inordinate amount of time at home sat on the sofa in front of my TV working on my laptop.  I have a nice little media set-up consisting of a Mac Mini connected to my Sony Bravia TV which provides me with a nice little Internet connected multimedia option.  Rather than watching TV all the time I frequently find that I want to listen to some music while I work and because I’m quite fickle with what I want to listen to at any time Spotify has proven to be a great little piece of software.

I was scripting some Active Directory extracts today and I needed to check if a string of text contained two colons.  I was checking if the detail on particular entries was to minutes or seconds; e.g. 13:25:33 vs. 13:25 .  I couldn’t find a function to count occurrences within a string so I ended up writing my own….

In the past I’ve used FSUTIL to create large test files of data to process.  Unfortunately you need administrator permissions to use this utility.  I decided to write a command line utility (called “Make Test File” but abbreviated to MTF.EXE) to allow non-administrators to do the same.  It’s written in VB.NET so it isn’t as quick as FSUTIL, but as they say “it does the job”, and it fulfilled my immediate needs.

Recently a number of my friends have hard hard drive failures and have asked me to retrieve data from their hard drives.  I’ve been reasonably successful in each case recovering well over 95% of the data in each case - thanks not to me but the proliferation of free data recovery tools out there on the Internet.

Annoyingly VBScript does not have a “Ceiling” function, i.e. one that takes a number and rounds it ‘up’ to the nearest integer (whole number).  So since I had need of one I wrote one.

Last week I attended a second workshop on Evidence Net.  It was launched a few weeks ago at The Higher Education Academy Annual Conference 2009 and has been growing in use across the HE sector ever since.

I probably should have realised a lot sooner than I did, but there has been something a bit odd with my SpotIT feed on my RebootIT blog of late.

After FlagIT, RebootIT, PostIT and SpotIT, ZoomIT sounds like part of the theme. Unfortunately it isn’t, but it is a great free tool from SysInternals.

Following on from my ZoomIT post and thinking again about presentation tools,  I started thinking about the ways in which magnification tools generally work an how you might want to use it in a presentation scenario.

I’ve been using DropBox for some time now and I use it in some ways that I think are quite innovative and will be the subject of future blog posts.  However in the last few days I’ve been having a few problems with Windows Explorer taking forever (well over a minute or two at times) to respond and it responds very sluggishly.  I’ve managed to track the problem down to DropBox misbehaving.

In preparing a post today I’ve been through a bit of a winding process whereby I came across an issue I’d never encountered before with a VBScript.  At first I thought I’d made some sort of mistake, but it appears I’d come across a limitation of a VBScript function I use all the time - MsgBox.

I briefly had a problem with the web server that’s running my personal wiki yesterday.  Try as I might it just wouldn’t start-up.  I hadn’t had a problem before and after three or four attempts at clicking the start option I took a step back and surveyed my machine - a useful option in many circumstances.

I’m been a huge fan of DokuWiki for many years now.  Since I worked in a huge corporate development environment where structured documentation was hard to set-up I managed to pull a great number of resources together using DokuWiki and make it available to my whole team.  The culture was such that I was pretty much the only person keeping it up to date … but that’s a different story.

I tried adding my Twitter RSS feed to FeedBurner a little earlier.  Even though FeedValidator identified the feed as valid FeedBurner wouldn’t.  Googling this suggested that either Twitter isn’t producing nice RSS feeds (which FeedValidator’s validation seems to contradict) or FeedBurner has blocked it.

I’ve spent a little while today looking at putting something together for Evernote.  Hopefully I’ll have it finished pretty soon and I’ll probably share it with you when it’s done, but whilst I’ve been experimenting, I’ve also been looking at ENScript a command line utility that allows you to interact with an Evernote database.

Since Google Notebook went out of development earlier this year I’ve made the migration over to Evernote. It has many cool features one of the coolest being the ability to upload images and have Evernote run OCR to index the content of the image.  The mobile phone Evernote applications allow a phone’s camera to be used to take a snapshot image and to upload it to Evernote over a 3G connection.  Unfortunately the Windows desktop application has no functionality for capturing images in the same way through a web camera and with the proliferation of netbooks I feel that this is a feature that is sadly missing - well for me anyway.   So after a bit of research I embarked on a quick weekend VB.Net project to put together a little application that could do this - and so I created “SnapIT”.

I run XBMC on a Mac Mini plugged into my TV.  Sometimes XBMC gets a bit caught up and freezes or gets locked into some sort of loop.  I have it running in full screen which makes it rather hard to quite when the application with focus is non-responsive.  So to get past this, press F8 to bring up Spaces and navigate to another space.  From here right click on XBMC in the dock to reveal and select Force Quit.

I was challenged to work out a little problem someone was having with Excel today.  The expectation was that I could write some VBA to resolve it, but once I found out what the task was I quickly managed to put together a purely Excel function based solution.

I’ve been using Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 (Express Edition) recently to create some utilities.  As part of this I needed to have an application start-up but only display as an icon in the system tray.  After attaching a notify icon control to my main form I set the form’s load method to set the display in task bar and visible properties of the form to be false.

I recently bought an iPod touch and for several days struggled whenever trying to type in acronyms like “BBC” as the iPod’s on screen keyboard didn’t seem to have a way to lock capitals on.  I finally came across the solution when looking through some of the settings.

The default browser on the iPhone and iPod is Safari which is a built in application.  As it currently stands inbuilt applications on Apple’s hand held device operating system doesn’t give much to developers who would like to be able to add extra functionality (at least not without jail breaking).  The option to send page content to Evernote from Safari is something I had hoped would be easily available, but found myself having to manually copy content from Safari to Evernote.