Software History

One of the most useful little scripts I’ve written allows me to copy a file’s path to the clipboard.  This provides a quick and easy way of pasting it into a file attachment dialog or even into the body of an e-mail. It’s certainly one of the most useful little automations I use on a daily basis.

I thought I’d start my first post on my new blos with a bit about why I’m starting it. For the last couple of days I’ve been attending an event for The Higher Education Academy where the staff from all of our subject centres and our office in York got together to collaborate and discuss various topics as well as have a bit of a seasonal do.

A little while back prompted  by a discussion doing the rounds on the Academy technical group I had a bit of a look into quick response codes (QR Codes).  These are a type of data matrix represented by a collection of  pixels in a square grid that are usually used to represent something like a URL.

I’ve been running a Windows Home Server for almost a year now but in trying to set-up a new FTP server (which caused some very odd networking issues with my router) and came across an odd issue. I’m guessing this may be down to one of the various updates I’ve applied to my server as I’ve not had cause to tinker with it since before I applied the Power Pack 1 upgrade.

My background is as a systems developer and I like to think that I’m quite a good developer in so much as I like to achieve outcomes using the minimum of effort. In my book “a good programmer is a lazy programmer”. So whilst this post does not relate in any way to programming it does relate to me finding ways in which to update this blog with the minimum of effort. In this particular case through something you may have noticed a little way down on the right side of the page called “Spot IT”.

One of the biggest things in the Academy is communication. Just like any other organisation there’s a whole heap of discussion about the right ways to communicate and about who receives what information, and about what constitutes too little and information versus information overload. There will never be a perfect fit for everyone, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth exploring the options we have available and trying things out from time to time.

When it comes to podcasting Apple is the king.  The iPod and its variations lead the market and  the software bundled with Mac OS X makes creating any sort of podcast a breeze.  Unfortunately not everyone has access to an Apple Mac be it for financial reasons or for internal IT related issues.  Creating podcasts from Windows is a little more laborious, but with the right tools it can be made much easier.

I was working on an Excel spreadsheet a couple of days ago where I wanted to automatically pick up the name of the current worksheet to use in a VLOOKUP function.  I came up with the following combination of functions to get it for me…

I did a bit more tweaking of the Yahoo Pipe construct that puts the FlagIT blog and Twitter feed together onto the Reboot IT blog.  The output now combines the two feeds in a chronological order.

When scheduling meetings with people who don’t share a common calendar system I favor the use of Doodle.  However you might be interested to know that Meet-o-matic are offering 1,000 free registrations for their latest more advanced beta version for online registrations.

Microsoft Word has a little known feature (unless you happen to have read Microsoft Knowledgebase Article 212251 of course) that allows you to create large amounts of sample text using what’s in effect an inline macro command.  Microsoft Word 2007 has a wider range of macro commands than previous versions, but I’ll describe the 2007 versions here.

NoteTab is a favoured text editor of mine and for a number of years I’ve used it for working with web pages and coding up HTML, PHP, Javascript and the like.  One of the best features of NoteTab (beyond the light version being free to download) is its powerful scripting language - creating what is known as NoteTab Clips.

Every presentation these days involves Microsoft PowerPoint.  After a while no matter how much multimedia you add to it, your presentation can still look a bit dull and boring.  In order to make your next presentation a bit different why not try pptPlex?

For a simple screen shot taking tool, Lightscreen is a free piece of software that sits in the system tray and can assign hot keys to capturing screen areas as well as the usual desktop and active window.  It can also be set to dump out direct to file.

As anyone who’s been following the RebootIT Twitter feed today will know, I’ve been at the first day of the BETT Show 09. BETT (or British Education and Training Technology) is an education focussed technology event with the global industry giants of IT such as Microsoft right the way down to businesses run by individuals providing specialised learning materials. Whilst the Academy is not dealing directly with educating students, we do work in the HE sector and so the suppliers are often the same. Additionally we do need to train our own staff in technology and so there’s some parallels there too.

Ever sorted sticky notes (affinity diagramming) on a wall and then had to copy it all down?  Well perhaps StickySorterfrom Microsoft Offics Labs might be just the thing you need.  Combine it with an electronic whiteboard like MIMIOor a projector and a gyroscopic/wireless keyboard & mouse and you can really get to work.  With Microsoft Surface on the horizon it could be even more natural and just ever so slightly Minority Report … but not everything’s perfect.

Microsoft have relatively recently launched their new “mobile tagging” beta programme.  It’s quite similar to the existing QR codes that have been around for some time and it was for this reason that it caught my attention and I decided to give Microsoft Tag an evaluation in comparison to QR codes.

When working with NoteTab clips I like to be efficient and reuse clips just like programmers do with functions, subroutines, code libraries, etc. So one little thing I like to use when dealing with some clips is a conditional statement that allows the clip to work out if it was called from another clip with a parameter.

A little clip I like to use in NoteTab is one for ensuring that I have an empty file.  I usually call it using the ^!FarClip command from a standard library before I dump out the results of something where I always want it to be separate.

Like almost everyone else with an Internet connection on the western part of our planet I use Google a lot.  Today though they seem to be having problems.  Everything I’m searching for seems to have an associated warning - this site may harm your computer.

Sometimes when testing network connectivity to a server on the local LAN or a web site I use the ubiquitous PING command to do the job.  If I need to do it repeatedly I tend to write a quick DOS batch file (a text based script with a file extension of BAT or CMD).

NoteTab clipping uses the clip wizard functionality to produce sophisticated input dialog windows to obtain information from the user.  There is however a strange view produced when looking at a single check box. The clip code shown below shows the various pieces of clip code used and below that are the discussions of the approach and options along with the screen shots of what the clip wizard produces.

A little while ago I was asked by one of our finance team to see if I could help reduce the workload required in maintaining a reporting Excel spreadsheet. Along with some very specific automation amendments to the spreadsheet I also created something quite generic to allow a macro to be run against multiple worksheets in an Excel workbook.

Quite often when working on a file I want to clone it as a backup or to work on another copy to try something out. I was doing this so often and being such a lazy coder I whipped up a quick NoteTab clip to make it even easier. Run it with the file you want to duplicate open in NoteTab and it will create a duplicate in a new tab and give it the focus.

I’m really enjoying the flexibility that Microsoft Live Mesh is giving me.  It lets me synchronise bits and pieces between various computers and means that I can have quick and easy access to files on my home computer(s), work computer, my Windows mobile phone and even on a computer used by my sports club.   It’s a bit like offline files but the Internet is your network and therefore it’s quite a bit slower to synchronise than if you’re on an office LAN for example.

I’ve been working on something to help me with some logging activity in NoteTab and I’ll be posting a variety of useful bits and pieces from this in both this micro blog (FlagIT) and my main blog (RebootIT).  As part of this I was looking at producing some date related clips which necessitated looking at some mathematical clips and notably one to determine if a number is an Integer.  NoteTab is a text editor and numeric manipulations are definitely not its forte, so I needed to produce a clip function to do this.

In my latest foray into NoteTab arithmetic I came across a curious fact around performing arithmetic calculations on a variable containing text.  Whilst in purely mathematical terms an arithmetic operation on something that has a numeric value is a bit nonsensical, but NoteTab is a text editor…

Twitter seems to have become really big in the UK all of a sudden.  Stephen Fry has been leading the way for some time, but lately there have been a whole slew of celebrities tweeting away raising the awareness and popularity of the system.

I seem to be doing rather a lot with NoteTab at the moment and again I thought I’d share something useful I scripted. This time around, it’s relating to date/time and days of the week.

I’m a big fan of portable applications and particularly the work driven by PortableApps.com.  The PortableApps Menu has been undergoing a revamp for some time now to work towards a number of enhancements and in the mean time I’ve taken up using a branch of this known as Geek Menu.  Unfortunately they are all quite slow as I have a huge number of portable applications on my portable hard drive.