Geek Speak.

It's Been a While...

So, after a post a couple years back letting people know that no, I hadn't abandoned my blog and yes, I would be posting more (just when the inspiration struck, rather than churning out content for the sake of giving people something to read - quality over quantity!), I'm still here and working in the IT field and writing and thinking about technology.

If you followed my Xbox posts a while back, you'll probably know there's a new one out, one that actually has integrated wireless, so whether you're Internet's coming in via a fiber-optic or from o2.co.uk you'll be able to set it up more easily. The homebrew community are still at work, and the NXE Dashboard is actually pretty slick.

There's a lot of new tech coming into the public eye, and one of those is OnLive - formally announced not too long ago, though it's been on the periphery of gamer attention for some time. It's essentially a box that streams games to your computer or television from a cloud network of servers running games at optimum settings.

That's pretty amazing, I think - the idea that you could run, say, Crysis, on a netbook, just by streaming and having a good internet connection. They state the minimum recommended connection as 2mb, but I think you're looking at a hefty fiber optic set up considering the amount of data that's being streamed directly to ...

Read More...

I have found, lately, that updating file names for large numbers of files to be tedious and time consuming. Lots of times I'll find myself going through hundreds of files changing the underscore character to space, or removing some tag.

Finding this really annoying and time consuming, I decided to write and share another script with you guys.

I packaged this all up nicely so that you can test what you're doing before you decide to commit your changes, check for case sensitivity and some other nice features.

I took some functions from from previous articles I wrote and wrapped it all up into one nice script.

Here is the output from the -? switch:

This script must be run with cscript.exe.
Syntax: cscript.exe fnfindandreplace.vbs [options] <StringToFind> <StringToRepla
ce>
Options:
         -v = Verbose
         -cs = Case Sensitive
         -x = Commit
         -r = Recursive
         -q = Quiet
         -? = Displays This Message

As always, questions and comments are welcome!

...

Read More...

A few months ago I ran into a bit of a problem. I was programming a front end for web application, and in that web application I wanted to prompt for the users username and password, and then verify that that user was, in fact, a user in the domain.

I then wanted to pull the user's information, like the DistinguishedName property, and it's CN or CommonName. This was surprisingly hard to figure out. There was lots of information out there on how to do IIS impersonation, which is not what I wanted to do, but I did want to verify the users credentials to see certain information.

After quite a bit o ...

Read More...

A while back I wrote an article about VBScript arrays and their various shortcomings entitled "VBScript Array Functions - DeleteFromArray, InArray". I love these functions because they really simplify the manipulation of arrays and directly address some of the obvious flaws with the initial implementation of arrays in VBScript.

At the end of that article, written almost a year ago, I also mention writing sort functions for VBScript. Well I finally go around to it today and decided that these two functions were just way to handy not to share.

The first one, which will probably be the one most commonly used is a simple sort function, where you can sort ascendingly or or descendinglying depending on which value you pass for sOrder. The nice thing about this, is that it will sort your array simply by calling it as a normal sub.

The second sub works exactly like the first one, except that it will sort 2 arrays relationally. For example, lets say you have Array1 and Array2 who's indexes are related. Lets say now you wish to sort Array1 but also maintain the 1:1 relationship you have between Array1 and Array2. This sub will do exactly that by passing Array1 as the first parameter, Array2 as the second parameter and the order, descending or ascending as the final parameter.

I think these are pretty slick and many of you will find them immensely useful in your own scripts and projec ...

Read More...

Hi guys! It's been a while, huh?

I just wanted to post a quick note and let you guys know that I have not abandoned this blog. I have received a few emails about code or projects wondering if I still check this blog or my email address and the answer is, "Yes!"

I just haven't had any the time or inclination to post anything new. When I get some time or have another great code snippet to share, as usual, I'll be sure to post it up.

If you have an suggestions on a particular project I should tackle, please feel free to let me know. You know how to contact me!

Please keep in mind I'm not going to write a complex script or teach you how to do things that are clearly documented other places. I'll only be considering simple tasks (in VBScript, no I won't do your PHP or whatever other language either) that aren't covered in a concise way somewhere else.

Anyway, thanks for all the nice email and words of support! I'm not gone, I'm here to stay and I'll see you soon! ...

Read More...