| December 18, 2013 | • Lua has been added to the list of languages supported by my WMI Code Generator HTA (WMIGen.hta). To run the generated Lua scripts requires Lua for Windows. |
| December 17, 2013 | • A minor update for Software.hta: the improved check for updates routine (as used in most of my other HTAs) has been implemented, and the HTA now uses MSIEXEC.EXE's icon instead of MSHTA.EXE's rather bland icon. |
| November 28, 2013 | • When my wife asked me to transfer her Mozilla Thunderbird address book to her Android tablet, the first thing I tried were regular expressions.
The regular expression I used almost brought my computer to a halt.
So I wrote a simple batch file, LDIF2vCard.bat, which seems to do the trick: just export the Thunderbird address book to an LDIF file, escape any ampersand with carets if necessary, and run the batch file:LDIF2VCARD export.ldif *This will create individual vCard files for each address in the LDIF file, and these vCards can then be imported on the Android device. If you had to escape some ampersands, you'll have to remove the carets again from the LDIF as well as the vCard files. In some cases, you may also have to manually edit some phone and e-mail fields, as Android insists that a phone number or e-mail address in a vCard is preceded by either WORK:, HOME: or PREF:. |
| November 25, 2013 | • And yet another update for AllHelp.vbs: more bugs were fixed, the code was optimized for better performance, and a host of commands has been added (almost all SysInternals' command line tools, at least the ones that return on screen help text). |
| November 24, 2013 | • AllHelp.vbs had another minor update: some bugs were fixed, a command added (PRINTBRM), and (in Windows Vista and later Windows versions) a command's file description will be used if no help summary was found on the command line. |
| November 20, 2013 | • WinSAT.bat is a new batch file that queries WMI to get the Windows System Assessment Tool's scores (WinSAT, also called "Windows Experience Index") for the specified computer. You can specify a single component score or the total score. The specified score is displayed on screen and its integer value is returned as "ErrorLevel".  |
| November 19, 2013 | • A minor update for Tail.exe: since TYPE somefile | TAIL.EXE /L:5 would often fail on large files, and I did not find a satisfactory solution yet, this option has been removed from the help text.The code has also been optimized for larger files: the file (or the redirected text) is no longer stored in memory twice... • An update for Hardware.hta: it now includes the Windows System Assessment Tool's (WinSAT) scores for the main computer components. Besides that, the update check procedure has been improved (separate thread), as has the HTML/CSS code, to make it work in future IE versions... |
| November 14, 2013 | • Another minor update for BirdName.hta: as the configuration files have changed a lot with each update, the HTA now checks for configuration file compatibility at startup. This feature is of limited use right now, as it depends mainly on the version number being present in the configuration files, but it will be quite useful in future updates. |
| November 12, 2013 | • Romans.hta (my HTA to convert Roman numerals to decimal numbers vv.) has been updated to make it "Internet Explorer 11 compliant". While working on it, I also removed the "Convert" button; the fields are now calculated and updated while you type. The updated HTA also features a Help screen when F1 is pressed. The on-line JavaScript version has been updated too. • WMIGen.hta (WMI Code Generator) has been updated too. The update notification no longer inserts itself in the head of the main window, but generates a ( MsgBox) popup message instead, asking if you want to download the latest version.Each command line argument can now be saved in a configuration file "WMIGen.cfg", to make it "stick" (though "real" command line arguments will override these settings). And a checkbox "Remember these settings" has been added in the "Configure" block to allow creating a basic "WMIGen.cfg" file. |
| November 11, 2013 | • Last week we finally managed to fix the screen driver issue in Windows 8 on a friend's Asus EEE-PC 1001PX "SeaShell" Netbook. Unlike my own Asus EEE-PC 1008HA Netbook, his "SeaShell" did not allow setting the screen resolution to 1024x768, thus blocking the use of Windows 8 Metro apps. By changing a registry setting and installing an older display driver he can now run Metro apps on his "SeaShell" Netbook too. The details can be found on my Tweaks page. |
| November 10, 2013 | • A minor update for BirdName.hta: each setting from the configuration file can now be overridden on the command line, and fields (e.g. Translation fields) are now cleared if their content becomes meaningless (e.g. when the Class or Species Name changes). |
| November 9, 2013 | • BirdName.hta has been updated: it can now be used to translate species' names from all chordata classes (i.e. amphibians, birds, fishes, mammals and reptiles), not just birds' names. |
| November 8, 2013 | • I wrote a command line utility named SplitTextFile.exe (in C#), which should be able to split really large files into smaller chunks. It is still in early beta stage, but you're invited to test it. |
| November 7, 2013 | • Marc Merkestein asked me if I knew why my collection of IE*.vbs user dialog scripts failed in Internet Explorer 10. To be honest, I hadn't noticed yet. I found out that IE10 conforms more to standards than IE9 did, and thus it became case sensitive (picky?) for JavaScript DOM properties' and methods' names (e.g. screen.availWidth instead of Screen.AvailWidth).I updated all affected scripts today and tested them in IE10. Thanks Marc |
| November 4, 2013 | • For one of my projects I needed my own XL2XML.vbs to read an Excel sheet and save the data in XML format. However, XL2XML.vbs was showing its age: it did not support Windows 7 nor Office 2007. So I updated it, and renamed it to Excel2XML.vbs. The updated version supports Excel 2003 (.xls), Excel 2007 (.xlsx) and Excel 2007 macro enabled sheets (.xlsm). To add support for more Excel sheet types, add the appropriate provider(s) and connection string(s), which can be found at The Connection Strings Reference. |
| November 2, 2013 | • Windows 8.1 sometimes makes a mess of command line tools' output: SUBINACL and SFC generate output with 2 bytes per character, but no Byte Order Mark, which gives especially VBScript a real hard time working with captured text.That is why AllHelp.vbs has been updated once more: SUBINACL's and SFC's output are now handled more correctly in Windows 8.*.Besides that, in Windows 8.1 I get unexplained access denied errors when trying to save AllHelp.vbs's output HTML code to a file. Having no real solution yet, I decided to add a new command line switch /Q that will display the generated HTML code in Standard Output, allowing redirection to a file:CMD /A /C CSCRIPT //NoLogo AllHelp.vbs /Q > allhelp.html |
| October 29, 2013 | • AllHelp.vbs had another update: error handling has been improved, greater than and less than characters are now escaped everywhere, version numbers are added for external commands, internal commands are indicated as such, the list of internal commands has been extended, and a new optional /NOBATCH switch has been added to ignore batch files in the commands list. |
| October 28, 2013 | • Denis St-Pierre sent me a script to get a File Select dialog using MSHTA in VBScript. Don't be fooled by the fact that it uses MSHTA, it is plain VBScript code; it just uses MSHTA instead of Internet Explorer, and an HTML input tag of type FILE, to get a File Select dialog! The original code was written by Rudi Degrande. Thanks Rudi and Denis • AllHelp.vbs had a minor update: an error in the generated page's stylesheet was corrected. While at it, I used the updated version to generate a help page for Windows 8.1 Professional. • Windows 8.1 was added to the list of Windows versions ( VER output values). |
| October 27, 2013 | • Upgrading Windows 8 to 8.1 on my Netbook was not as painless as my earlier upgrade from XP to 8. After the upgrade I could no longer change the screen resolution to 1024x768. The problem was a registry setting gone bad, which I could correct thanks to an article by Brad Linder. Thanks Brad |
| October 20, 2013 | • ListADComputers.bat is a simple batch file to list all or a subset of all computers in active directory. Filtering can be done by name (wildcards allowed) or by specifying a start node in the AD tree. Example of its usage, pinging all computers whose name starts with "DEV": FOR /F %%A IN ('ListADComputers DEV*') DO PING %%A |
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