| June 30, 2009 | • Denis Speich found and corrected a fatal typo in my ReadRegValue function. Thanks Denis Brian Williams is investigating a possible bug in Multiply.cmd, found by Justin. So you'd better doublecheck if you used it to calculate your salary. Thanks Justin |
| June 28, 2009 | • Brian Williams submitted 2 batch files that work with large numbers: IsLarger.cmd and Multiply.cmd. IsLarger.cmd compares 2 (big) numbers and returns TRUE if the first number is larger than the second one, FALSE if it is smaller, or EQUAL if they are equal.Multiply.cmd, you may have guessed, multiplies 2 (big) numbers and returns the result. On my Clever Tricks page I explain the main trick behind these brilliant batch files. Thanks Brian |
| June 10, 2009 | • Bill Stewart notified me of two useful batch utilities he wrote: EditVar and Choose.
I added them to the new Batch Tools section of my User Input page, and to my existing Batch Tools page. Thanks Bill Brian Williams sent me a script by Brad Thone; it uses the fact that (in XP) string substitution is case-insensitive, to convert strings to upper and lower case. Thanks Brad and Brian Denis St-Pierre sent me a link to AppDeploy's Package Knowledge Base, which contains many commands to install or uninstall specific software. He also discovered a third way to manipulate the registry in VBScript: RegObj.dll. We haven't found true documentation yet, but some samples can be found in the Microsoft KnowledgeBase articles KB281309 and KB279847. Thanks Denis |
| May 28, 2009 | • Mark Tattersall found two new batch techniques: one to convert strings to upper case using FIND, and another one to convert strings to lower case using DIR /L. Quite ingenious. Thanks Mark • Brian Williams, author of Twirly, reported a problem with invalid caret characters when code is copied and pasted from my web pages into Notepad. My own testing confirms the problem, with both Notepad and UltraEdit. So, until I find a solution, make sure to download code, don't copy and paste it. Thanks Brian |
| May 27, 2009 | • I just returned from a 2 weeks holiday, which may help explain my "radio silence". There were several new tips in my mail box, waiting to be investigated. Please have patience, I will answer your mails. • One mail by Dejan Matijevic made me decide to act immediately: Dejan discovered 2 missing parenthesis in the code on my Parsing Date and Time page in the "Parse the time, strip leading zeroes" paragraph. They have now been added. Thanks Dejan |
| May 4, 2009 | • ChangeDetection has been sending lots of "false positives" the last couple of days.
It seems they only just discovered the conversion from plain HTML to PHP for some pages. There is no way I can stop this, they will send a message for each HTML page to every subscriber. It might be better to unsubscribe for the HTML pages and subscribe for this News page only. Sorry for the inconvenience. • I updated Txt2Src.vbs, the script I use to convert plain text source code to HTML "escaped" code (e.g. it replaces & with &, > with > etc.)Version 2.00 now supports codepage selection with the /C switch, e.g. cscript.exe txt2src.vbs example.bat /C:437 makes sure example.bat is read as plain text "encoded" with codepage 437. |
| May 1, 2009 | • More typos corrected: Daniel Smith corrected 2 typos in the code on my Parsing Date and Time page, plus one more in the explanation on my Comments page. Thank Daniel |
| April 30, 2009 | • A function and demo script to retrieve geographical information for host names or IP addresses was added to the VBScript techniques section. You do need to install some (free) additional software before the script can be used. |
| April 27, 2009 | • Oops. Justin corrected 2 typos in DateTime.cmd. Thanks Justin |
| April 22, 2009 | • Never assume anything. After converting my web pages from HTML 4 Transitional to 4 Strict I uploaded all pages to the server and a s s u m e d that was just it. Until today, when I found out that almost 50 pages were truncated and had to be uploaded again. |
| April 17, 2009 | • Raphael Estrada corrected 2 typos in TEE.BAT. Thanks Raphael |
| April 22, 2009 | • Willem Koster sent me an alternative tweak to restore the file security tabs in XP Home. I prefer this tweak, because all changes are temporary only and will most likely "survive" all future Windows Updates and ServicePacks. Thanks Willem |
| April 16, 2009 | • Leonardo Gutierrez Ramirez found a clever way to use numbers as variables in a FOR loop:FOR /L %%ˆA IN (1,1,10) DO ECHO.%%ˆACombined with Carlos M.'s extension of the available variables in FOR loops, we can now, in theory at least, nest up to 75 FOR loops! Not that I would want to maintain such code... Thanks Leo |
| April 9, 2009 | • Jiri sent me a clever adaptation of the UpCase and LoCase routines, plus what he calls a Title Case routine, also known as capitalization.His code doesn't require delayed variable expansion, but unless you have a huge screen it does require some scrolling to read it... 😉 Thanks Jiri • Justin sent me a batch file that returns the current date in YYYYMMDD format as errorlevel in Windows XP. It is limited to English only, but you can modify it yourself for other languages. Thanks Justin • After having converted these web pages to HTML 4.01 strict, I'm still ironing out the last glitches, running every page through multiple validators and correcting any errors. Marc Gueury's validator add-on for Firefox (based on Tidy and OpenSP) has been a great help. Anyway, you may receive more "false positives" from ChangeDetection this week. Sorry for the inconvenience. Thanks Marc |
| April 5, 2009 | • I just converted the pages of this web site to HTML 4.01 Strict. As a result, you may receive notifications from ChangeDetection for every page you subscribed for. |
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