Rob van der Woude's Scripting Pages

News Archives 2012 Q4

 

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December 24, 2012 European Robin in snowfall, (c) Rob van der Woude

Happy Holidays
 
December 21, 2012 • Two bugs have been fixed in Printing.exe, making it work again.
December 20, 2012 Hardware.hta has been updated: an HTML document type has been added, and some incorrect CSS was fixed, to make the HTA work correctly in Windows 8.
December 11, 2012 RxGrep.exe has been updated: it now accepts optional /S:nn (Skip the first nn matches) and /T:nn (Take only nn matches) switches.
December 5, 2012 • For the paranoid: LookupURL.vbs is a simple new script to find the true destination URL for a redirected URL (e.g. bit.ly) without loading the destination URL.
November 24, 2012 • And yet another update (3.11 by now) for AllHelp.vbs: several Windows 8 commands have been added, a button has been added to switch between "all" commands and the ones listed by HELP only, and the HTML file is now saved in Unicode, otherwise the script would crash on one of the "new" commands in Windows 8.
November 23, 2012 AllHelp.vbs has been updated to version 3.02; several (legacy) commands have been added.
November 18, 2012 AllHelp.vbs has been updated to version 3.00, to make it work in Windows 8.
The updated version no longer works in Windows XP Professional, though. Version 2.12 does, and is included in the ZIP file as AllHelpXP.vbs.

• As of today all code samples will be displayed with highlighted code.
November 15, 2012 • The WMI Code Generator has been updated.
Delphi/Object Pascal was added to the list of supported languages, and the old HTML3-like code has been replaced by proper HTML4/CSS whenever possible, to make the HTA work in IE 10/Windows 8.

• Like the C# code samples, the HTA and WSC code samples will all be displayed with highlighted code.
For those of you who still prefer plain text, a link to the plain text source code has been added above the highlighted code.
November 13, 2012 • A bug has been fixed in PrintAny.exe: it would fail if wildcards were used without a path (e.g. PrintAny.exe *.pdf).

• As of today, my C# source code will be displayed "highlighted" instead of as plain text.
This is accomplished with the aid of GeSHi (Generic Syntax Highlighter), an open source PHP library by Nigel McNie, Benny Baumann and Milian Wolff.
Note that you'll need to download the ZIP files to get the code, the highlighted code contains too much HTML "rubbish" to copy and paste.
Source code for other languages will follow soon.

Thanks Nigel, Benny and Milian
November 12, 2012 • Having upgraded my Netbook (Asus EEE-PC 1008HA) from Windows XP to Windows 8, I found that I needed an alternative to the XP screen driver that could switch to a larger virtual screen.
The Netbook's true screen resolution is 1024x600, but it can be set to 1024x768, where you have to scroll up and down to view the entire screen.
Several programs refuse to work on a screen with less than 1024x768 pixels; the virtual screen driver is an acceptable workaround.

In Windows 8, there is no such screen driver (yet).
However, Intel's Internal_VGA_Intel_32bit_8.15.10.1912 driver comes close.
It "squashes" the 1024x768 pixels into 1024x600, which has the advantage that you can view the entire screen, though everything does look a little squashed.
To easily switch between 1024x600 and 1024x768 I wrote SwitchRes.bat.
Pin it to Windows 8's Start screen and the Task bar to switch easily.
The batch file requires Ian Sharpe's SetRes command line tool.

Thanks Ian

Note: Unfortunately, this driver cannot be used on Asus' EEE-PC 1001PX model, which has a different chipset; I haven't tested other models.

PrintAny.exe has been updated: it now accepts wildcards, and will always display the entire print(to) command or verb for each matching file.
November 9, 2012 • UpdateVueScan.vbs is a new script (based on UpdateVBSEdit.vbs) that checks if a new version of VueScan (scanner software) is available, and if so, offers to download it.
This demo script is hardcoded to check the 64-bit version of VueScan, you are encouraged to modify it to meet your own requirements.
October 16, 2012 CameraModel.exe has been updated, it now supports several Canon, Nikon and Pentax models, or you can filter on any camera brand.
October 15, 2012 RunBackupWithoutSleep.bat has been updated again: the new version only reactivates the initial power scheme if that initial scheme was the active one when the batch file was started.
In any other case, the batch file will activate the "High Performance" scheme, but instead of reactivating the initial power scheme, it will display a warning message. You can then choose the best time to manually run RunBackupWithoutSleep.bat /I to reactivate the initial power scheme.
Though not tested yet, this new version should be language independent.
October 9, 2012 • Simon Sheppard sent me some comments on my web page that explains how to use TYPE to convert ASCII to Unicode.
He came with a very plausible explanation why this method failed on many computers: the web page incorrectly represents the 2 characters for the Byte Order Mark, so when copied and pasted, the code just won't work.
I do not have a solution to display ASCII characters 0xFF and 0xFE on a web page.
So I decided to replace the 2 characters by arbitrary box characters, to make them stand out, and added a note that copy and paste won't work without some manual adjustment of the pasted code.
Maybe, some day, there will be a single, worldwide standard for text... but don't hold your breath.

Thanks Simon
October 7, 2012 • I wrote CanonModel.exe to quickly find out what camera an image was made with.
This information is then used to rename the image file.
I used FINDSTR and STRINGS before, but with images getting bigger and bigger with each new camera, I figured I could save lots of time reading only the first 1024 bytes of each file – which contain all the information I need.

CameraModel.exe supports more camera brands and types than CanonModel does.
October 4, 2012 • Ruud van Velsen released KiXtart version 4.63.
Besides some bug fixes, arguably the most important change is that its @PRODUCTTYPE macro now supports Windows 8.

Thanks Ruud
October 2, 2012 • I had been working on PrintScreen.exe for a while, when I stumbled upon some working code to read the console buffer by Simon Mourier.
I had tried to write similar code many many times before without success.
Simon's code would fail just like mine when trying to read my entire (extremely large) console buffer at once, but it was much easier to adapt the code to read it line by line.
So now PrintScreen.exe combines 2 of my projects: it either saves the entire screen as bitmap, or the console buffer as text.
The code for saving the entire screen as bitmap was provided by Ali Hamdar.
A screenshot of the current window only is still on my wish list, but it is amazingly complex to get the current console window's coordinates in C#.

Thanks Ali and Simon

 

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