bluelinecity.com

Just noticed I haven’t posted anything since November last year so here’s a quick and dirty way to dynamically include other jscript files in Windows. Include the following function at the top of your jscript file.

function uate(s){return WScript.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject").OpenTextFile(s).ReadAll();}

To inlcude jscript files call eval() along with uate().

eval(uate("someotherfile.js"));

I’ve always been really bugged that Excel and OpenOffice Calc both don’t have an easy way to filter out unique values in columns. Sure I can do an auto-filter to see the unique values but that’s useless when I want to actually have a list of unique items.

So today I said enough is enough. I created a Runny command to take data from Excel / Calc ( that has been copied into the clipboard ) and filter out all the unique rows and place the results back into the clipboard. Here’s the command to create “unique” in runny.

new script unique if((t=Runny.getClipboard(0))){u={};r=[];t=t.split(/(\r\n)|\n|\r/g);for(c=0;c<t.length;c++)u[t[c]]=1;for(k in u)r.push(k);Runny.putClipboard(r.join(’\r\n’));}

Now all I have to do is copy my excel data, run “unique” then paste the data back into excel where i need it.

Enjoy!

A new version of Runny works in Windows 7 and has some new nifty features.

I cleaned up command creation so there’s no need to prepend scripts and macros with a protocol-like keyword. Now to create a macro you can simply type:

new macro [macroname] [commands]

The same goes for script. Making “macro” and “script” sub-commands of new seemed like the most natural way to think of it.

I also added cascading parameters so a command can fall back on multiple forms of input when one doesn’t exist. For example:

new g http://www.google.com/search?q={$0|clip|prompt}

This will first look for a additional parameters after typing “g” and if none are found will check the clipboard for text data before straight out prompting for a search term. Using the pipe “|” you can string together these keywords in any order.

Lastly I added a special cliptext command ” {SLEEP n}” to pause the sending of keys for a set amount of milliseconds.

On the list so far for 0.4 is multi-tweeting, regular expression search & replacing, simple reminders & timers and extra help/command reference screens.

cheatsheetheap.com

Another exciting development from the basement at PivotLabs! Cheatsheets, cheatsheets, cheatsheets. Boy I love cheatsheets. Now I can finally free up my brain and flush out all my rote learning!

One thing that has bugged me are that cheatsheets are commonly created with no easy way to update them and redistribute them. Most authors keep the source files and release only a fixed bitmap or postscript file along with a restrictive license. I wanted to change this.

Cheatsheetheap.com is a project I started to provide a central place to share and encourage user edits to cheatsheets. It’s a repository of cheatsheets built using open source tools such as Gimp, Inkscape and Open Office.

How cool would it be to call multiple custom runny commands with just one command? Cool enough to warrant an update to Runny that’s for sure!

Runny 0.2 adds a new custom command type “macro” that lets you string together multiple runny commands with or without parameters into one single command. Why you could even string together macros! And then string those to macros and on and on ad infinitum!

Check out the new download at the labs site… http://pivotlabs.com/opensource/runny

Runny is a project of mine which is similar to the quick launch command programs such as Launchy and Gnome Do but uses the built in capabilities of windows instead of running background processes.

For about six years now I’ve used a kind of poor-man’s unix by running commands straight from my Window’s Run box. I would make shortcuts to commonly used programs rename them to something small and simple and put them into a directory that’s referenced in my environment PATH. It worked really well and I never really thought much about it.

It wasn’t until Launchy and Gnome Do (both are amazing) and others started getting big that I thought this might be a “thing”. So I cleaned up my scripts, added supporting functions for clipboard management, twitter posting and text clips and packaged them into an easy installer.

It’s definitely limited but gives complete control over what the commands are and what they do and can even be run side-by-side with other launchers.

Check it out at my labs site!

Element 112 is being added to the Periodic Chart. Awesome! Now lets get to work on that “Island of Stability” guys!

Being a relatively new fan to Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, I’m happy to find a trailer for their newest game. It looks interesting but I’m not sure about the whole Falcor thing. Chances are I’ll still buy it and love it though.

I just posted the latest update to the KitcheNET software over at the PivotLabs open source site. You can see a list of all the changes under Change Log.

KitcheNET 0.1 Beta 2 with Software Keyboard

Over the past week since my KitcheNET project got posted on LifeHacker, I’ve been busy tweaking the software adding new features and fixing bugs I’ve found in the process of testing it out.

Once I get it packaged up I’ll post the new version to download on our PivotLabs Open Source section.

Some new features include:

• Software keyboard for VERY simple textual input
• Added page buffering so dialing through configured web sites seems quicker
• Added right-click reset to automatically go back to home page when navigating away
• Added snazzy splash screen
• Switched from <browser> to <iframe> elements.
• Fixed links that would otherwise open in a new browser to open in current one
• Fixed up styles

The online response from readers has been very supportive and inspiring.

One reader, James Tandy, sent me a picture of an inspired setup sporting Windows Media Center and a wireless mouse.

Another reader pointed out another similar project on TechRepublic and others had great ideas for other methods of input such as the Wiimote.

I also learned about the Linux From Scratch project which might be my ticket to finally diving head first into the barebones mechanics of Linux instead of letting Ubuntu take care of everything for me.

Either way i definitely have a list of new ideas to take from this whole experience and plan to keep going with it.