Archive: January 2006

IE7 Beta 2 Public

January 31, 2006 by Marcus Tettmar in General

Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 went public today. Finally IE has tabs! Download it here. ZDNet have a review here. This beta version is likely to have bugs and may not display some sites properly. Microsoft want site designers to test it out fully before it is shipped later this year with Vista. I’ve tested […]

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Documentation and Contingency

January 30, 2006 by Marcus Tettmar in General

Recently I wrote about why it’s good to automate and how automation can help you learn software and improve its design. There are other good reasons for automating beyond the obvious benefits of saving time and money. Documentation: Automation scripts are the ultimate way to document a process. A script that automates a process describes […]

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Particle Acceleration

January 27, 2006 by Marcus Tettmar in General

Nothing much to do with Macro Scheduler this except that it finds me sitting in an office in Geneva today. 100 meters beneath me, under the ground, is a circular tunnel 35m wide, 55m tall and 27 km long. It goes right underneath houses and offices in the city of Geneva and surrounding areas. Sandwiched […]

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MicroISV Show

by Marcus Tettmar in General

I was interviewed yesterday for Channel9’s New MicroISV Show. It will be aired in 5-6 weeks. MicroISV is a new term to describe small software companies like MJT Net Ltd. ISV stands for Independent Software Vendor. The show is aimed at developers and small software companies and will give an insight into the benefits and […]

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Using Dates & Variables

January 23, 2006 by Marcus Tettmar in Scripting

This is something that comes up often, so I thought I’d mention it here. Every so often we get asked how to put a date into a filename. Say you want to rename or save a file with the date in the filename formatted to reportsYYYYMMDD.txt e.g.: reports20061801.txt Well the simplest way to do this […]

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Scripts & Tips Update

January 20, 2006 by Marcus Tettmar in Announcements, Scripting

I’ve added some scripts to the Scripts & Tips forum: A script to Monitor Startup Programs. Useful for detecting rogue apps like spyware etc Is Drive Ready. A function to determine whether the drive is ready or not. Automatically Create a System Restore Point. Useful at the start of a script that installs software or […]

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Set Desktop Icon Positions

January 19, 2006 by Marcus Tettmar in Scripting

Cosmo asked in his comment on How to Start Writing an Automation Script how he could set the position of a desktop shortcut. This is an interesting question that hasn’t come up before and it took me a while to realise how it could be done. You may wonder why you’d even want to do […]

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Thou shalt not waste time doing repetitive and mundane tasks

January 18, 2006 by Marcus Tettmar in Automation, General

This is the 10th commandment of system administration according to Brian Warshawsky’s article “Ten Commandments of system administration” over at NewsForge. I couldn’t agree more. You’ll find the article with links to the other nine commandments here. These articles are for Linux administrators so much of the content and the example scripts won’t be much […]

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Keyboard Shortcut Correction

by Marcus Tettmar in General

Tim Jones emailed me to point out an error in my keyboard shortcut article. Tim is a proper keyboard junky. Not even sure he has a mouse! ___________________ > SHIFT-RIGHT on its own just moves the cursor to the end of the > word and then to the next word and so on. Reverse it […]

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