blog.arithm

Someone has finally produced a decent front end to 7-Zip ! jZip is 7-Zip, but not irritating to use. Like 7-Zip, it should support all major (and many, many minor) archiving formats.

This cool little tool from Ultrapico saved me a ton of time while attempting to whack together a fairly complex regex today. Though it can be a bit clunky at times, in general Expresso is extremely useful for visualizing how your regular expressions are stepping through test data. The layout is simple and intuitive. And best of all, it’s free.

Also played around with Jan Goyvaerts’ RegexBuddy, which is definitely the more slick of the two (real-time search while typing) and highly recommended by flagrant regex badass at large Steve Levithan. Nevertheless I found it easier to see what was going on in Expresso and, as I may have mentioned above… free.

I recently wrote about what a nifty tool the Outlook 2007 Calendar Printing Assistant is. And it is nifty, yet a few annoying issues that have left us relying on printed screen shots instead. Hrrm. Unfortunately, the Printing Assistant:

1. Doesn’t render items in the calendar in the same left-right order as Outlook. (Neither does OWA for that matter.. This is a really minor point but seems to drive some people absolutely crazy.)
2. Doesn’t apply category colors.
3. Doubles-up appointments on occasion for no apparent reason.

The last two points, especially, justify our decision to just bang on the PrtSc key when needed.

That and I can’t quite seem to figure out how to rework some of the .xcal templates so that we can change working hours. (Which would ideally already be read from the calendar settings in Outlook.. Double Hrrm.)

At least not when doing Windows.

I’ve tried a couple of free GUI-esque applications for tailing logs on Windows servers, but none of them have really panned out. Tail for Win32 is fine for small log files, but stops working when you get into the multi-megabyte log range. Plus it has a creepy icon.

mTAIL looks good, but returns a frightening “Unknown Publisher” error in Windows 2003. Same for the free version of Bare Metal’s tail, WinTail.

MakeLogic (motto: “We are excited that MakeLogic is delivering” — Microsoft. What?) has a Java Tail that also looks promising, but is still clunky and gives random ArrayIndexOutOfBounds errors.

And then there are the for-fee version like BareTail, Hoo WinTail, HPS WinTail, and Tail4Win. All seem very nice… but then, I don’t pay for tail.

So ultimately I’m back to good old tail -f via Cygwin (which I swear didn’t used to work). I understand that the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools provide similar functionality; however if I’m going to catch tail from the command line, I need to do it from bash.

KnockOut is a wonderful little “Outlook Companion” that I just (re)discovered and, though it’s over five years old, still works fine with Outlook 2007.

If you’ve ever had to switch back and forth between profiles in Outlook (or.. if you’ve ever just wanted to turn the damn thing off for awhile so that your could clear your mind without getting email and — in my case — irrelevant appointment reminders thrown in your face), you’ve probably noticed that Outlook often doesn’t really shut down quickly. Or ever.

KnockOut snaps a little icon into your taskbar that clearly shows Outlook’s running state. If Outlook is hiding zombie-like under the desktop, just click”Terminate Outlook” to shoot it in the head. You can also launch new email, task, calendar, etc. items from Knockout’s popup menu. Nice touch.

At 37 KB I’ve simply dropped KnockOut.exe into my quick launch bar and pull it up as needed.

Wow, it’s PDF day. Exciting.

Tim Heuer has written a PDF Previewer for Outook 2007. And just in time too, as I was about to shell out $300 for Acrobat.. mainly because it had a previewer.

So after spending well over twenty minutes uninstalling the Adobe beast, I’m up and running with Foxit for free. Like Sumatra, it’s lickity split fast.

Thanks Tim!

While getting document viewers deployed onto Japanese handsets I’ve consequently mucked around with more than my fair share of PDF utilities over the last three or four years. Sumatra has got to be the best one I’ve come across. Simple and lickity-split fast.

Now if it just wouldn’t crash on Japanese documents.

I’m generally not a big fan of the Microsoft way of life. That said, I’ve been a loyal user of Outlook for years; mainly because there just isn’t any particularly strong competition out there. (And, yes, I have tried very hard to get funky with Zimbra.)

Over the last month or so I’ve been — cautiously — deploying an Outlook 2007 solution for a local non-profit with some pretty intense calendaring needs. Cautious because, though Outlook/Exchange will definitely get them the most bang for their buck, the sophisticated group collaboration functionality does get to be complex. And by “sophisticated” I mean, of course, “quirky”. And we’re dealing with folks who still store all their data on 3.5″ floppies. Quirky and technophobia do not make a good combination.

Anyway, as the nervous floppy-ites have become increasingly comfortable tabbing through public folder calendars, we’ve had a number of challenging requests crop up. One was to print multiple calendars side-by-side. Quite the reasonable request.

So reasonable, in fact, I was sure it was impossible.

You can imagine my surprise when today I happened across the new, free Calendar Printing Assistant. While many Microsoft apps seem to have just enough functionality to make you wish they, say, worked well, this little utility appears to actually deliver. And now we’re happily lasering five separate calendars to a single, perfectly printed sheet of A4.

Maybe I’m a fan afterall.

I recently had an urgent need to run an old full screen DOS application.  Vista wouldn’t cooperate.  DOSBox to the rescue.

Makes me want to dig up my old GAGS archive.

For as long as I can remember it’s been a royal pain in the butt to log into a Linuxy server from a Windows box and get work done in Japanese. Tera Term, with fairly good multiple-encoding support, was fine back in the days when password authentication was still thought to be secure and most of us associated ssh with testy librarians.

I recently had high hopes for a reincarnation of Tera Term as UTF-8 Tera Term Pro with TTSH2. Though there seems to be a lot of activity, I could never get key-based authentication to work and had to go back to a rather clumsy, hacked version of PuTTY.

I’d downloaded Poderosa some time back but never really played around with it; for the most part I thought it was tabbed, scalable Cygwin. Recently, however, I noticed it’s nifty little encoding pulldown.

Convenient.

Rather than just launching Cygwin I tried out it’s SSH key wizard, maneuvered a login, broke the window into three or four tabs and then split them again vertically, horizontally, and wow.. this thing is really easy to use.

What’s really amazing is that the Poderosa project seems to be sponsored by the Japanese government. Brilliant, as this is a hugely powerful tool for Japanese engineers; many of whom suffer post-traumatic multiple encoding disorder. (“Ok, so if I cat this text through recode maybe I can see what’s going on here, as long as the hankaku doesn’t mojibake..”)

That said, I’d really love to know which section of the government they convinced to cough up funds, and how on Earth they presented it. Someone higher up must be a Linux engineer.