shwango! blog

Those spammers have really sunk to new lows now! They’re now posting spams to my blog! So I’ve had to resort to deleting comments from my blog.

In general, I don’t have too many issues with IE. I’m sure some people out there my flame me for it, but I do use it as my main browser – I mean I have to design for the majority, and that’s IE users on Windows. Plus, I really like MSXML and using it in the browser to save some of the server side processing.

There are a few things that still irk me – aside from the standards compliance issues… I’ve already mentioned that my current blog css causes problems on occasion – such as the page being cutoff and links “half rendering” until scrolled over. Another one that’s starting to piss me off is the disappearance of the status bar. I’m not sure why, but sometimes IE opens up with the status bar not displayed. Strange… Firebird renders things beautifully, though!

I’m not sure if any of you will notice, but I boosted wasted’s RAM from 64MB to 128MB. Now she’s not even swapping!

I put a few little bash scripts on there to bring up the /proc/cpuinfo and /proc/meminfo data. No real coding, just thought it was cool. I like little cgi scripts like that – just a head or tail here, a cat there.

Ok, I’ve decided to switch to using proper caps again. Got tired of all lower case. Hope you don’t mind.

Ever export emails from Outlook? Sucks, right? I mean why not have the date sent there? Date is pretty useful to me! Anyway, I’d rather have the output in XML over TXT or CSV. Since we needed it for an quick hack, I thought of throwing a bit of code together since I’ve worked with the Outlook object model on another project.

Before I began coding, I did a quick google and got some great resources back. This user contribution at TopXML was great! The macro was already written! Just give a filename and choose a folder and bam! You’ve got your emails in XML.

Pretty cool, I think. Also works for contacts, appointments and notes.

Note: Don’t forget to add a reference to “Microsoft XML, v4.0″ – look in Tools, References in the VB script editor.

In case that link dies, I’ve archived it here.

I know people complain – even myself – about Microsoft. OSes plagued with security flaws; products with tons of bugs… But MS does have some good technologies in my opinion.

MSXML is one of them. Very easy to work with in IE, VB and the Office XP products.

For example, in 10 – 15 lines of code (and a XSL file), I created an Excel macro to post data to our WebService servlet. (I can’t post the XSL file yet since our API isn’t public yet – still working out the details.)

The basic code is something like this: