TechnicallyChris.com

Early in 2008 after a couple of years of playing recreational Texas Hold ‘em with friends and free online, I decided that it was something I wanted to get a little more serious about. Not “professional” serious, but just a deeper understanding of the various strategies involved and how to come out a winner a bit more often than not. On the recommendation of a good friend, and resident poker guru, I picked up Phil Gordon’s Poker: The Real Deal. While I’m not certain I’m much of a talented review writer, I’ll certainly share my thoughts on the read.

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Chris Sports and Recreation Poker

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Chris Sports and Recreation Bush, Maine, Photography

I created the following function to create Microsoft SMS 2003 Client Configuration Requests from within Excel and dump them all out into a temporary directory for me to copy to the SMS inbox. For those that are unaware, you can “ask” SMS 2003 to remotely install the client by putting a CCR file into the INBOXES\CCR.BOX folder on the SMS Site server.

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Chris Random Code Microsoft Office, SMS 2003, VBA

Oddly enough, I often find myself needing to ping a list of computers from Excel. Usually it’s part of some asset management or software deployment exercise. If it’s a small list, I’ll often do it manually. Medium and larger lists usually warrant some type of batch file hitting the list and I just keep an eye on the results or have them pipe back to a text file. Recently I developed an Excel sub that would do the work for me and then return the results back to a column for me to sort and filter by.

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Chris Random Code Microsoft Office, VBA

I was excited to find out recently that Notepad++ has a plug-in that will allow you to edit files on an FTP server. The plug-in, which has come with Notepad++ since v4.7, is FTP_Synchronize. Unfortunately, although I’m on Notepad++ 5.2, the plug-in did not work out of the box for me. While I could connect to and browse my FTP server, any attempt to download a file resulted in the error “Unable to create directory for file C”.

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Chris Random Technology Notepad++

I added myself to the Boston Redsox Season Ticket Waiting List today. I’ve been meaning to do it for more than a year and I’m not sure why I kept procrastinating. The agent on the phone told me that the list is somewhere around 8,500 long and that it’s a $50 non-refundable fee to have your name added to the list. A fee, mind you, that is not a deposit towards the tickets when your time comes. While I think that’s a little shady, saving myself just one game’s worth of StubHub fees easily eats that right up.

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Chris Sports and Recreation Redsox, Season Tickets, Sports

I’ve updated the UDF for AutoIt from this article to Version .02 Beta. The enhancement to this new version is that you can now send commands using the COM object without specifying a connection. This will allow you to issue ForceSync, GetCryptState, and the like without first having to make a needless connection to the database. Simply leave the connection parameter blank to forgo making the call to the DB.

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Chris McAfee EE / SafeBoot AutoIt, McAfee Endpoint Encryption, SafeBoot

I frequently find myself needing to create lists of values I have in Excel in one cell. For example, I might get have a column of IDs and I need to create a comma delimited list of them to put into a SQL Query. I have the following function I put in an XLA that loads with Excel to generate these lists.

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Chris Random Code VBA

The following AutoIt script will allow you to set the Microsoft Office Registered User Name, Initials, and Company via a script by getting the name information from Active Directory and modifying the keys . This is useful in corporate environments where you don’t want it to have a generic name when you’re being told someone else has your file open.

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Chris Random Technology Microsoft Office, Scripts

There appears to be an issue starting Railo Express on Windows Vista, at least on the test machines and VMs I’m using. Basically you double click on start.bat, the DOS window opens, and then closes. This is because Windows Vista is starting the batch file with System32 as the working directory, and the batch file is looking to start java from that folder. The fix is fortunately simple.

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Chris ColdFusion ColdFusion, Railo