Friday, January 27, 2006

[VBScript] Where else have I logged in on this network?

It's not so much a question for me -- I remotely log into many pcs daily as part my job, and try to leave as few tracks as possible. However, today a customer rang saying she'd lost a few important Favourites and had no backup. The best way I could think of helping her, was to locate all the machines she's logged into and see if any of the Favourites could be found.

I did find what she was looking for. Here's the code I used.

First the standard header implementing the synthetic include (derived from
Rube Goldberg Memorial Scripting Page)
StandardLibrary.vbs is getting big. 1500+ lines of code.

Next a little function for a right fill. Having needed this only once, I haven't included it in the StandardLibrary.
Now the main body of the script.

1. Check commandline to see if a username is specified.
1.1 If nothing specified, throw a fit.
2. Get an array of all the computers currently online.
2.1 No error checking here but there ought to be
3. Tell everyone what's going on.
4. Loop through the names of the online machines
4.1 Trim off the leading \\ put on by NET VIEW
4.2 Write out the name, right filled with dots
4.3 Get an array of the login profiles for the computer
4.4 Scan the array to see if contains the the username (case insensitive search)
4.4.1 If found say so with a CRLF
4.4.2 otherwise issue a CR

The calls to BeginsWith are commented out. They apply only to my situation where a company edict ensures that all desktop pc names start with PC and all laptops with LP.
The supporting library rountines are below, First GetOnLineComputers with its supporting routines, GetNetView, CaptureDOS and ReadFile
Next, BeginsWith (included for completeness sake)
Then GetLoginProfiles, plus support routine AAdd
And, finally, StrInArray.
Unfortunately, this does not run quickly. It can take ages to get through the entire list and sometimes hangs inexplicably. Your mileage may vary.

If anyone comes up with a faster way of doing this I'd be very interested.

Monday, January 23, 2006

[Euphoria] Structured Access, part 2

I knew I had it somewhere. Okay, these implement the following: BYTE, BYTES, WORD, DWORD, QWORD, ASCIIZ and PSTRING. You can pull the data one chunk at a time as per the last posting or else pull a whole set all at once.

The file versions don't work and I'm not sure why, and as I said before, I don't have the time to do anything about it.

By the way, this was written before Euphoria 2.5. In fact, possibly before 2.4 so the code may need some tweaking.

mread is like the getmem of the previous posting. memread takes a sequences of reads. I will eventually post an example (if I can find one).

(Since writing part 1, I've been in touch with CChris from
Euphoria Standard Library who has taken over the development of getmem. It's great to be able to give something back to the Euphoria community after all these years (I've been using it since version 1.5).)

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

[Euphoria] Structured Access

Late last century, in a developing part of the world, I tried writing a diskette cataloguer. It worked okay, once I'd figured out how to do all the gymnastics necessary for BIOS calls. In the process I wrote a function to access memory in a structured way. Brilliant as Euphoria sequences are, they are just that: sequences. There's little in the way of structure, unless you apply some of your own.

I've reproduced the function in its entirety below. Essentially, the code takes data from memory in a structure way, that is, in terms of BYTE, BYTES, WORD, DWORD or ASCIIZ.

An attempt was made to make the functions applicable to files. Those routines don't work, and I haven't taken the time to find out why. Good as Euphoria is, there's no Mac OS X version (so I can't use it at home) and there's no opportunity to use it at work -- Euphoria's not in the SOE. If you're interested in looking at the code, write.
As an example of how to use getmen, below is the code for GetDriveParameterTable
As an example of the BYTES parameter:
The ASCIIZ parameter is like the BYTES except it keeps working its way through memory until it encounters a binary zero and then returns everything up to that point.

From memory I remember writing a version of getmem() which received a sequence of BYTE, WORD, etc. specifications and returned the resulting sequence of results. When I find it I'll post it.

Enjoy.

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

[VBScript] A CLI framework

Here's a simple framework for building your own CLI (Command Language Interface) Keywords at this point are: quit, exit, bye, eval, echo, set and run. Below is a sample session. Now my own version adds a little to this framework by including a .vbs file full of extra symbols, procedures and classes. I've reproduced it below just so that you can see how to do a synthetic include in VBScript. Interestingly, the technique also works in HTAs. Enjoy.

[VBScript] CSV to variables using Execute

Nico wrote, on microsoft.public.scripting.vbscript:
I need ASP to read the CSV file to read lines 2 on-wards and display it back to the user for verification. Each line has aprx 8 "," that control user properties.

I am looking for each line to be displayed back to the user without the "," so they can verify and write to an access db.

All i am looking for is a simple way to read the text display to the user for acceptance before writing it back to the db.
I wrote a response but thought a fuller treatment was in order, thus the following:

Data, stored in DEMO.CSV
Then the code which does nothing other than read the file, store the data in variables for each line of data, and for effect, echoes the first and last names And here's the results of the run, taken from SciTE's output window A possible extra step would be to read the header line, strips the spaces, build the "Dim" statements and execute them as well. Or maybe, create an instance of "Scripting.Dictionary" and use that. Or ... well, there must be more than two ways to do it, even in VBScript!

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

[VBScript] Threads ... thin ones

The following is an attempt at threads in VBScript. The code owes a lot to Greg Chapman of MouseTrax Computing Solutions. There are two scripts, the first calling the second (in many instances). The means for communicating between the two is via the Volatile environment. When the script runs, Outlook flickers (don't know why).

There are comments, but the basic idea is to keep a watch over how many instances of cscript.exe there are running and while there's only so many, add more. Use the Volatile environment for semaphores and make sure there's enough delay in there to get stuff to and from Volatile (which is actually in Registry and not blazingly fast).

First the controller.
Then the controlled. There are quite a few extra useful routines in all that code, including an AADD(), and assorted WMI related routines.

I'm in the process of putting the thread functionality inside a Class so that I can change how things are done without causing drastic rewrites of the original VBScripts. I'm not entirely pleased with the Volatile environment and may end up playing with something else that can be used as a shared storage area between many programs ... like subdirectory structures.