General Nonsense, Hacks

De-ActiveX-ifying an ActiveX Component

Some ActiveX components add “enhancement” to the browser by dropping in custom controls for forms or other fanciness. Those types of components require the browser, because they augment the user’s experience within the browser. Other ActiveX components are little more than a standalone executable that can get it’s command line arguments from the web page…
Helpful Tools, System Administration

Make a Program Run as a Windows Service on Boot

Components that run automatically with Windows on boot up often establish themselves as a system service. Other options are to add programs into the registry in places like HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run and HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run, or into the “All Users” Startup group folder (C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup, C:\Users\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup). There are pros and cons to each method,…
System Administration

TLER and MD Arrays

TLER is the Western Digital “feature” for making a hard drive give up trying to read/write before it normally would. This can be useful in a RAID environment in that a RAID controller is able to recover from a read/write error faster than an individual disk would since the RAID controller can consult the redundant…
Bash

Bash Snippet: URL Encoding

One approach would be to encode everything, but the approach I took was to just encode things I thought might be problematic to pass over the query string. URL (a.k.a percent) encoding of a string in bash: urlencode () {         tab="`echo -en "\x9"`"         i="$@"      …
Bash

Bash Snippet: Calculating the Distance Between 2 Coordinates

I have a tendency to do things in bash that I’d probably be better off doing in perl or python. Although bash may have super powers, math is not one of them, and so like my last post this script also requires bc. I’ll try and keep these code snippet posts short and sweet, and…
Bash

Bash Snippet: HTML &#code; decoder

A short and simple way to decode HTML decimal (and hex) character codes in bash. html_decode () {     html_encoded="$1"     html_encoded=${html_encoded//&#/ }     html_encoded=(`echo $html_encoded`)     for html_dec in ${html_encoded[@]}     do         html_dec="${html_dec//X/x}"         html_dec="${html_dec//;/}"         if [ "${html_dec:0:1}"…