Archive
Adventures in VBScript – Including code from other files
If you’re a VBScript hack like me, you’re probably frustrated by the inability of VBScript to include code from other files natively. Yes, you can use funky Job files etc, but nothing beats the simplicity of an all-in-one .VBS.
I’ve created innumerable “helper” scripts and classes over the years, and even wrote a tool I call “region” which selectively merges different files together to make one big (unreadable) script.
My utopia of having simple, small scripts which leveraged my 20 year programming library has not been achieved, until now.
Here you’ll find my “Include for VBS” function – surprisingly simple, but it took 20 years of thinking about it before I got around to writing it. There were two problems to solve: Read more…
Innovate, or die.
This week Matthew Wall of BBC news posted an interesting article on Innovation. In it he lists some of the major reasons “big businesses are poor at Innovation”, things like
- Overly focussed on short term goals – quarterly earnings reports etc
- Worried about taking risks which damage their brand
- Lack of a forceful, entrepreneurial CEO at the helm..
Many of us will have experienced some of these over our careers – some of us have changed company because of them – as a past mentor of mine one said “It’s not the biggest company, or the one with the best products that wins, it’s the one which can react fastest to changing markets…”
And for me, that’s the key, underlying foundation of Innovation – Agility. Read more…
AutoDomain 5.60…
NOTE – Production-ready version 5.63 (as far as I am aware) is now available on CTOGoneWild
This version is a real departure from the 5.2 and before series, as I got rid of the dependence on IE for the UI – it was becoming a real pain, with IE trying to display first run screens, telling me it was not installed etc. Generally the IE object was unreliable to say the least.
Instead, I used a whole bunch of HTAs – This is nicer architecturally as each stands alone and can be modified as you see fit, so you can change the UI without changing the logic of the script, plus they run independently so if they crash and burn, again, no problems for the script.
Other than that, there were some more changes to make the “Run On Logon” code asynchronous, so it does not stall the user experience when provisioning them. You can find a full list of changes at the top of the autodomain.vbs script.
Finally, if you enjoy this tool and it saves you a whole bunch of time and effort, you might want to send me something from my Amazon Gift List? Thanks!
You can read more about the current version on my previous blog on this topic.
ToastCache for EEPC/EEM v5
I finally got around to posting ToastCache to my CTOGoneWild site. This is a simple script which uses a couple of tricks, and a kludge to force the EEM v5 Name index to rebuild on demand.
The EEM Name Index is one of the most useful performance enhancements you can enable within the product – certainly any database running more than 2000 machines needs it turned on to give reasonable performance. The Index speeds up Name>ID resolution. Without it, the server has to crawl the entire database searching for an object which matches the name it’s looking for – This means that logging on slows down for new users (they are placed at the end of the db), and also creating new things takes more time (as the DB has to be trawled end-to-end looking to see if the name is already in use).
The index resolves both of these, and more scenarios by maintaining a “bucket list” of hashed names>IDs. Read more…
McAf.ee Launched!
A pet project of mine for a couple of months now, McAfee’s secure-short URL service went through a viral launch last week and has taken flight!
Leveraging McAfee Global Threat Intelligence, McAf.ee lets you create short url’s which are checked against our databases of known spammy, dangerous, malware hosting, bot control etc sites prior to being show. A while ago there was a glut of dangerous short links circulating around Twitter, Facebook etc – this is something McAfee can proactively do to help offer a little more safety in our online lives.
You can create a short URL for any site, but when someone clicks on it, if the site is flagged as dangerous we throw up a warning page to give users a chance to back out before visiting.
This service was created by the McAfee Office of the CTO, which I am part of – the team is charged with looking into and creating innovative test projects, which, if successful can be rolled into the more traditional McAfee Business Units. It means we have a little more freedom to go out on a limb and try new ideas out.
You can find more information, and of course comment and add feature suggestions, or report issues on our forum http://mcaf.ee/about
I’d love to have your feedback, and, as of now I’m proud to say you can find my blog at http://mcaf.ee/simon (smile!).
Update – Larry Magid from CNET NEws called me to interview me about the service, he was very gracious and published a great writeup of the service. He also recorded the interview and made a podcast available. Boy, I hate hearing recordings of myself.
LiveLog – interactive near-real-time Log Monitor
EPE Log Reader for McAfee Endpoint Encryption v6
Packing code within code – a HTA exercise in string manipulation
I was working on a HTA tool this week, and to make things easier I wanted to encapsulate another HTA within it – really I just didn’t want to have to send two files to the user, I wanted everything in one, and rather than take the obvious approach of putting them both into a self-extracting zip, I decided to work out how to include the code of File B in File A.
Note – you can find the test files for this article on my companion site, CTOGoneWild
Pretty easy stuff I thought, just split B up into a string, and include a simple routine to write it out to the temp directory
1 : Dim s : s="Some text to output to a file" &_ 2 : " which is more than one line and go" &_ 4 : "es on a bit." 6 : Dim fso: Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.filesystemobject") 8 : fso.createtextfile("test.txt").write s
HTA Login Box and Question/Answer for EEPC5
NOTE: These are now used in the AutoDomain 5.5x script.
I was playing around with Autodomain recently, and it occurred to me how awful, unreliable, and generally perverse it is to use internet explorer to collect information from the user.
Over the last few years, I’ve found that using IE as a way of presenting information to users from a VBScript tool is just fraught with problems. I’ve had machines tell me that IE does not exist (even though it was running at the time), IE has crashed, baulked, appeared minimized, behind windows etc. Generally it’s proven to be really, really unreliable. Read more…
Tools and Utils – Latest Versions
This page is mostly machine readable by my various tools and utilities so they know when to tell you there’s a new version.
But, if you find it interesting, well, all the better.
START: ProductVersionList
Livelog|1.50|10th Feb, 2010|http://wp.me/pyGw9-cd| Asynchronous update notifications
EEPCFSExplorer|1.09|10th Feb 2010|http://mcafee-int.hosted.jivesoftware.com/docs/DOC-1123|Changes to add menus and better error handling\nAsynchronous update notifications
ProductUpdate|9.99|4th Feb, 2010|No URL|Test update text\nwith\na couple of new lines.
EPELogReader|1.12|15th April, 2011|https://simonhunt.wordpress.com/2010/02/17/epe-log-reader-for-mcafee-endpoint-encryption-v6/|Updated to have a built in search for incompatible product messages.
EEFFMigrate|1.01|7th April 2010|http://planet.mcafee.com/docs/DOC-1273|Minor changes to support update notifications
McAf.ee GUI|1.40|19th October 2010|http://mcaf.ee/about|Added ieSpell Support\n\nAdded the ability to enter a block of text, for example if you want to make a tweet and shorten all the links at once\n\nAdded the ability to expand all the links in a block of text
END: ProductVersionList
Who?
 | EVP Cyber Product Innovation for Mastercard. Formally the Chief Technology Officer for Intel Secure Home Gateways, CTO for McAfee Enterprise Endpoint, CTO McAfee Innovation team, and Founder/CTO SafeBoot Corp. |
Simon Says - Musings of a Technology CTO 
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