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Just found an outstanding program for opening/editing/??? .csv files.  CSVEasy - http://www.tizma.com/csveasy is an AWESOME program for opening csv files, from small to large.

CSVEasy Screenshot

I can’t get over how great this program is.  If CSVed chokes on the file, CSVEasy may be your answer!!  Although lacking some of the features that make CSVed great, CSVEasy pretty much fills in all the gaps.  Between CSVed, CSVEasy, and Excel 2007, you shouldn’t ever have trouble with .csv files again!!  Top notch app.

In my line of work, I deal with a lot of .csv files (we refer to them as .csv – comma seperated value – files, when in actuality they may be tab or pipe seperated, quote delimited, and/or some other random variation or mixture of tabs, quotes, commas, pipes, delimiters, etc.).  They can be a nightmare if they are given to you misformatted (in a pipe, i.e. ‘|’ , seperated file, if the text is not scrubbed for pipes before it is formatted, you end up with an invalid file (aka a file not able to be parsed by DTS, SSIS, ODBC Text drivers, Excel, etc.).  I have found a few tools that are very helpful when you are working with .csv files.

1.  CSVED – (download from) http://csved.sjfrancke.nl/

CSVED is the go-to-guy (next to Excel) in terms of CSV editors.  Although a low-key app, its free (!) and integrates really well into the Windows right-click context menu.  It gives you all sorts of options, from deleting columns from the file, to exporting the .csv in XML.  Absolutely top-notch freeware program.

2.  Excel – (download the trial from Microsoft.com)

Not freeware, but Excel does do a great job at opening .csv files (and fixed length, too!).  The trick is to paste all your data into the first column, then select “Text to Columns” and tell Excel about the file it is opening.  If you are using Excel 2003 or older, you are limited to around 56,000 rows.  Excel 2007 will let you open a .csv file with up to a million rows (very helpful).

buckminster fuller dome - chicago merchandise mart chicago

I work  (for the next 2 months ?? maybe.  im getting laid off – well, they are closing our office/killing our arm of the business) – across the street from the always impressive Merchandise Mart in Chicago.  I was mailing something from the post office inside the mart and walked through the lobby and was surprised to find this structure in the lobby.  This is the Buckminster Fuller ‘Fly Eye’.  It was a conceptual structure that was meant to possibly house people in the future.  Apparently, one if the companies in the mart is going to furnish it while on display.

www.iconpot.com

Tons of excellent free icons, usable in personal/commercial apps, websites, etc. and you dont have to provide back-links or credit to the author.  Was searching and searching for icons for my scheduled task management application and found the best icons here.  Awesome resource.

Get a comma seperated, consolidated file with all of the configured
scheduled tasks within your domain.  Will also work in a workgroup, you
just need to be sure that you have configured a network username and
password and can authenticate successfully as an admin on that machine.
Save the following as a '.bat' file, in its own folder, along with a file named
'servers.ini'.  In th servers.ini file, simply list the machine names for those
machines you want the schtask report from.  Run it, and you should get a
text file that could be parsed through and imported into a database, or
just useful for auditing purposes.

This has been something that’s bothered me for awhile- especially at work, with all the tasks I schedule daily.  It bothered me that I always had to look up the system account username and password that’d been designated as our ‘Task Scheduler Account’.  The password is a tough one (and rightly so- its a domain admin account).  It also bothered me that in order to schedule a task, I had to go to the GUI applet interface (Control Panel) or the command prompt, then add the task- even though I’d just written the script and was staring at it in the directory I wanted it to run from.  Thus was born the (fairly ugly, but useful) – ScheduleAsTask context menu item.

There is a limitation on the name of the vbs file- it cannot have spaces in it.  This is because we are using the filename as an argument – so if there is a space in the name, the Windows Scripting Host thinks there are multiple arguments.  This limitation could be overcome by getting the number of arguments found at runtime, and concatenating them fairly easily.

The default name is your script’s name, minus the extension.  If there is already a task scheduled with the same name, the script will throw an error.  You can change the task name to whatever you like in step 2.

And step 3 is just configuring the details for the task.

———————————————————————————

1.  Save the following code to a directory as “schtaskContextMenu.vbs” (the name doesnt matter as long as the extension is .vbs).

2.  Go to http://www.mvps.org/emorcillo/en/code/vb6/index.shtml and scroll down until you see “Using the Task Scheduler”.  Click the link underneath it and save the .dll in the same directory as the script.

3.  Run the script.  You may have to give it permission to run.  Tested on XP Pro sp2.  Might work on Vista, not sure.  Vista uses the TaskScheduler 2.0 interface, which has some backwards support.  Try it.

Here is the script zipped up for you.  Once you have the .dll from the above link in the same folder as the script, simply double click on the script.  It will ask you if you are installing or updating.  Click yes to install the whole shebang, no to just update the script (in case you make any changes), or cancel to, well, cancel the script.

Oh, and be sure to enter the account information in the .vbs so it will work on your machine (yep, its a security risk- anyone could open the script’s source and read the account info- maybe make a special non-admin account for scheduled tasks?  As far as I am concerned – in the environments I work in- the account info is available to any legit user.  If we have a rogue hacker looking through our scripts, plaintext passwords are the least of our concerns.)  Context Menu Task Scheduler Script for Vbscripts

scheduled task studio - windows scheduled task manager

So there arent many options out there for managing Windows Scheduled Tasks. There is the bizarre Tasks folder- a special folder in xp and server 2003 that you can access on remote machines if you have admin rights (so not on xp home edition…**arghh**). You can use the schtasks.exe command line interface…
You can spend 200 or so dollars on the Task Scheduler version of Sql Sentry (http://www.sqlsentry.net/event-manager/windows-task-scheduler-enterprise.asp – very nice program imo- especially the sql agent/task scheduler version. i used the trial version for 1 sweet month… then got my allocations request denied…).
There is Task Scheduler Pro (http://www.liebsoft.com/Task_Scheduler_Pro/)- which is 500 dollars (minimum license purchase: 5. each license costs 100 dollars… when I inquired about pricing last).
There used to be EMCO Remote Task Scheduling… But I recently noticed that it was not available anymore via the EMCO Software website (http://www.emco.is/). It had a price tag (if I remember correctly) of somewhere around 150 dollars per license.
The point is- not many options if you are on a budget and need some advanced management-ability for the windows task scheduler. The company I work for uses it and Sql Server Agent exclusively for our (extensive) job-scheduling needs.
So I’m building one. Here is the (very rough) initial layout. Ive got all the standard management capability plus visual schedule management. As soon as I verify that I can redistribute the components used, I’ll post the source. As of now, I havent gotten to remote task management (the machine is hardcoded in right now), but the goal is to be able to get a complete overview of the enterprise’s scheduled task in one view, or be able to manage individual machines, etc. Id like to add job-chaining and alerting, as well as log-aggregation. If youve ever looked at the SchedLgU.Txt (the task scheduler’s log file- c:\windows\SchedLgU.Txt – its a mess to parse through. If anyones written a comprehensive parsing regex- I’d love to look at it ).
More on this later.

When I first saw this website, I kind of thought it was ridiculous.  But then I kind of got hooked- try it out.  Its kind of addictive.  this site is worth $104.  I’ll take paypal.

estimate the value of a website

This is an ongoing topic.  Im going to start with the one I use the most.  Pretty much everyday. 

VBSEdit (http://vbsedit.com/)

Pretty much all you need if you do some serious vbscripting.  Right click context menu, run lines or entire scripts and debug them from the editor.  I love the ‘Snippets’ functionality…  why oh why is this not integrated into more text editors (Notepad++, Textpad, ConText, Notepad2, PSPad, Programmers Notepad…come on now….).

Its got an object browser built into it, you can do true debugging (like visual studio – hover your mouse over a variable during runtime to see its current value…). 

And to tie it all together, a single user license (that can be used on multiple machines!!) is only $49.  It always blows my mind when Im looking at code on someone elses computer and they are using notepad.  Its so… masochistic.

vbsedit in action - vbscript ide