Author: Andrew Huey

annoying detours

Just found out that my usual route to work will be blocked off for “a few months.” I knew they were doing this, but I was hoping it would just be for a week or two. Joy.

Talmadge Avenue Bridge Reconstruction over the Middle Brook, Township of Bridgewater/Borough of Bound Brook. Beginning Friday, August 14th a detour will go into effect for this bridge as work continues. Eastbound traffic will continue to use the temporary bridge but must turn left onto Tea Street. Talmadge Ave. will be closed at this bridge. The posted detour will direct traffic to Union Ave. (Route 28), to Mountain Ave. back to Main Street. The posted detour will direct westbound traffic onto Mountain Avenue to Union Avenue to Tea Street back to East Main Street. This detour will remain in effect for a few months.

comic-con

Since I didn’t get to Comic-Con this year, I bought an events guide and souvenir book from someone on eBay. The package showed up today, and I just finished going through the events guide. Reading through it was strangely relaxing. Not quite as good as actually *going to* the con, but, with a little imagination, it felt a little like I was in my hotel room on Wednesday night, after getting back from Preview Night, planning out the rest of the weekend.

Notes 8.5 FP 1 and a weird shortcut key

Notes 8.5 fix pack 1 is out. I’ve downloaded it and applied it to a few machines. It does seem to fix a few random problems with the initial 8.5 release.

I haven’t applied Domino FP1 to our server yet though. I need to wait for the weekend to do that. I haven’t had a lot of problems with 8.5, overall. I’ve had a few issues with SMSDOM crashing occasionally. I’m on the most recent version; I upgraded SMSDOM right before I upgraded Domino itself. I’m not sure if I should blame this problem on IBM or Symantec. I also upgraded Backup Exec on the Domino server recently. That seems to be working OK, though the Backup Exec Domino agent isn’t yet certified to work on 8.5. The Backup Exec upgrade was a pretty big jump, since we’d been running version 10. There isn’t a way to directly upgrade from 10 to 12.5, so I just uninstalled 10 and did a fresh install of 12.5, then re-created my daily backup job.

As I side note, I discovered a weird shortcut today. Hold down Ctrl+Alt while you’re going into your inbox, and you’ll load the “non-java” version, basically the same thing you get if you run Notes in basic mode. I picked this up from a forum post written by Mary Beth Raven. I’m not sure how useful this is to anybody, but for some reason, I think it’s kind of cool.

revised AutoHotKey script

A couple of weeks back, I posted a semi-useful AutoHotKey script, just a little script to paste text from the clipboard, but stripped of formatting. Well, I did some searching, and of course, I’m not the only person to have come up with this basic script. This guy posted a similar script, a couple of years ago. The one thing I learned from his script, which I somehow didn’t think of myself, is that, rather than sending the clipboard contents using “SendInput”, it’s better to put the text back on the clipboard, then send ctrl-V. The reason this works better is that, in most applications, a paste is an atomic operation that’s easily undoable, whereas using SendInput appears to the application as though you just manually typed out the contents of the clipboard.
I also decided to disable the macro in Excel, since I have an existing macro in Excel that’s mapped to ctrl-shift-V, and I don’t want to override that. So, bottom line, the macro now looks like this:

#IfWinNotActive Microsoft Excel 
^+V::
myStr := clipboard
myStr := RegExReplace(myStr, "s+$","")
clipboard := %myStr%
Send ^V

Still nothing terribly amazing, but very useful, and something I was living without for longer that I should have.

NYAF

I bought my 3-day pass for New York Anime Festival today. I went last year, and enjoyed it, though I didn’t really buy much or spend that much time at the con. I think I just went in for a couple of hours on Saturday. This year, I bought a three-day pass, and I plan on taking Friday off from work, so I should be able to spend more time at the con. I’m still so far behind in watching my accumulation of anime DVDs, and reading my accumulation of manga paperbacks, that I probably won’t buy much again this year. But, I’m hoping to just hang out, relax, and avoid thinking about work for the weekend. How’s that for a plan?

post-SDCC wrap-up

CBR has a nice post-con wrap-up article, interviewing David Glanzer. It’s hard to imagine how much work goes into Comic-Con. I’m still reading articles on io9, CBR, and elsewhere, catching up on stuff from the con. (Imagine how far behind I’d be on con news if I’d actually *gone* to the con?)

comic-con panels

I spent some time this afternoon watching bits and pieces of Comic-Con panels on YouTube. I found a funny bit from a Torchwood / Doctor Who thing here. And a great bit from the Chuck panel here. And a page of embedded clips from Kevin Smith’s panel. And a page of clips from Joss Whedon’s panel. Not quite as good as actually being there, but the lines are shorter, the seats are more comfortable, and the coffee’s cheaper!

stuff at San Diego I’m missing

I’ve been surfing the web, browsing through a lot of the San Diego news. Here’s some stuff I’m missing:

  1. Mark Evanier’s panels
  2. SyFy morphing an actual cafe in San Diego into Cafe Diem
  3. The crazy line for Hall H
  4. Much more!

Next year, for sure.

useful AutoHotKey script

I’ve been using AutoHotKey for a while now. I’ve got a few macros programmed into it that are pretty much wired into my brain at this point. There’s one thing I’ve been meaning to write for the last year or so, and just never got around to it. Well, I was in the middle of something on Friday, and I just decided that I needed to stop what I was doing, and just figure out how to write this macro. It turned out to be a lot simpler than I though it was going to be! Now I feel kind of stupid for putting it off for so long.

Basically, I wanted a macro that would do a “Paste Special / Text Only”. Mostly, I needed this in Lotus Notes, but there are other apps where it could come in handy. Long ago, I’d taken care of this in Word with a simple one-line VBA macro. But, I never really knew how to do this in Notes. The reason I need this, is that I’m often pasting text from Word, or a web page, or some other app, into Notes. The text goes to the clipboard as formatted text, and if I just do a straight paste into Notes, all the formatting info gets pulled in, and it’s usually not a good match for the default e-mail formatting in Notes. So, I’d settled on just selecting Edit, then Paste Special, then Text from the menus. But that’s a lot more work than pressing Ctrl-V.

Before yesterday, I’d never looked at the AHK docs closely enough to realize how simple this was. The contents of the clipboard, in plain text format (that’s the key there!) are available in a system variable called “clipboard”. So, all I really needed to do is call SendInput on that. Duh. Just to get fancy, I also decided that I wanted to trim trailing whitespace from the clipboard contents. So, here’s a simple macro that trims trailing whitespace from the contents of the clipboard, and sends it out:

^+V::
myStr := clipboard
myStr := RegExReplace(myStr, "s+$","")
SendInput %myStr%

I just have that mapped to Ctrl-Shift-V, so I can paste text anywhere, without formatting, no problem. And, yes, I could have written this in one line, but I broke it up so it would be easier to see what I was doing.

The point of this story, I guess, is that AutoHotKey is a wonderful thing, and that some things are simpler than you think they are, if you just sit down and spend a few minutes reading the docs.