Archive for the ‘tools’ Category

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Ignore CRC Errors to Copy Damaged Files

Tuesday, June 19th, 2012

As I type this, I am watching a new addition to my utilities toolkit copy damaged files from a hard drive with several bad sectors that is about to be replaced.

Trying to use most programs, like a basic drag and drop in Windows Explorer, or Robocopy, or XCOPY (remember that!) will fail when the filesystem kicks up a CRC error on the file.  I’ve also had this happen with scratched CD’s and DVD’s.

The new in my software toolbox is Unstoppable Copier, a freeware tool available here. I’ve tested it once, and it seems to work as advertised. It did more than Windows Explorer managed to do, at least.

There are also roundabout ways to do this with disk image software that can ignore errors – such as ddrescue – which I’ll be running on this same hard disk soon.

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Posted in technical support, tools | 5 Comments »

New MySQL Escape Tool on tools.perceptus.ca

Sunday, February 19th, 2012

I had the need to escape a fairly large string for running a one-off SQL query against a database today. There were plenty of quotation marks and other dangerous characters in the text… so, I needed to escape the string properly.

Thus, the newest tool on Perceptus’ Web Tools, our new Web Based MySQL Escape Tool.

We hope that someone besides us finds a use for it.

Oh, and for our American friends, Happy President’s Day!

 

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Posted in database, tools, tools.perceptus.ca | No Comments »

Clean Up a Column of Mixed Date Formats Tool

Sunday, December 12th, 2010

A few times a year, a client of our will need our help in cleaning up a manually populated Excel file that has a couple of date columns. Invariably, there is a hodge-podge of date entries, such as 2010-10-05;  june 10, 2010; or 8/4/2008.  We’ve finally made a tool to fix up the bulk of this so that Excel will detect it properly as a date value.

Perceptus introduces the  Clean and convert a column of dates in Excel Numbers Wizard, on the Perceptus Web Tools mini-site.

We hope this tool saves some people besides ourselves some time.

 

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Posted in Excel, tools, tools.perceptus.ca | 2 Comments »

Our New Web Based Whitespace Trimming Tools

Friday, October 29th, 2010

We added a couple new tools to Web Tools by Perceptus today.  We also cleaned up the look of the site a little – it’s gone all the way from ugly to almost passable.  Similar to our blog, over time, the trickle of traffic to our web based text mangling site has grown, and it had earned a bit of our effort to tidy it up. Who knows, if this keeps up, we’ll have to keep adding more tools!

The new tools?

  • The Whitespace Trimmer – Paste a blob of text. Every line  of text will be trimmed of spaces on the left and right and returned to you.
  • The Blank Line Remover – Paste a blob of text.  Every blank line will be removed.

Like the rest of the site, the clipboard is your friend.  Run one tool.  Copy the result to the clipboard, and run another one of our tools on the result.

 

 

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Posted in efficient, tools, tools.perceptus.ca | No Comments »

User Scripts Broken in Google Chrome?

Friday, December 11th, 2009

A little while ago my custom user script for Chrome stopped working. I’m currently using the “dev channel” at home. When I first switched to Chrome, that was the only version that supported user scripts (basically GreaseMonkey from FireFox integrated into Chrome).

My script is simple, it makes some font and color changes to a few websites that I view regularly to make them more legible (IMHO). I should bundle it into an extension some day…

Anyway, it took a bit of research to figure out what happened. Look here on the Google Chrome blog:

[r33013] Disable –enable-user-scripts. (Issue: 27520)
NOTE: You can now install user scripts by navigating to them. You will have to reinstall your current scripts (they aren’t migrated).

— http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2009/12/dev-channel-has-been-updated-to-4.html

So, scripts are still supported, but I have to install it again. I didn’t quite understand “navigating to them” meant, but it actually means exactly what it says. In the address bar browse the file system, e.g. go to here:
C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\User Scripts

Then double click on your .JS file, and a little extension installation prompt pops up. It’s pretty cool actually.

Hmm… now that Google Chrome regular version supports extensions, I might be able to take myself off the dev channel.

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Posted in software, tools, web browser | 1 Comment »

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