Archive for the ‘tools’ Category

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The Fastest Way to Lookup Multiple Historical CAD to USD Rates

Friday, August 21st, 2009

At Perceptus, we deal with the Canadian Dollar to US Dollar exchange rate a lot.  Doesn’t every small business in Canada? We need to convert our US revenues to Canadian CAD amounts for tax purposes, among other things.

We used to use the common websites like XE.com or X-Rate.com to get our historical exchange rates.  But those sites are too slow if you need to look up a half a dozen exchange rates from the past.  It takes several clicks to retrieve a single exchange rate for a date in the past.

So, I went looking for something better to use.  In fact, I was prepared to create a new tool for looking up historical Canada to USA exchange rates on the Web Tools by Perceptus site if I couldn’t find a satisfactory alternative.

Unfortunately for tools.perceptus.ca, I did find a reasonably good way to get a lot of old exchange rates in an efficient way.  The IMF website, of all places, has a great custom table generator.

Here’s the link: Http://www.imf.org/external/np/fin/ert/GUI/Pages/CountryDataBase.aspx

However, this link (until it breaks, anyway) will take you directly to every CAD to USD rate in the last 365 days in a nice and tidy table.  Just generate the table, and look up the rate you need for the date you need.

Nice!

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Posted in canadian, efficient, small business, tools | No Comments »

Create a single line of text from a table for logging

Monday, June 15th, 2009

Have you ever wanted to copy a chunk of text from a web page for logging in an Excel spreadsheet and have been supremely annoyed by the formatting and spacing and all manner of other things that make it untidy and tedious?

Well, we did.  So, a couple months ago, we added a new text mangling tool to our simple web tools page, we introduce, The Simplify to a single string – granted, we don’t have the prettiest names for our web tools.

It was originally designed to online transaction details from a bank web page that includes a small table, and turn it into a single string that we save in Excel for logging purposes.  It’s turned out to be useful for mangling all sorts of web snippets to make them Excel, Word, and even email friendly.

We strip all formatting, remove extra spaces, and modify table cells and line breaks by replacing the breaks with dashes (“-“).

It’s useful to us, and hopefully to you!  Enjoy.

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Posted in annoying, documentation, Excel, tools, tools.perceptus.ca | No Comments »

Free Computer Burn-In Software

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

I thought that free burn-in software would be easier to find.

Every now and then I cobble a computer together from parts, or I have to diagnose a PC that is crashing from time to time.  Unfortunately, even though a PC can boot, it doesn’t mean that it’s stable and ready to go. The tool for this job is burn-in software.

I used to use the free-as-in-beer version of SiSoft Sandra, but over the years it has gotten rather bloated.  Anyway, SiSoft Sandra is more geared towards benchmarking a computer rather than stress testing.

Today, I found a great little tool that seems to do a good-enough job of testing the CPU and RAM – it also puts a modest amount of load on the hard drive.

The free tool that I am currently recommending: CPU Stability Test by Jouni Vuorio. It seems to run fine in all current versions of Microsoft Windows.

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,7146-order,1/reviews.html

It’s a bit old, circa 2000, and I can’t find a current website for it… but it works.  There are several “high-quality”, i.e. non-spammy, websites that host CPU Stability Test. Just Google for it if the link above goes stale.

There is still room to find a better free utility, but for now I’m satisfied.  But, if you have other suggestions for free burn-in testing software, please leave a comment!

Update: A free utility for testing memory (i.e. looking for bad memory sticks) that runs inside Windows – http://hcidesign.com/memtest/. If you’ve got the ability to reboot the machine, then use Memtest86.

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Posted in computers, software, support, tools | 4 Comments »

Creating a single-quoted comma separated line of text

Friday, March 27th, 2009

Today I had a need to create a single line of text like this:

‘product1.jpg’, ‘product2.jpg’, ‘product3.jpg’

From a text blob that looks like this:

product1.jpg
product2.jpg
product3.jpg

This text chunk, in this case, comes from a copy-and-paste from a “dir *.jpg” in a Windows XP command window.

There were actually only 6 image file names that I wanted to put into an array in PHP, but I had a feeling that I would be doing this type of task again, so I spent the time to build a tool for it.

So if you need to do something similar, please try the latest addition to Perceptus’ Web Tools site, the List to single quoted CSV Text Wizard (admittedly, we don’t save our best names for that site).  All you need to do is paste in a bunch of words, one per line, and you’ll get back the one line CSV.

I think this will be handy for creating source code for arrays in many languages, and also creating the bulk of the syntax for an IN () SQL statement.

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

A free schtasks.exe equivalent for XP Home edition

Monday, December 15th, 2008

It’s funny how one stumbles upon the finer differences between XP Home and XP Professional once in a while. Every good geek knows the biggest limits to XP Home such as no ability to join a corporate network, no Remote Desktop, and no encrypted file system (EFS).  But who knew about a tiny utility that will run a Windows Scheduled Task from the command line? That would be “schtasks.exe”, and it’s not included in XP Home.

The background: I needed a Limited User in Windows to be able to do something requiring Administrative permissions.  There are a few ways to do this, but in this situation, running a scheduled task was the obvious best choice because the task was already there as an overnight maintenance job.

A quick Google search for “run scheduled task from command line” will lead you to the aforementioned schtasks tool.  Well, I could copy the file from an XP Pro workstation, but that would violate Microsoft’s copywrite.

Fortunately, more searching will turn up a reference to an old MS tool “jt.exe” from it’s Windows 2000 Resource Kit.  You can get individual tools from the W2K ResKit here: ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/reskit/win2000/. The license to JT and is much more permissive.  You’re free to use it, but at your own risk.

The “JT” syntax is not straight forward to me.  But these the two examples will probably help:

This lists all tasks: jt.exe /se

This will run (“activate”?) a task (you do not need to include the .job in the TaskName): jt.exe /sac TaskName /rj

On the XP Home Edition computer I was setting this on, the Limited User could run all the scheduled tasks, even when it couldn’t “see” the task in the list. YMMV.

One could  make this end-user friendly by wrapping a batch file around it and put an icon with a link to your script on the Desktop.

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Posted in computers, programming, support, tools, windows | No Comments »

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