Glossary of Terms

•July 22, 2008 • No Comments

These days, the software world is flush with acronyms, names and other terminology.  This is my “cheat sheet” of terms.  Check back often - it lives!

My sed one-liners

•July 2, 2008 • No Comments

Being the hardcore geek that I am, I inevitably find a need to use the GNU stream editor (aka “sed”) for some complex text conversion/filtering from the command lines.

Below is a list of my sed one-liners by category.  I normally use GNU sed from the GnuWin32 project under Windows, but most of these one-liners can be adapted to other seds.

General Text Filtering

  • Remove all newlines from an input file and emit as one giant long text string.
sed -n ":top;$!{N;s/\n//g;t top};$p" input.txt > output.txt

More to come…

Adding entries to Internet Explorer’s user-agent string

•December 19, 2007 • No Comments

If you regularly develop extensions to IE (like I do), at some point you’ll need (or want) to extend the user-agent header string that IE sends up to web servers.  Fortunately, all you have to do is put a few entries in the registry.

Let’s say you want to add the token “MyIEExtension 1.0.0.0″ to IE’s user-agent string for the current user. Just enter it as the name of a string value (without the quotes, of course) under the registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\

    SOFTWARE\

        Microsoft\

            Windows\

                CurrentVersion\

                    Internet Settings\

                        User Agent\

                            Post Platform

If you want the token to be added to all users, use the same path except put it under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.

Want to know more? Go to “Understanding User-Agent Strings” at MSDN.

Welcome to my blog!

•December 19, 2007 • No Comments

Well, hello and welcome to my humble blog.  I’m Dylan Greiner and I’m a professional software engineer/developer/architect.  Without going into too much excruciating detail, I have been developing commercial and consumer software for 20-odd years now.  Most of my work has been done under Windows, starting all the way back in 2.0!  These days, I also do website development and back-end systems development.  My weapons of choice are C++, C#, Java, Javascript, HTML, XML…with the odd diversion into Lisp, Prolog and other lingua inusitatus.

What’s this blog about?  This is where I’ll publish interesting tidbits, learnings, rants, musings and other chatter about software programming and development things I encounter.

So, let’s get to it…