Cut out unwanted pieces of a lastname with vbscript

lastname = "DE' CA-R LO III"

'separate lastname by spaces into an array
a = split(lastname," ")
new_lastname = a(0)

for i = 0 to ubound(a) -1 ' add each chunk of the last name to the final string
'the last piece of the last name is not added if it is less than 4 characters (such as III, II, I, etc)
    if i + 1 = ubound(a) and len(a(i+1)) > 3 then
        new_lastname = new_lastname + a(i+1)
    elseif i + 1< ubound(a) then
        new_lastname = new_lastname + a(i+1)
    end if
next

new_lastname = Replace(new_lastname,"-","") 'take out hyphens
new_lastname = Replace(new_lastname,"'","") 'take out punctuations

wscript.echo new_lastname

Linux mail basics

# Start interactive mail
mail

# Print current message
p

# Delete current message
d

#Exit mail program
q

Leopard user template

sudo mv /System/Library/User\ Template/English.lproj /System/Library/User\ Template/English.lproj.old

This will give you copy of the original called "English.lproj.old" in the same folder. Then you may copy your new template file by executing:

sudo cp -R /Users/new-user-short-name /System/Library/User\ Template/English.lproj

If you prefer to remove (delete) the original try the command without the /* at the end: sudo rm -r /System/Library/User\ Template/English.lproj

Get mac address from xml and generate computer names for each mac

Parsing xml is pretty easy using grep. The benefit of sed/grep is that they are right there -- if you have cygwin, Linux or Mac.

Here is an example format:

<macs>

<string>00-00-00-00-00-01</string>
<string>00-00-00-00-00-02</string>
</macs>

This will parse the xml file formatted like above and generate a computer name for each mac address. A good application of sed/grep/bash. If you are installing a lot of new computers and need to associate new names with mac addresses, this is a good start.

grep All\ Computers.plist | sed -e 's/<\/*string>//g' | while read line; do ((i++)); echo "pc-$i $line"; done > macs.txt

Set the default printer from the registry

rem Using reg.exe you can set the default printer

@echo off

rem Here we are doing a split of the hostname on the hypen, so room1-01, becomes room1

for /F "tokens=1 delims=-" %%a in ('hostname') do set name=%%a


if %name% == room1 ( reg add "hkcu\software\microsoft\windows nt\currentversion\windows" /t REG_SZ /d "ROOM1PRINTER,winspool,NE04:" /v "Device" /f
)

Installing a folder tree of fonts on XP

rem XP doesn't let you select a folder to install fonts from; it will not recurse to find fonts within a folder unless they are all under one folder

rem This command will go through all folders in the current directory and copy the files to all_fonts

rem The /y for copy will force an overwrite if a duplicate file shows up

for /F "tokens=1 delims=," %a in ('dir /s /b') do copy /y "%a" all_fonts

mysql -- attaching to a host

#This is a way checking your connection to a mysql db server

mysql --user=username -h hostname -p