Jonathan Franzone 
I have been rejected, cast off, shunned, and exiled… out of the land of YouTube. YouTube has terminated my account and banned me from ever making another account! What is my crime? Your guess is as good as mine. I have absolutely no idea.
UPDATE: On March 30, 2020 my YouTube account was restored. Read to the end!
I work within a corporate environment that manages its own Microsoft Exchange Server. I am also on a development team and receive thousands of automated email messages per day from various services that run across multiple servers. I started out creating rules for these emails in MS Outlook that sorted them into folders based on the service that generated them. I would go in once a day and clean out the folders. This is a bit tedious. Additionally, I want to keep emails that are within the last day in case something goes wrong with that service and I need to reference an email that was generated. Even more tedious.
Next I thought to myself, “Why don’t I use the built-in Outlook Archive method?” That would be a great option, but my company manages our archive policies, meaning I cannot modify them.
Finally, having all other avenues closed to me, I decided to write my own utility to perform this task. I am, after all, a Software Engineer.
This is a little Powershell script that I came up with to convert a folder full of Word documents into PDF files. It takes a single command-line parameter, which is the directory containing the files that you wish to convert. It puts the PDF files in the same directory alongside the originals.
As a user of the NetBeans IDE, I have always had this one complaint. NetBeans has what they call Project Groups. These are used to group projects that should be worked on at the same time, similar to a Solution in Visual Studio. You can define multiple Project Groups and switch between them. Great, right? What’s the problem?
The problem lies in the fact that NetBeans will always open the last Project Group that you had open when it starts up. Some of the projects that I work on are quite large, with Maven repositories that must be scanned and re-indexed upon startup. That’s all fine and good if that is the project I am working on, but if it isn’t then it becomes a big headache. Then I must cancel the operations and try to convince my machine that I really don’t want to go through all of that scanning and indexing… I just want to open up a much smaller project or even create a new one.
My solution: Create a Startup Project Group and have NetBeans always open that when starting. Here’s how to do it.
Have you ever needed to get an average of a group of numbers in an Excel spreadsheet? And have you ever needed to do so with a range that is variable? In other words, “I need to get an average of Column B, but I don’t know upfront how many rows are going to be in Column B.”
Well, it turns out to be fairly simple in Excel. I’m partly sharing this with the world to be a help to others, but also because I forget things… and I needed a place to keep it!
Ever have one of those days when you feel like you’re in a Dilbert comic? I love it when somebody arranges a meeting for, say, 9:30 AM. It’s a phone conference because I work from home most of the time. 9:30 comes and goes. No call. I reach out back to the co-worker who arranged …
Oh… you didn’t think that title meant I was providing my entire ebook library to the public, did you? Sorry. Thar be no pirates here, maties. This is more of a tutorial on how I make my ebook library available to me. Onward, hoe!
I love using Calibre to maintain my ebook collection. If you have not heard of it and would like more control over your ebooks, then you should take a look. Calibre also has a built in server that you can access via a web browser. This allows you to browse your ebook collection and download them if you like. This is a really neat feature, except that the software has to be running in order to access it.
What I really want is to be able to publish this library and be able to access it from anywhere without any dependence on my computer and the Calibre software running.
This is my solution.
It has been a while since I’ve changed the layout of this blog. I’ve got some plans for more upcoming posts on software engineering, but I wanted to freshen up the feel first. One of my goals was to use the Bootstrap framework to create a responsive layout. In other words, it looks good (or …
Awesome new song. Of course, when I say awesome, you’re probably going to be thinking… “huh?”
Continuing on my last post (), I wanted to show a snippet of Python code that will list a set of IMAP folders and count the number of messages in them. You give it a starting folder and it lists that folder plus all/any sub-folders and their message counts. At the very end it prints …