Need to get a file list out of a zip file? Winzip is a fine product, but don’t muck about with their recommended method, setting up a text file printer driver to print a list to, then having to chop out the paper-style headings and linefeeds.
No… Instead go to Info-Zip and grab their command-line zip package.
unzip -l filespec.zip [Optional filespec if you don't want them all] > filelist.txt
Easy.
I swear I’d never heard this until tonight.
“There are only 10 sorts of people in the world. Those who get binary and those who don’t.”
Who’s winning this time round? Is Firefox having any impact?
Here’s the stats for my most heavily trafficked site, top 15 agents:
| Hits | Percent | User Agent |
|---|---|---|
| 30815 | 11.88% | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98) |
| 23816 | 9.18% | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) |
| 14375 | 5.54% | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1 |
| 10701 | 4.12% | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1) |
| 8880 | 3.42% | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET |
| 8330 | 3.21% | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98) |
| 8092 | 3.12% | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0) |
| 6784 | 2.61% | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/ |
| 5190 | 2.00% | Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/2004 |
| 5144 | 1.98% | Program Shareware 1.0.0 |
| 4832 | 1.86% | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; .NET CLR 1 |
| 3825 | 1.47% | Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko |
| 3314 | 1.28% | Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko |
| 2982 | 1.15% | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; FunWebProd |
| 2362 | 0.91% | Atomz/1.0 |
Interesting that after all these years, IE5.5 is still the top hitting browser.
Gecko is Firefox and Mozilla and their derivatives. Probably a few copies of Netscape 7 floating around as well.
Atomz and Yahoo are spiders, obviously, though I’m not sure why Yahoo decided it would be good to tell us their spider is Mozilla compatible, ‘cos I bet it isn’t. Google comes through every so often, but doesn’t appear in the top 15 provided by my web site’s default report.
I have no idea what “Program Shareware 1.0.0” is. Any ideas, anybody?
No sign at all of Mac users, or indeed any OS other than Windows. Maybe if the list showed the top 50…
Getting these into some basic groups, we have:
| Hits | Percent | User Agent |
|---|---|---|
| 82008 | 31.60% | MSIE 6 |
| 30815 | 11.87% | MSIE 5.5 |
| 12329 | 4.75% | Gecko |
I could show you the two party preferred figures, but I scarcely need to: IE still rules the roost, though I’d bet Gecko/Firefox is slowly gaining momentum.
(Obviously I’m going to have to look beyond the top 15, because there must be an awful lot of minority combinations of OS/browser out there.)
It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out over the next few months.
A while ago I downloaded a cross platform DB manager, DB Tools Manager Professional. It works great for local databases but was painfully slow accessing remote MySQL installs. Daniel came across MySQL Administrator, a smooth Windows GUI for MySQL from the very same people that release MySQL. It seems to be as fast with remote access as it is with local and so far I’m impressed.
I’ve been discovering just how great PNG is for screendumps. It’s not lossy, yet it compresses particularly well for screendumps off Windows… even when there’s those gradient title bars that have become fashionable over the last couple of years.
For instance, the Path Not Found dump out of Windows explorer the other day:
Okay, so the 256 colour GIF is only marginally bigger, but to produce it you have to fiddle the colours, and of course it uses the proprietary LZW algorithm for which Unisys once would have wanted all our souls. PNG is just a save, no having to even think about it. Coolness.
It’s one thing to centralise your web site to a global location for efficiency, but how about a little customisation to allow for different countries. For instance, how many global web sites get you to search a location database, and come up with state names which are two characters, because the US programmers didn’t factor in that other countries would use anything else, and the local operations are too lazy to insist on it being fixed?
This was from Avis, looking for Australian offices. Hertz did the same. Budget didn’t. I’m almost amazed the postcodes didn’t have an extra leading zero.
At least this one has managed to avoid displaying the phone numbers as (xxx) xxx xxxx when it should be (xx) xxxx xxxx (like my old answering machine used to). Chucking the extra 0 after the 61 wasn’t particularly helpful though, as use one or the other depending on where you are… never both. Not unusual though.
Reminds me of an email exchange I had with CitySearch when they first launched in Australia, asking them why they were showing event dates in mm/dd/yyyy format. Sure enough, it was because they’d got the software from the US, and hadn’t figured out how to change it yet. Pretty shoddy.
I don’t run Windows XP (my PCs are a couple of years old and happy on Win2K… I don’t feel compelled to lumber them with the beautiful XP), but a lot of people I know do. I want to give one of them a copy of SP2 to install, to save a long boring troublesome download via dialup.
Problem? The SP2 download page lets you install it via Automatic Updates or Windows Update. Or you can order a CD. You can order it in any country, not just North America (good) but it takes four to six weeks to arrive (bad). If the average unpatched computer can be compromised in 20 minutes, in four weeks it could be compromised 2,016 times. (Okay okay it’s on dialup, so it wouldn’t be connected all that time.) Gimboids. Even the Download.com page for it pointed me back to Microsoft.
Happily, I did find it on an APC Magazine CD. I also eventually found the Butch Microsoft Technet Geeky Professional Developers’ download page.
GMail is still in beta, so little changes creep in now and then. Haven’t seen this one before: a warning on what is actually an innocent message.
As it happens, the Learn More link wasn’t very helpful, just going to some stuff describing how to recognise a scam.
Just when I thought I could get away they drag me back in again.
I recently posted about Copernic Desktop Search, well a day later and Google have released ‘Puffin’ – Google Desktop Search. It too seems IE-centric in that it only index IE history, surely Google should realise a good deal of early adopters will be using Firefox?
Even though I’ve set up Copernic to search my OneNote files I guess I’ll download Google’s offering and see how it stacks up.
UPDATE
I read somewhere today that Puffin was the code name for Google Search Bar, not Google Desktop. No matter what it’s called I still can’t use it.
It’s a few months old, but this article is a great read — telling the story of (some of) the history of Microsoft Money.
During the heady dot-com days, when all reason was tossed to the wind, Money’s success was measured against the same metrics that other MSN properties (read: “websites”) used.
…
Metrics like minutes viewed per month. Like ad revenue. Like click-through. Stickiness. I am not making this up. I sat through meetings where we were asked to research ways in which to increase the amount of time that users spent in Money. Increase the amount of time!
Yesterday was the 13th of the month, and you know what that means… time for Microsoft’s monthly patch roundup.
Writing my previous post on Copernic Desktop Search made me realise that my icon tray is getting a little crowded. Fully extended it takes up almost half of my task bar on a 1280 x 1024 monitor.
