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Have you ever wanted more than one window open for PowerPoint or Excel? Say you want to be able to compare 2 charts or presentations side-by-side. I have a system with 2 monitors and it would be very helpful to be able to have 2 windows.
Most of the online help says to open the documents. You then see them listed on the task bar, but toggling between the documents just places them in the same window.
The first solution you will find is to just go to the View tab and select “Cascade”, for office 2007+. This action will place the documents where you can see them both, but they are in the same window. This still makes it hard to see both items at the same time. You have to move things around, or shrink them down to sit side-by-side or up-and-down. Not really what you want, but it works.
I did figure out a way to have 2 separate windows open at the same time.
1) Open the first document normally. It would be easier if this is the document that you are editing or working with the most.
2) Start a Command prompt by typing “cmd” in the Start/run menu or search menu.
3) Figure out what time it is now by typing “time” at the command prompt.
C:\>time
The current time is: 9:34:42.83
Enter the new time: <just press enter>
4) Start a new command window in a minute or so from the time shown, I went for 9:36.
C:\> at 9:36 /interactive cmd.exe
5) Wait the minute or so for the new cmd window to come up and then manually start Excel or PowerPoint. Remember to use the new cmd window, not the old. Also, use quotes around the full path to the command.
C:\WINDOWS\system32> “c:\program files\microsoft office\office12\POWERPNT.EXE”
You can now navigate to the other document that you need and open it in the newly launched application. Now stare and compare to your hearts content.
Something that I have needed for a while while working with Windows. Most of the systems I have include cygwin so until now I had not really needed a windows grep equivalent.
The built in windows command FindStr mirrors the capabilities of the Unix command Grep.
Findstr /?
FINDSTR [/B] [/E] [/L] [/R] [/S] [/I] [/X] [/V] [/N] [/M] [/O] [/P] [/F:file]
[/C:string] [/G:file] [/D:dir list] [/A:color attributes] [/OFF[LINE]]
strings [[drive:][path]filename[ ...]]
/B Matches pattern if at the beginning of a line.
/E Matches pattern if at the end of a line.
/L Uses search strings literally.
/R Uses search strings as regular expressions.
/S Searches for matching files in the current directory and all
subdirectories.
/I Specifies that the search is not to be case-sensitive.
/X Prints lines that match exactly.
/V Prints only lines that do not contain a match.
/N Prints the line number before each line that matches.
/M Prints only the filename if a file contains a match. Same as “grep -l”
/O Prints character offset before each matching line.
/P Skip files with non-printable characters.
/OFF[LINE] Do not skip files with offline attribute set.
/A:attr Specifies color attribute with two hex digits. See “color /?”
/F:file Reads file list from the specified file(/ stands for console).
/C:string Uses specified string as a literal search string.
/G:file Gets search strings from the specified file(/ stands for console).
/D:dir Search a semicolon delimited list of directories
strings Text to be searched for.
[drive:][path]filename Specifies a file or files to search.
Example of using Findstr to search for multiple strings in succession within a log file.
findstr “ERROR Caused Fail” c:logslog.log
This command will search for the String ERROR then Caused, and Fail while parsing down a file. So if the file looked like this:
Line1: Error Script Failed
Line2: test1
Line4: Caused by process down
Line5: test2
Line6: Error2
The FindStr output would look like this:
Error Script Failed
Caused by Process down
Error2
This was just a test. Ha ha made you look
Well, the challenge is over.
The game was fun and rather challenging during a very volatile time in the market. Many stocks saw a 52 week low and the market fell below 1999 levels.
We saw the almost collapse of the Euro and the beginnings of a double dip recession. It was a challenging time to do anything with the markets.
I was thinking that I just didn’t do very well this time. I was super busy at work with a HUGE project underway so I couldn’t do much from work and had to plan my attacks at night when the markets were down.
So I looked and my main board of 3, which would be what I would do if I really had the money to spend ended up in the best shape. Today my best game was titled “Milkman Mainly” was up 17.76% with 1,177,591.47 in the account at the end. I was up 24K in currency trading an 90K in bonus funds which really only puts me at 63K in stock market trades. I was bowing my head in shame as this just didn’t seem all that great.
Then I went over to see the leaderboards to see how badly I must have gotten trounced this game.
Holly Molly… WTF!!!
I was ranked in the top 99.25% of all contestants. That’s my highest ranking ever.
I was 5057th out of some 4 million boards.
I actually did do very very well, and competing against people that do this sort of thing for a living and have all day to research stuff or possibly inside trade all they want because it’s a game.
I’m feeling much better about myself and my stock market skills.
I just wanted to share with the people I know that would understand the accomplishment.
Mike
Boy I really miss Unix sometimes. Things that are so super easy in Unix/Linux are often a total pain in the butt in the Windows world.
I needed a script to gracefully shutdown and startup an application when the server was rebooted. Again, not an issue so much with linux as you almost never HAVE to reboot. Windows you reboot like you catch a cold. “oh you are not feeling well? Reboot twice and call me in the morning.” Plus windows systems like to reboot every time there is any sort of patching going on. So I needed to be able to have a custom script run to stop and start an application.
A startup script is a quick and easy way of getting a process running when the machine boots. The computer startup process will be affected by the time it takes to run the program, though, so you might want to ensure you call it with the START command from a batch file, or specifying not to wait for the executable to complete from whatever script language you use. (the key point there is: run the script asynchronously unless it’s critical, or doesn’t need to be run asynchronously cos it will always take no time at all. Long boots = unhappy users).
In Windows XP/2003 you will need to use the group policy editor which can be found under Start / Run / GPEDIT.MSC. You will then need to navigate to Computer Settings -> Windows Settings -> Scripts (Startup/Shutdown) or something similar to be able to set a startup script. You can see the scripts outlined in the scripts.ini file or add your own scripts to the Startup/Shutdown directories found under: C:\WINDOWS\System32\GroupPolicy\Machine\Scripts\
Using a Win32 Service is an alternative option – you can use the SRVANY utility from the Resource Kit to “service-ify” pretty much any executable. VS .Net and later also let you build a managed service directly.
And Task Scheduler gets much more capable as of Vista/2008, able to run scripts at startup, on idle, when certain other conditions are met; it’s pretty cool. Task scheduler has the possible advantage of being able to specify the user account under which the task runs, if that’s important to you.
I hope this little tid-but of information can be helpful to those that need this sort of thing.
For the 1st day, I have decided to go with the following for the currency trading.
Week one, split GBP and BRL at 40K each, and JPY and EUR at 20K each.
I need to watch the currency markets and decided when to get out. I think the British Pound is very weak against the dollar now and should be back to parity very soon. The Brazilian Real looks like it’s climbing too. The Euro and Japan Yen are on a rise, but should be watched closely. I wanted to get the upticks, but minimize the down risks.
Well, that idea went out the door. The challenge only lets you trade about a Dozen currencies.
My quick summary of the currencies at the start of the game.
| EUR/USD |
Downward trend |
| USD/JPY |
Even, upswing possible |
| GBP/USD |
Downward trend |
| USD/CHF |
Upward trend, big time |
| EUR/CHF |
Flat at a peak? |
| AUD/USD |
Downward trend |
| USD/CAD |
Low possible bounce up |
| NZD/USD |
At a Low, possible bounce |
| EUR/GBP |
Downward trend |
| EUR/JPY |
All Time Low – Risky move |
| GBP/JPY |
All Time Low – Risky move |
| CHF/JPY |
All Time Low – Risky move |
| GBP/CHF |
On a big upswing near a high |
| EUR/AUD |
Upward trend, big time |
| EUR/CAD |
Downward trend |
| AUD/CAD |
Downward trend |
| AUD/JPY |
At a Low, possible bounce |
| CAD/JPY |
Downward trend |
| NZD/JPY |
Downward trend |
The CNBC Million Dollar Challenge is finally back for another few months.
I had so much fun with this last time it was run. I hope to do even better this year. I thought I could use my Blog space to list out how I do. what stocks I am selecting to purchase and why.
Then in the end we shall see how I did. This will be my 3 time through the challenge and I have done very well in the past. I haven’t quite decided if I like the multiple accounts or not, but it is fun to have a normal, aggressive, and cautious type of accounts that you can play with.
Being that this game is short, there is no way to just be able to buy up a couple of stock on Monday and sit on them until the contest is over and really hope to win anything. Some people may have won a week in the past by having all of their money in one stock that just happened to jump 30% one day,but I think that is rare and if I were to put my own money into the game I would not play it that way.
Wishing myself luck as no one else reads my Blog. diving in to do my home work.
Thought I would throw out some information on creating links in Windows now that this is the second time I had to go and look the information up.
First, there is the “SUBST” command. This command comes with the OS. Of course I am talking XP and Windows 2003. I would assume it’s still available in the latest releases. This command will let you create a Drive Letter out of a directory.
subst M: /d
subst M: C:\music
The first line deletes the reference to the M: drive, just to make things clean.
The 2nd line create an M drive that actually links back to C:\Music on the hard drive. Not sure how handy this can be. It could find a way to be used to say copy a DVD to the harddrive, then create a drive letter so the application can find the DVD info. Sort of spoofing a DVD drive if needed. I haven’t tried it, but that’s about all I can think of what it could be used for at the moment.
The next handy linker item I stumbled upon is a little executable called LinkD.exe . This little gem will allow you to create hardlinks like Unix on your PC. The executible is part of the old 2000 Resource kit, so not sure on how it acts on Vista or above.
I found just the executable here without having to download the whole resource kit.
To free up some space on my C: drive, I copied everything from C:\WINDOWS\Installer to H:\WIN_FILES\Installer. However, Windows expects to find the Installer files on C:. To allow Windows to find the needed files, I used LINKD.EXE to point C:\WINDOWS\Installer to H:\WIN_FILES\Installer. The actual command to do this is:
LINKD.EXE “C:\WINDOWS\Installer” “H:\WIN_FILES\Installer”
That’s it! All my files moved to another physical drive without any problems.
* Note that the order of the command args is different than the Unix ln command.
Well, I sort of made it into week 3, maybe week 4 with P90X. It was very hard to dedicate that much time everyday to working out. I’m sure there are many people that can do it, and some people that can change their schedules to fit in 90 minutes a day of working out. The only person I know personally that finished P90X through the whole 90 days, was unemployed at the time, so he had plenty of time to workout and recover.
So, now I am back at it, but in a slightly different fashion. I want to dedicate 30-40 minutes a day to a workout. That is something that can be squeezed into a lunch break. I am looking at a combo workout of some P90X, like yoga or other program even if it’s in parts. Plus I have a better ab routine which is a full set of 300 moves I want to work in 2-3 times a week. Then on top of it all I have been reading Muscle and Fitness and found a workout I liked that follows the HIIT model with some weight training. In between super sets there is a 5-7 minute intense cardio piece.
I may have to take it a little easy at first on the legs as I injured my Achilles Tendon last weekend skiing, but it’s feeling better now and I think I can start doing some stuff with it. I might start off with rows or bicycle for the cardio at first so as not to injure that tendon any more. I can support weight with no problems, it’s flexing the foot and applying force that hurts. You should have seen me the day after crying in the grocery store because pushing the cart hurt that much.
So here we go with day one.!!!
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