Universe's Blog

A couple of years ago, I was processing some IRC log files created by an Eggdrop I had running. However, I ran into some problems related to these log files having non-ASCII characters used. I need a quick way of stripping these characters out. The following is a VB6 program (source and binary available) that can process single text files and remove all non-ASCII characters from them. (Appending “.clean.txt” to the filename.)

This was only written for one-time use, so excuse the lack of comments, and the lack of general error checking etc. Someone even slightly skilled at Visual Basic 6 will be able to change the code to batch process files and embed some basic error handling. As with all programs, use this at your own risk.

Download

I found an interesting plugin for this wordpress blog when I was going through my RSS feeds a couple of weeks ago. Simple Facebook Connect allows blog commenters to post using their Facebook accounts for authentication. Not only that, it leaves a link back to their profile as well as showing their avatar (depending on privacy settings). I’ve installed the plugin on this blog, which you can try out by going to a post, and selecting “Connect with Facebook” on the sidebar.

I did note, however, that the FB avatar wasn’t being displayed correctly (alignment was broken) with the current theme, Fluid Blue. Needed to edit “simple-facebook-connect/sfc-comments.php” and replace the two relevant blocks that generates the picture displaying HTML with:

$avatar = "";

When I’m ingame with games such as Left 4 Dead 2, I often want to save chat from game lobbies, or during the game itself. However, it’s often incredibly difficult, requiring alt-tabbing out of the game, and this isn’t really feasible when in the middle of a round.

I’ve written this program, which monitors the contents of the Windows Clipboard, and saves any new content automatically. The idea being, you start the application before you launch a game, and let it run in the background. When ingame, you simply copy chat into your clipboard. The program will then automatically log it, and every minute, write to a log file on the hard drive. That way, there is no need to alt-tab or otherwise leave the game.

When finished, simply close the program, and access/read the log file. I’ve been testing this for the last day or so, and it seems to work fine without any crashes. I should note that it uses an MD5 implementation available here. I’m keeping the program closed-source for now, but if people want the code to verify there isn’t anything malicious going on, I may release it later.

Download:

Binary
Source