Jeremy Simmons: The Blog

Here's the dealio.

We¹ have a bad habit of placating the customer instead of educating them. 9 times out of 10, our customers don't know what they need. If they think they know what they want, they can't express it. Even when we've already built something, they can't express how they want to reuse it.

ed‧u‧cate –verb (used with object) ( http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/educate)
1. to develop the faculties and powers of (a person) by teaching, instruction, or schooling.

pla‧cate –verb (used with object) ( http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/placate) to appease or pacify, esp. by concessions or conciliatory gestures.

It's no suprise why there's a great deal of frustration from both parties. What would happen if we took our jobs as an opportunity to educate people, as to what was going on, by giving them rich tools with which to express what we were doing. If we could put tools in their hands to describe in their language, what we're doing, we could re-use the tools we build much quicker. Simply amazing.

I can't really take credit for this. I found it somewhere on the net, and wanted to make sure I kept it around.

Sub HoverRepair()

Dim applet As IHTMLElement
Dim param As IHTMLElement
Dim paramStr As String
Dim Text As String
Dim URL As String
Dim target As String

For Each applet In ActiveDocument.all.tags("applet")
If applet.getAttribute("code") = "fphover.class" Then

Text = ""
URL = ""
target = ""
paramStr = ""
For Each param In applet.Children
If param.tagName = "param" Then
'paramStr = paramStr & param.outerHTML

If param.getAttribute("name") = "target" Then
target = param.getAttribute("value")
End If
If param.getAttribute("name") = "url" Then
URL = param.getAttribute("value")
End If
If param.getAttribute("name") = "text" Then
Text = param.getAttribute("value")
End If

End If
Next

paramStr = paramStr & "<a href=""" & URL & """"
If target <> "" Then
paramStr = paramStr & " target=""" & target & """"
End If
paramStr = paramStr & ">" & Text & "</a>"

applet.outerHTML = paramStr


End If

Next

End Sub

Batch script to run FiltDump against a list of files

SET FiltDump="C:\Programs\Microsoft Platform SDK for Windows Server 2003 R2\Bin\FiltDump.Exe"
net use z: /delete /y
net use z: \\server\share
for /R z:\subfolder1\subfolderN\ %%i in (*.*) do @%FiltDump% %%i