Allah Sulu's Massive Tool
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Allah Sulu's Massive Tool's LiveJournal:
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| Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 | 4:27 pm
[allah_sulu]
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| | Monday, August 18th, 2008 | 4:43 pm
[allah_sulu]
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Minor Bug Fix Last weekend, while number-crunching poll results for this post, I noticed that the column layout of the table was getting a little messed up as I exported it back and forth between the Massive Tool, Microsoft Excel, and Open Office (which I've only just recently switched to at home). Nothing major; it was just sticking a few extra empty cells in where they didn't belong, so I just killed them and forgot about it. I wasn't sure where the problem lay, because I've done table import/exports before without a problem. Well, I found the error today, and it was a single line in my code. (I'm not sure why it never manifested before, unless that's due to the latest Excel or Open Office saving the files slightly differently than before.) I fixed it, and put up the revised version of  Allah Sulu's Massive Tool for download. That is the only thing different between the program that's up there now and the one I just uploaded last week, so no hurry unless you're also planning to capture some poll results and swap 'em back and forth with your spreadsheet of choice. | | Friday, August 15th, 2008 | 7:22 pm
[allah_sulu]
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[Update] Allah Sulu's Massive Tool version 3.4.5 There's a new version of Allah Sulu's Massive Tool available for download. New changes include: - The LJ menu has a new option, "Poll Results…" (described here). Some of the other elements on the LJ menu have been renamed or reordered (for instance, the old "LJ Poll…" option is now called "Create Poll…" to distinguish it from the "Poll Results…" option).
- Also, in another Poll-related update, you can now get a rough approximation of what your poll will look like if you have
<lj-poll> codes in your text and you turn on the "Display LJ Tags" option on the LJ menu. It is, as I said, pretty rough (since a more accurate preview would have required more code and significantly slowed down the preview window¹); but it's better than the Preview option on LJ's posting screen, which doesn't do anything with the <lj-poll> codes at all. (A much more accurate poll preview is available within the "Create Poll…" screen.) - You're probably sick of hearing about the differences between the
<nobr> and <span style="white-space: nowrap;"> codes; so now you can simply select both on the Edit → "Preferences…" → "Document" tab. I figured that was only fair, since the HTML → "User Tags…" code is already using both because of the inherent differences and advantages. - There is a new option on the Window menu (with an associated toolbar button) called "BBCode". This allows you to work in Bulletin Board Code and have the Massive Tool's preview pane properly display the results. (The functionality of these codes vary from forum to forum, so I included just the basic set outlined in the Wikipedia entry.) Also, just as with the Wikipedia Code toolbar button, if you right-click on the BBCode button it will convert the codes in your text entry window from BBCode to HTML.
- As discussed here, I've added a Title Case function to the Massive Tool. One way to access it is with the
TitleCase.rim macro file. - As usual, there are more icons and backgrounds. Also, I've added instructions to the Reference Page.
¹The display in the HTML Preview window is updated every time you press a key or change the text entry window in any other way, so it behooves to not make the update process too complex. In fact, I simplified and sped up some of the other options for modifying the Preview display (see the Window menu) in this version of the Massive Tool.
| | Monday, August 11th, 2008 | 8:15 am
[allah_sulu]
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Poll Results For the next release of the Massive Tool, I'm adding a function that will read all of the results from all of the questions in a LiveJournal poll, and put them into a table. This will allow you to read by columns, to see how everyone answered a particular question, or by rows, to see all of the answers a person gave. The way it works is that you provide the Massive Tool with the poll number – for instance, this poll which I posted yesterday is clearly identified as "Poll #1238300", so you would enter "1238300" when prompted. Depending on your connection speed and the number of questions in your poll, this could take a few minutes; but once the Tool is done, it will display the results on the Table window. From here you can modify/format the results, put the table into the Tool as HTML for posting to LJ, or even save the table to a tab- or comma-delimited file which can be imported into other applications such as Access, Excel, or Open Office. (Note that, so far, the Tool may not be able to get the results if you have them restricted; but if they're viewable by All and in a public post, no problem!) Below the cut is a screencap I just made from yesterday's poll, and what it looks like in HTML: ( Read more... ) EDIT: It seems I'm also unable to read the results of a closed poll using this technique; I just had to re-open a poll, read the answers, and then re-close it. | | Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 | 5:59 pm
[allah_sulu]
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Fontifier Link Fontifier – Create a font out of your handwriting which you can purchase and use, or create a Signature Font containing up to 26 signatures, greetings, phrases, logos, or pictures. | | Friday, July 18th, 2008 | 8:54 am
[allah_sulu]
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Well, In That Case... Two of the text-conversion functions built into the Massive Tool are "uppercase" and "lowercase". (You can access them through the uppercase.rim and lowercase.rim macro files that come with the Tool.) Of course, I couldn't just use the uppercase() and lowercase() string functions built into Delphi; oh no, that would have been too easy. I wrote custom functions which were designed to (a) ignore HTML tags between < > symbols, since some parts of HTML (URLs, in particular) are case-sensitive, and (b) recognize and convert ampersand codes for accented letters. Below is an example of a block of code, both before and after the uppercase.rim macro has been applied. Note that the only text which was affected was the text outside of the < > brackets, and note also that the accented é was also converted to uppercase: Of interest to possibly no one else but me, I'm adding a "title case" function to the next release of the Massive Tool. Title case is what I generally use for the subjects of all of my posts – it means that Every Word Is Capitalized. As with so many other things, I figure "Why I should keep doing this manually, when I can just get the Tool to do it for me?" | | Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 | 4:19 pm
[allah_sulu]
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[Update] Allah Sulu's Massive Tool version 3.4.4 There's a new version of Allah Sulu's Massive Tool available for download. New changes include: - I added a line on the "Properties" window (from the FILE menu) listing the number of lines in the document. This value may change depending upon whether or not you have "Word Wrap" (on the WINDOW menu) enabled.
- There is a new command on the EDIT menu, "Paste Special". Use this if you want to paste Unicode text (such as this) into the Massive Tool. The Unicode characters will be converted into ampersand tags. This command will also strip control characters (such as tabs) out of the pasted text, and correct for line breaks that aren't in the CR-LF format. The "Paste Special" function can also be activated by right-clicking on the Paste button on the Edit toolbar.
- There are two new buttons on the Edit toolbar with arrows on them. If you click on the up arrow, it moves the cursor to the top of the document; and if you right-click on it, it selects all text from the top of the document to the current cursor/selection location (the latter is functionally identical to the "Select to Top" command on the EDIT menu). If you click on the down arrow, it moves the cursor to the end of the document; and if you right-click on it, it selects all text from the current cursor/selection location to the end of the document (the latter is functionally identical to the "Select to End" command on the EDIT menu).
- Updated the "Find…" and "Replace…" commands from the SEARCH menu. I don't know if any of you ever edit megabyte-sized files in the Massive Tool; but I do, and some search-and-replace operations can take forever. Every now and then I manage to tighten them up a bit more.
- I've added new functionality to the "Horizontal Rule" screen on the INSERT menu. In addition to creating <hr> tags, the Massive Tool can create simulated horizontal rules using <table> tags with background images, allowing you to have patterns, animation, and so forth in your dividers.
- The "Images" window (from the HTML menu) has a new control – a sliding bar that lets you set the opacity/transparency of the image (see this post for more information).
- There's a new option on the MACROS menu which provides a "Command Line" at the bottom of the screen.
- I've changed the format of the reference pages generated by the Massive Tool (see this post for more information).
- I corrected some minor issues (I won't call them bugs, because they're not all my fault) with the userpic names (loaded on the "Post to LiveJournal" screen) because they got confused by apostrophes and ampersands (I'll keep an eye out for other characters it might have difficulty with) and with the code for lists (which didn't work properly in someone else's journal because of their style, for some godforsaken reason. I know LiveJournal was the culprit, because as soon as I added
?style=mine to the URL, the problem went away). - As usual, there are more icons and backgrounds (including Q*Bert), and the internal scripting language has undergone a major revamping – many of the old macros won't work anymore, since I've changed many commands to make the whole more logical and consistent; but I've updated the macros that I include with the Massive Tool, and I can help with any others that may or may not exist out there.
| | Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 | 10:31 am
[allah_sulu]
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Firefox 3 Like the sheep that I am, I was part of the herd that downloaded the new version of Firefox yesterday. Then again, it was something I would have done anyway, since I've tested out a couple of the Firefox 3 Beta versions (without installing them over the Firefox 2.xxx that was my primary browser) already, and I prefer Firefox over IE for most applications. Anyway, if any of you also made it through the unprepared and overloaded servers to download Firefox 3 yesterday, here's an easter egg for you. Type the following into the address bar… about:robots Over the years, I've discovered a number of ways that Firefox and IE handle HTML/CSS differently, and not always to Firefox's benefit. I'm going through the tagged entries in this community about browser differences now, and it appears that Firefox has fixed one of them: Firefox 3 appears to be handling nested <marquee>s correctly now. However, it still isn't rendering nested borders properly, nor does it support compact definition lists – but I already have a workaround in the Massive Tool for that issue (simulated compact definition lists using <table> codes). So far, it doesn't look like I need to change anything in the Tool based on changes to Firefox, which is a good thing (since I'm busy enough re-arranging most of the innards of the built-in scripting language). EDIT: OK, for those of you who don't yet have/want Firefox 3, here's what you see: ( Easter Egg Spoiler ) | | Thursday, June 5th, 2008 | 8:15 am
[allah_sulu]
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Background Information The first image is an icon made by  28bytes. Figure 2 is an image I made out of it, for use as a tiled background. If you want to see whether or not an image will make a good background – if the edges, top and bottom, right and left, will line up – I just made a new way to check and find out. Simply use this page, placing the image URL where specified: http://DammitJa.net/lj/bg/index2.html?bg=[insert image URL here] For instance, to see how the Q*Bert image above fits together into a tiled background, click this link: http://DammitJa.net/lj/bg/index2.html?bg=http://DammitJa.net/lj/bg/qbert.gif | | Friday, May 30th, 2008 | 12:23 pm
[allah_sulu]
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Upside-Down Writing flip – it uses a lot of non-standard characters that may not work with all browser/font combinations, but it's fun. got it a while ago from  littlebluedog, but forgot to post it here until now. ˙ǝɹǝɥ ʇı ʇsod oʇ ʇoƃɹoɟ ʇnq 'ƃopǝnlqǝlʇʇıl ɯoɹɟ oƃɐ ǝlıɥʍ ɐ ʇı ʇoƃ ˙unɟ s,ʇı ʇnq 'suoıʇɐuıqɯoɔ ʇuoɟ/ɹǝsʍoɹq llɐ ɥʇıʍ ʞɹoʍ ʇou ʎɐɯ ʇɐɥʇ sɹǝʇɔɐɹɐɥɔ pɹɐpuɐʇs-uou ɟo ʇol ɐ sǝsn ʇı – dılɟ Note that you can't copy and paste those wacky characters into the Massive Tool, and that I had to add the upside-down user tag manually. | | Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 | 8:38 pm
[allah_sulu]
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What's In A Name? I've just updated all of the reference pages to include the latest collections of icons. I've also added another text field to the bottom of the page, after the field where you enter the LiveJournal user or community name – this new field is an optional input for entering the name you want displayed in the user tag, if you want to display something other than the name of the journal/community. For instance, if I entered "gwiii" for the journal name and "Jim" for the name to be displayed, I'd get a user tag like this: Jim This allows you to refer to a person by their name (or by some other nickname) while still linking to their journal. This functionality has always been available in the Massive Tool program, but I've only just now gotten around to adding it to the code for the reference pages. I've also decreased the amount of space between icons on the reference pages, so that you don't have to scroll as much to find the one you're looking for. When the next version of the Massive Tool is released, this is the way that it will generate Reference Pages (unless something else changes between now and then). Finally, the link for the reference pages changed some time ago (although the old URL redirects to the new location). If you have a link or bookmark for the reference pages, make sure that this is the URL that you're using: http://DammitJa.net/lj/asmt/ | | Friday, May 23rd, 2008 | 8:04 am
[allah_sulu]
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Browser Question One of the settings I'm playing with in the Massive Tool (which you'll most likely see in the next release) is image opacity. As you can (probably) see in figure one below, it is possible to set how opaque/transparent an image is, compared to its background. Internet Explorer and Firefox each employ a different command syntax for image opacity, so the Massive Tool adds both forms to the generated HTML code (see figure two). Those of you using browsers other than IE or Firefox, please let me know if you also see partially transparent animated images in the example below. FIGURE ONE – Image Opacity FIGURE TWO – The Code <img src="http://DammitJa.net/graphics/rh-ffbig.gif" style="opacity:0.5; filter:alpha(opacity=50);"> fnord Firefox code (scale of 0 to 1)
fnord Internet Explorer code (scale of 0 to 100)
EDIT: ( Me Being A Sneaky Bastard )
EDIT: According to respondents here and in in my journal, the  Safari browser supports the Firefox version of the opacity commands. So does Netscape (which is Mozilla-based, like Firefox) and Opera. | | Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 | 12:58 pm
[allah_sulu]
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According to McAfee's Site Advisor, Allah Sulu's Massive Tool has a nuisance score of zero."In our tests, this download was free of adware, spyware and other potentially unwanted programs."Huh. In all my life, I don't think I've ever done anything with a "nuisance score" of zero. | | Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 | 1:09 pm
[allah_sulu]
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| | Thursday, May 1st, 2008 | 10:49 am
[allah_sulu]
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[Update] Allah Sulu's Massive Tool version 3.4.3 There's a new version of Allah Sulu's Massive Tool available for download. New changes include: - On the Edit menu, I have changed "Select Beginning" to "Select to Top", changing the command key from CTRL-B to CTRL-T. I did this so that I could define CTRL-B as boldface, CTRL-I as italic, and CTRL-U as underline (I felt that there ought to be control codes for those functions so that they could be quickly typed, rather than requiring you to click on buttons or such.) These three control keys are also available when editing text on the "Lists…" screen (from the HTML menu).
- The "Preferences…" screen on the Edit menu has a new option on the "Program" tab, to make the Massive Tool automatically Maximize itself and Tile (Horizontally or Vertically) the Text and Preview windows upon execution. I added this option because I use the Massive Tool on different computers with different screen resolutions; so anytime I copy the latest version from one computer to another, I have to reset the window sizes for the new computer. Now I can activate this function and get maximized/tiled automatically on all of my computers.
- The "Preferences…" screen on the Edit menu has several new options on the "Document" tab for customizing which HTML tags perform certain duties. For example, you can select
<b>, <strong>, or <span style="font-weight: bold;"> to perform all boldface operations in the Massive Tool; or choose from <i>, <em>, or <span style="font-family: italic;"> for all italic operations. Keep in mind that, as I explained in the last update, all style tags are stripped out by LJ on the user Profile pages (and may also be affected by some S2 styles); and also that all user tags will continue to use both <nobr> and <span style="white-space: nowrap;"> regardless of which one you select for the rest of the model. Another option which was added to this tab is the option to add closing slashes or tags to commands that don't normally have them (nor do they require them, technically speaking). If you check this box, line breaks will use <br /> tags instead of <br>, most <p> tags will have accompanying </p> tags, and so forth. This will not change the functionality in any way at all, but will make your code a little bigger (which may be important in cases like LJ comments when there is a limit to the amount of text you can use for your reply) and a little more anal. - I have corrected the code generated by the "Paragraph…" screen on the Insert menu for text alignment. The Massive Tool will now generate code in the form of
<div align=justify> rather than <div style="text-align: justify;">. Once again, this is to circumvent LJ's removal of style tags on the Profile page. - There's a toggle button on the "Post to LiveJournal…" screen (from the LJ menu) to select the first line of text in the Massive Tool for use as the Subject of the LJ post. I've also improved the "Update Icons/Tags" code using feedback from this thread.
- The "Open Links" option on the Window menu now has a different hotkey, Ctrl-Alt-O.
- There's a new feature on the Help menu called "New Version?" What this does is check to see whether or not the Massive Tool that you're using is the most current released version. It does nothing beyond that – if you're not running the latest version, it's up to you to exit the Tool and download the latest update (the link is right at the top of this post, and in many other places throughout this community).
- Some time back, I added a recovery feature to the Massive Tool, so that the document being worked on could be recovered in the case of a system crash. When you run the Massive Tool, if it detects a previous session, it gives you the option of recovering it. Unfortunately, this screen also occurs when you run the Massive Tool with another instance of the Massive Tool already in memory – So, I added a "Cancel/Exit" button to the recovery prompt, so that you can close the second instance of the Massive Tool if you ran it accidentally while another instance was already running.
- As always, there are more icons and backgrounds in the various files.
| | Monday, April 21st, 2008 | 2:12 pm
[allah_sulu]
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More Usericons I just randomly encountered some Russian people using a set of LJ usericons from this site, which appears to be the work of  angizij.EDIT: My bad; the site is in the Ukraine, not Russia. However, I did just discover that LiveJournal.ru has its own variations on the  user and  community icons. | | Thursday, April 17th, 2008 | 4:54 pm
[allah_sulu]
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Because Nobody Asked For It... | | Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 | 1:27 pm
[allah_sulu]
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Random Question Just something I've wondered from time to time, since I have no idea who many of this community's members are… How did you find out about  as_massive_tool? | | Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 | 9:28 am
[allah_sulu]
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Week Late, Dollar Short Aren't you glad I always have these ideas too late? 
I just had an idea today that I should have added Clippy (the Microsoft Office paper clip assistant thingy) to the Massive Tool for April Fool's Day... | | Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 | 9:55 am
[evilgrins]
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community tag request Wile i know there's already the pulsing ranbow patterned ones, was wondering if something that flashes like this  would be possible? Standard still or pulsing community tag please! Current Mood:  pleased |
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