Tom Dalton :: Doer of Good

For checking out which ports are open on a given system, Nmap is a slick, simple little tool. It runs from the command line, so you have to learn the parameters to put in, but the basic run is just:

nmap 38.119.178.86

or whatever target IP address you're looking at.

http://www.insecure.org/nmap/

The windows executable installer includes winpcap which is the magic driver piece that lets you do all sorts of network fun.

UPDATED BELOW!

So, the grand question of the day: how can I track how many people actually view our entire Flash presentations?

We've just uploaded a handful of new movies. They're built in Flash, based on some Powerpoint presentations we wrote. We used a tool called Pointecast to convert them -- I haven't used the tool myself, but it looks pretty good.

And of course, we want to know if they're doing any good. The final page of each movie has links to three differents "actions" -- our email form, and two other pages. We can track each of those actions, but we want to know how many people get to the end of the presentation at all.

In a more general sense, integrating tracking with Flash is often an important issue.

I can think of three different ways to do this:

1. Automatically redirect the presentation to a separate HTML page for the "call to action" final slide, and put Omniture code on that final page (easiest, but I don't know if Pointecast will let us do it, but maybe we could find another way to make it work even if there's no built-in feature for it)

2. Integrate external Javascript calls into the Flash itself (elegant, if it works -- and then we could track movement through the whole movie -- but I think it's unlikely we'll get this to work with Pointecast)

3. Break the whole thing into separate HTML pages (this will definitely work, but it's clunky and I'd only do it as a last, last resort)

So we're going to try for #1. You'll probably be able to tell what worked by checking out the movies at 10xmarketing.com.

UPDATE

Here's the strategy we ended up implementing:

1. Each flash movie went on its own html page, which was coded with a Campaign variable that corresponded to the movie.

2. Each movie ended with an automatic redirect to the "thanks and take action" page, which was coded with a commerce event.

This allows us to use all the commerce reports, with fallout and campaign effectiveness and so forth. The Best Solution Ever.

We don't get all the internal detail that actionscript on every page might have given us, but there was no way to implement that through the flash generator we were using, and we really didn't need all that extra info. (Though I still hope to learn enough actionscript soon that I could do that if I ever have an especial need to in the future.)

This solution should be pretty generalizable to anyone else looking to do the same thing. Let me know if it works for you!

Here's the sitch:

We had a long, long list of keywords related to music. We had another long list of artists, and we needed to identify all the keywords that contained one of the artists. Manually, something like 10 hours of work.

Excel-magically? Half an hour of research.

The keywords go in column A. The list of artists goes in column X. The following function is copied down column B:

=IF(OR(ISNUMBER(FIND(X$1:X$500, A1))),"TRUE","FALSE")

This will throw a "VALUE" error immediately unless you enter it the Right Way, which means to hit SHIFT + CTRL + ENTER when you're done. That puts it in curly brackets and makes it an "array function."

The FIND function allows for keywords to be scrambled and include extra words.

This 'business process' is under a provisional patent by Tom Dalton. You can use it if you pay me $10,000 per keyword.

It's the easiest thing in the world to sort a column alphabetically. But what if you have a column with a bunch of words in each row, and you want to sort the words within each cell?

For instance:

A1 - Tom ate lunch
A2 - Alex brought animal cookies
A3 - Games were played

I want to sort each sentence. A1 should be "ate lunch Tom," see.

1. I approached it by splitting the cells into columns, first. (Data > Text to Colums > Space delimited)
2. Then I ran the following macro:

===============================
Sub AlphaRowSort()
'
' AlphaRowSort Macro
' By Tom Dalton
'
'
Do Until ActiveCell.Value = ""
ActiveCell.Range("A1:Z1").Select
Selection.Sort Key1:=ActiveCell, Order1:=xlAscending, Header:=xlGuess, _
OrderCustom:=1, MatchCase:=False, Orientation:=xlLeftToRight, _
DataOption1:=xlSortNormal
ActiveCell.Offset(1, 0).Select
Loop
End Sub
=====================

3. Then I copied all the cells into notepad to clean it, copied that into Word, replaced all the tabs with spaces, and finally dumped it back into Excel.

If I were any good at writing macros, of course, I'd have put all the splitting and recombining into the macro as well. But I'm not -- I'm not a programmer! I just get things done. And this got done in time. So I'm a happy boy.

My sister and her husband stopped by our house in the middle of a move from Alaska back to the mainland. They had taken a lot of fun pictures of their trip thus far, and then the camera died. (Kids + camera = likely cause.) A new camera was easily enough acquired but my sister was sad that their pictures were lost. They'd formatted the compact flash memory card three times while attempting to get the old camera to work again.

I figured not much could be done at that point, but it couldn't hurt to try. Whipped out the old CF card reader and plugged in the card -- Windows told me it needed to be formatted. A quick Google turned up a handful of free flash memory data retrieval programs. 'Zero Assumption Digital Memory Recovery' cranked for a while and recovered nothing.

But then, on a whim, I installed another program. (Call me stubborn.)

PC Inspector Smart Recovery ran quickly and recovered all 181 pictures from the card. I love it. And it's freeware! So it gets the Tom Dalton Seal of Approval.

Yay! I loathe Acrobat Resource-Stealing-Reader.

http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php

This is a standalone, no-registry-editing, fast-loading alternative to the bloated standard. Download it and set it as your default.

Now! Do it!

Clipdiary. You won't use it really often, maybe, but it will save your bacon when you need it to.

You hit Ctrl+C and copy something important. Get sidetracked, and copy something else. Ooooh... Lost that first thing? Gone forever? Hours of work?

Okay, you're a monkey for not pasting it immediately. But that happens sometimes, to all of us.

If you have installed Clipdiary, a FREE tool that stores your clip history, no problem! It just sits in your tooltray, on the bottom right of your screen.

You can delete individual entries from the database, set a database size limit, purge the whole thing, toggle it on and off... It's perfect. An absolutely great tool that everyone should have.

It's already installed on my machine. So I really hope it's not actually a mind-control tool that will turn me into a zombie.