This program returns a quick tally of the different values for a column. My primary use for this program is to find out the most common date value in a file, to rename that file to that date. It is also very convenient to use this program to get a quick overview over the distribution of lengths, especially for numbers.

Currently, I'm "confident" that I'm picking the right value as the maximum value if the value occurs in at least 60% of the rows of the sample I'm taking. This has shown to be sufficient, but better would be an estimator that determined the size of the sample or expanded the sample as long as there was not enough confidence in the "modus".

Have you ever wanted to:

1. Migrate from Outlook to another mail program like Thunderbird, Evolution, Netscape, Eudora, or even (al)Pine on *nix?
2. Convert an Outlook/Eschange pst file into a standard Berkely unix mbox format?
3. Extract the email headers from Microsoft Outlook?
4. Extract the contents of your spam folder for analysis?
5. Extract all the attachments from you email into a single folder?
6. Understand Win32::OLE and how to use it to automate Windows stuff?
7. Use Win32::OLE to recurse a tree structure?

BUT you have not been able to find the right tool/code/example/snippet?

Well this script does that using Win32::OLE and the Outlook and MAPI interfaces. You may need Outlook Redemption to bypass all the "security" related stuff that M$ did to break MAPI, although it worked fine for me using Outlook 2000 (SR-1 pre the patch from hell) and Windows XP. If it "breaks" with endless "Do you want to do that messages" let me know. Import tested into Windows ports of Thunderbird and Evolution. Optionally non RFC 1521 compliant message rebuild to deal with the, uhm, "features" of various mail programs.

One of my friends teaches math to 7th-8th graders and came up with a little puzzle game to help demonstrate elementary geometry (coordinate systems, transform/translation of shapes). It consists a series of puzzles cut out of cardboard that the students assemble to form a perfect square.

He was showing it to me and mentioned that it was getting unwieldy to keep all the individual puzzles sorted out and in their proper envelopes. A lightbulb went on and I whipped up this script for him.

This is a simple puzzle game. Each puzzle has 2 or more pieces that you can drag and/or rotate to fit together to form a perfect square. Every vertex of each piece falls exactly on a 4 X 4 unit square grid, so each piece is described by its whole number verticies on a 0 .. 4 by 0 .. 4 cartesion grid.

Many of the puzzles are simple, some are tricky, all have at least one solution.

Works under Windows and Linux (and probably others but haven't tested).

Update: Added smoothing suggested by zentara

Update: Doesn't seem to work anymore. E.g., latest version of autorep does not seem to have "-D" option. Instances of 'from_autosys' in code should probably be 'from_server'. I haven't used autosys for a while and am just getting back to it, so I may update this in the near future.

This is posted mainly because I said I would in response to a recent post. AutoSys is job scheduling software (like cron on steroids) from Computer Associates. This started out as just a JIL (AutoSys' Job Information Language) parser (to read files with multiple job definitions), and mutated into also getting job status and dependencies, and validating jil scripts. You'll need to configure the AUTOSERV hash...sorry this is mostly as is so things are not as generic as they could be. There is some overlap between this and what is already on CPAN (CA::AutoSys) but the existing CPAN module didn't have any JIL parsing, which is what I really needed in the beginning. If the output format of autorep or job_depends changes in past/future version of AutoSys, then something here will probably break.

And I would appreciate feedback on whether or not this works on other systems :-)