My TweekGeek Page

Since I'm a tech person, a tech page is in order. While I gather the best links and tips, some opinion.

Have you wondered about the world of scripting and which scripting language to concentrate on? Visual Basic has been a pretty good bet for a while since:

• it is Bill's choice
• it has a long legacy since BASIC was free on the original PCs and was taught in most beginning programming courses
• it's used for office suite integration (VBA) in MS products
• it's used as the basis of other vendor's high-level integration languages, (ie LotusScript, CognosScript, etc...)
• it's the basis for VBscript used in the infamous Internet Explorer
• Bill has now arranged for NT to have shell scipts. Wohoo! getting closer to UNIX. Guess what the scripting language is?

However, JavaScript has really caught fire lately; why?

• It has the word "Java" in its name
• It's a pretty good scripting language
• Most importantly; it works in both browsers

I think the last item is pretty much the key point. To put a finer point on it, let me add one little discovery I've made.

I'm now running IE4 on my PC. Essentially, what this does is add some enhancements to your Win95 desktop and it revamps explorer - it's really a dot release to windows 95. The desktop stuff can be annoying - it wants to open up "channels" to web sites in your desktop that stay live. Sort of a way of competing with "push" technology by having your win desktop stay in touch with various sites. Most people turn that off ASAP. It does add the ability to incorporate some handy little single-click launch buttons to the toolbar.

One of the other things it did was add some new template files which explorer uses to display folders. These are .HTT files - hypertext templates.

Guess which scripting language is used in the HTML?

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