This page is software I wrote for myself. But if you find it useful, feel free to use it.

Remote control for a DirecTV DVRs

Icon Dance Screen Saver V1.8

Download: IconDance.zip (45K)
or SetupIconDance18.exe (321K)

OK, this one is pretty silly.  It is the Icon Dance from Iconoid, in a screen saver form with some extra goodies added.  It is not a regular screen saver because it doesn't hide your desktop.  It just makes the icons dance.

The small zip file has no install/uninstall program.  Just unzip it to a directory and right click in the icondanc.scr file then select Install.  To uninstall it, just delete the 2 files. Passwords are not supported.  End it with a click or key press.  The SetupIconDance18.exe program is the same thing with a full install/uninstall.

The Icon Dance screen saver does not work on NT 4.0.  You can run it in preview mode, but it will not run as a screen saver.

NB: It has come to my attention that there is a trojan called Win32.IconDance.  This is NOT that trojan.  (Look at the source if you are concerned).  The IconDance screen saver does restore all icons to their original postitions.

Software for real computers

The software, tips, and samples found on the The ISPF and z/OS Tools and Toys Page are for real computers; IBM mainframes, not Windows.

The ISPF Tools and Toys Page should be considered stablized.

CSS Formatter

Well, really it is just a web page, but it is self contained so there is no server requirement.

Rudimentary CSS formatter

Bookmarklet Editor

Another self contained web page; This one is useful for creating bookmarklets in Firefox and maybe other browsers. A bookmarklet is a small javascript program that you usually click on from the links bar of the browser. It can do anything from scan the contents of the page to completely reformat it or do much more. Examples are widely available on the web.

This page takes a bookmarklet and turns it into a 1 line program suitable for use in a link. It compresses out all blanks except from quoted strings and "new Array" so be aware of that and add semicolons to the ends of javascript lines. Some samples are provided.

Bookmarklet editor

JavaScript Mazes

A small JavaScript to generate and solve mazes.

Killhost

Download: killhost.exe (18K)

Killhost is a tiny program to update your 'hosts' file to include URLs of sites you don't ever want to see again.  Once a site is placed in the hosts file by killhost, it is effectively blocked.  This is a very simplistic approach to getting rid of 3rd party advertisements while surfing the web (thereby improving load time and reducing 3rd party spying activities).

The hosts file is a file that TCP/IP uses to resolve names.  It contains site names and their corresponding IP addresses.  The nice thing is that if you specify an address of 0.0.0.0 for a site then you'll never reach anything... so if you put the name of a site in with an address of 0.0.0.0 then your computer will never contact the actual site.

On Win9X systems the hosts file is usually located at C:\Windows\hosts and for NT, 2K, XP systems it is normally at C:\Winnt\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. Here is a copy of my hosts file.

How KILLHOST works:

Killhost monitors the clipboard for any URLs starting with http:// and when one is found, it puts up a small window in the upper left corner of your screen:

From this window you can select one of 2 buttons:

Ignore: Don't save this URL in the hosts file.  Just hide the window.
KILL: Add this URL to the hosts file.  The change will not be seen until you restart the browser.

If you select Change Hosts File from the Edit pulldown, the window changes:

From here you can change the file to which you want to save the entries.  Normally this is the hosts file.:

Browse: Search for and select the file with the standard Windows 'open' dialog box.
OK: Accept the name listed.
Cancel: Don't change the hosts file name that is in use.

How you use KillHost

When you see an advertisement you don't want to see again, you need to get it's URL into the clipboard.

• With Internet Explorer, you right-click on it, then select the URL and press Ctrl-C to place it in the clipboard. 

• In Netscape, right-click and select 'Copy Image Location'.  Once the image is in the clipboard, the KillHost window will display in the upper left corner and will show the site name portion of the URL.

Insure that the URL specifies something other than the name of the site you are viewing!!  Some sites server their own images and this program can not be used to stop those images.  This program is intended to stop images from 3rd party sites.  Press KILL to add the site to the hosts file, or Ignore to do nothing with it.

If you block a site by accident, you can manually edit the hosts file using Edit Hosts File from the Edit pulldown  to remove items.  The format of the basic hosts file is very simple to understand.

Killhost establishes a hot key of 'CTRL-SHIFT-H' to hide or show the window at any time.
Killhost establishes a hot key of 'CTRL-SHIFT-K' to allow you to add host names in IE6 cookie prompt dialogs.  For example, if IE shows you a dialog box like this:

and you decide you never want to access the thisbanner.com site, you must move the cursor over the first paragraph and press ctrl-shift-k.  This will scan the paragraph for the site name and then place it in the clipboard, thereby showing the window so that you can kill it.  Be sure to block the cookie until you exit and restart IE.

Killhost will run on Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000 and XP systems.

If you want to show your own image in place of other images, such as a 1 pixel transparent GIF file, you must run your own web server and direct requests to that server.  For example, if you run an Apache server on your LAN at 192.168.1.8, you can tell KillHost to direct unwanted traffic there using the Set IP Address selection under Edit.  The web server must then handle document not found requests (404) and return the gif file.  Be sure to use absolute addressing, which includes the http:// in the address.  If you do not, Netscape will crash and burn on cookie requests to blocked sites.  For example, in Apache, use

ErrorDocument 404 http://192.168.1.8/pixel.gif

You can, no doubt, find such a gif file by looking in your existing web cache.  I doubt anyone will have read this far into this boring page, so, for the record, let me say that I think that fried doughnuts are disgusting, and no household should be without a generous supply of cream cheese. 

You must have the Visual Basic 5 Runtimes libraries, available from Microsoft, to run KillHost.