End Sub
She loved to play around first with the relational and absolute references, and finally
assigned the macro to a shortcut key: "Ctrl+y"
Hilde just loved Tina; she always had such nice and interesting requests.
Already to know how to express one’s IT desires is a lot and shows a gift for the
matter. What a user wants, God wants. But all of CHD had counted each of them over
30 days overtime since the coming of the Chaos. But the good news for everyone later
that day was that Yves Longweil and Franca Incubo were to leave the House. Cool!
The two had never been House anyway, and had been put there temporarily in order to
make the point and convey how awful a problem user could be.
An Email popped up, as if by miracle, on their screen at 19h45. Betsy of Personnel
division was doing overtime too and getting used to the job. Welcome to the House
then.
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The Light
Nico had been looking at the VBS-Visual Basic script manual for what was now over
two weeks. Almost three in fact, since he’d had the course about this programming
language.
As always, when he was to use a new programming language, not yet known to him by
practice; he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to master it. The same experience had
taught him that this couldn’t be so, that until now he had always been able to master
any new programming language, but still, he was afraid.
He knew Pascal, FORTRAN, COBOL, RPG, FoxPro (the one which makes coffee), C+,
C++, Visual Basic Short, and Visual Basic for Applications, he had learned all of them,
but still, he was afraid. He always feared that a blockage would suddenly appear,
revealing to everyone that in fact he couldn’t programme at all; that he was just like his users, those who considered that programming was a gift given to only an elite, the
upper few thousand. Users thought programming was a mystery, slightly disgusting,
given to a mind by the gods, like epilepsy to Caesar, a gift that one possessed or not,
like the one of farseeing or telepathy. In a way, many didn’t believe in it and didn’t see it as a reality.
The VBS manual winked at him, accusingly, and Nico felt sick in his stomach.
Would he become a user now? Would he have to realise that he couldn’t programme at
all? Never had? That it had all been an illusion?
Searching for some consolation, he looked at the impressive collection of his holiday
shots on the walls of his office: Brasilia, Argentina, Chile, Niagara and Iguaçu falls,
New York, the Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, South Africa, Kenya, Morocco, Egypt,
Moscow, Tokyo and Kyoto and the Golden Pavilion, Vienna, Prague and Budapest, the
bay of Sidney where he ...
How much he would like to be there now. But he wasn’t. Instead he was in dreary
Bohatia fighting with some dreary code fright.
Users looking at his screen over the back of his shoulders were often bewildered by the
strange hieroglyphs they saw there. They repeatedly called him Genius, and asked him
how he had come to learn this potion making. Nico then laughed and answered that it
was precisely that: he had learned it. At university they had learned the basics of
programming in the first year already, each week a two times two hour course;
followed by at least four hours of exercises. It took its time. Many believed that one
was either capable to programme or not, it was inbuilt, genetic; some very few tried
themselves at it, and gave up after a few hours, being almost glad to have gotten the
proof that they belonged to this vast majority which couldn’t programme and never
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would be able to. Psycho-technical tests wanted to help proving this too, and their
results gladly told most of those who had taken them that it was true:
“You will never be able to programme. You lack the necessary logic.”
But logic is an inborn gift for only even fewer than those who learn to programme.
Logic can be inborn, maybe, but most of all, logic can be learned. The few great
principles of logic in programming can just simply be learned.
There was if-then-else sequence, the loop, the compare next to pervious principle, the Array, but not much more. Like:
Sub OldestUser()
Dim Age(777) As Integer
Dim Oldest As Integer
Oldest = 0
For Count = 1 To 777
If Age(Count) > Oldest Then
Oldest = Age(Count)
End If
Next
MsgBox Oldest & " is the oldest"
End Sub
Nico estimated that there were maybe not more than ten of those principles underlying
programming. He didn’t dare tell this to anyone, afraid he might be laughed at. He’ll
show you some of it later, when he will have mastered his own new challenge.
Nico hadn’t reached that point yet and opened the manual slowly. He needed the new
code to manage the hundreds of user movements in the Active Directory which would contain them. The scripts would add the users, remove them, move them to another
Organisational Unit, add and remove them to and from Groups, like the groups
corresponding to their WG, change their attributes, like office, phone, WG, title (when
one marries), add the logon script.
First of all he wanted to try out a ‘Create user’ script. He surfed on the Internet and
found several sites with sample scripts. Like on Technet. No use to give you the exact
URL, it changes all the time. URL is the Uniform Resource Locator. All of the web
addresses you see in your browser are URL’s. On one, Nico found a script which
would help him take the first steps. He copied it to his own Script Editor and started to do the necessary adaptations for his own environnement. The script used a text file
with the names and other data of a list of new users. He ran the programme. Of course
it didn’t work. It seldom worked the first time. Programming could be quite of a trial. It didn’t happen trough magic, but required patience. It could be hard work and needed a
lot of creativeness and also, mainly: to be left in peace.
He began to concentrate and to put himself it that state of relaxation necessary for
programming. He would have compared it to meditation, had he been a meditative
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person, which he didn’t think he was. Slowly he began to drift off, to some place of his mind. It was not in his brain maybe, but somewhere in a spot above. A little sphere
there, floating above his head.
It could only be true: he couldn’t programme. When he sometimes read his own code
again, he couldn’t believe that it was he himself who had written it. He didn’t
understand a single word of it, until the moment where he needed it again for a new
adaptation of it in a new programme. So how then did he do it? Not with his brains, but
with something somewhere above. With a little globe, a thinking moon circling around
his brain. He was a genius, really. A genius is someone who can do things he can’t do.
The moon was an entity like Freud’s Ego, or rather Conscious and Subconscious, a part
of him unknown to himself. A place Outside of his brain. One of his users had once
found a word for it: It was his ‘Hyperconsciouss’. Not the subconscious, nor the
conscious. He programmed with his hyperconscious. His outer self.
He shoved the code around, helping himself into the required condition. Slowly he
began to see the code more clearly, his condition of meditation intensified and he
plunged into a state of well-being he could compare to the one described by those who
take heroin. However, for this he had no real proof. He had never taken heroin, only
read about it. But the world around him was becoming white, there were no more
waves on the sea, everything was very calm. The white intensified. A state without any
pain at all. A mini Nirvana.
Then he understood. His script couldn’t work because the initial one contained an
error. A ‘logical’ error. It could never have worked like that, nor in any other situation or environnement.
It was the moment of enlightenment every programmer must know. The moment when
on feels the code surrounding oneself like an aura. Slowly he switched two lines in it
and then changed the object setting slightly. He was sure it would now work.
And it did. Nico sighed with relief. Not a user yet.
Feeling in a state of grace he now wrote quickly in within ten minutes or so had
finished the script. 30 lines of code. That was a lot for a single hour. He knew that 30
lines of valid code a day where the average for a programmer. Nico knew he did much
more.
Some VBScript code
' Visual Basic Script Source File - ' AUTHOR: Nico , MOUXII, House
' COMMENT: script to create users
DIM arrRecord
Dim VCount
Set Root = GetObject("LDAP://RootDSE")
DomainPath = Root.Get("DefaultNamingContext")
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Set MyDomain = GetObject("LDAP://" & DomainPath)
set fso = CreateObject ("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set tsTextFile = fso.OpenTextFile ("f:\ADusers\CreateUsers.txt", ForReading, False) Set ou_Current = GetObject("LDAP://OU=users,OU=MOUXII,DC=House,DC=Bohatia")
Set adsUser = ou_Current.Create ("user",”CN=" & vUser 'common name adsuser.put "sAMAccountName", arrRecord (5)
adsuser.put "userPrincipalName", arrRecord (5) 'logon name
adsuser.put "givenName", arrRecord (2) 'first name
adsuser.put "sn", Ucase(arrRecord (3)) 'last name
‘add phone, office, workgroup later
adsuser.SetPassword "Svet8888"
adsuser.AccountDisabled = False 'important otherwise it is!
adsUser.SetInfo
Set adsUser = Nothing
Wend ' END OF Loop
tsTextFile.Close
Chiara, a user who often used his help for the weekly lists of her WG, suddenly bowed
over his shoulder like a dark shadow, drew her breath and almost hissed:
“Wow Nico, when I see this code I almost feel sick with envy. I feel faint. Do you
think you could give me a short briefing, of an hour or so, to teach me to programme? I
really would like to write programmes too. I’m sure if you explained, I could do it.”
The pain of the interruption shot through his neck. He made a fall from a warm sunny
sky into dark cold water. He felt sort of ‘vampirised’.
“I think it needs a bit more than an hour or so”, said Nico. ”It would take a year. At
least. Not non stop, but a bit of it everyday, so that it can settle down.”
He sighed. He knew what would follow. The user would now accuse him of not
wanting to share his secret. The secret of how he did it. She did not believe this would take a year. Nico was just being stingy. If he would only show a bit more of good will,
he surely could convey the whole principle of programming to her just by using
something like wavelength, or a magical formula, so that she could transform into a
programmer, just like the magician could transform a duckling into a swan, by using
some five to ten words, and by waving a ward over her head. Just like it had been done
to him, Nico, by some previous magician, and now he didn’t want to share this with
anyone. Chiara did not know it, but she believed in magicians, and magical thinking,
wishful thinking, just like the children do, when they think very hard in order to get a new CD or an hamburger. Later they will learn that to wish is not enough, well, maybe
some of them will. But with computers many people continue to have wishful thinking.
“But can’t you just give me a hint”, she said, tentatively, not wanting to give up.
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“What hint?”
“Just help me take the first steps.”
“But you took a Visual Basic course last year,” he said, remembering.
“That was only two days. Yes but I really don’t have the time to sit down and try it
out”, she said, really upset now. ”I’m sure if you would only explain it could really be done in an hour. You said yourself it would take me a year otherwise. I need some
human contact to feel this in my bones, flesh, you know. Your genius would help.”
Nico bit his lips as to not become slightly aggressive. On day he would really like to
play a joke on a user and say something like:
Set OU_wish = GetObject (“LDAP//cn=user, y, ou=House, dc=World”)
Set vUser = OU_wish.create (“user”, “CN=You’re now a programmer!”)
A VBScript, sounding like a Cabbalistic or magical formula.
He was sure the user would walk away believing it. But what if it worked!?
Some people really seemed to believe that if he wanted, only wanted he could put his
whole knowledge into a few words only, convey his experience and hard work of years
in only a few seconds. If he and the others of the Helpdesk only wanted. He thought:
‘But we can’t. And maybe Chiara was right on one thing: Even if we could, we would
not. After all it had been hard work to come to this. Why just share it in a single
magical formula? Couldn’t she sit down on her a .. herself?‘
Many users seem to feel that if IT people were not so stingy they could very well
quickly transmit the right attitude underlying their aptitude or ‘gift’. Like via
neurotransmitters or telepathy or some magical word. Abracadabra. But what if it WAS
possible to transmit this knowledge just by some magic?
Ok. Maybe the Software Support people could do it. Nico was feeling slightly superior
to them. Well not only slightly, but quite. Their work was so much easier. Nico
considered that programming was sort of the emblem of being an informatician. The
others, Webmaster and the Soft- and Hardware Helpdesk were not REALLY
informaticians. He knew about Methods, Events, Properties, Keywords, Libraries,
Functions, Operators, Statements, Constants. They were just using some simple mortal
MS Office commands.
Show this folder as an Email address book
How could it be important to know that when he was writing a new mail message, and
clicking on To: or on the Address Book, he was not seeing his Private address book in
the list? He only saw: ‘House’ and ‘Team’, but not ‘Private’. He must remember to ask
Gwendoline or Hilde.
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Myra’s answer (Hilde and Gwendoline were not available) later was:
Be sure to have the Folder list visible
If not, choose ‘View - Folder list’ or click on
Find your ‘Private’ contact book.
Take your mouse and right-click on ‘Private’
In the menu that appears, choose Properties.
Then click on the “Outlook address book” tab
Then click on: ‘Show this folder as an Email address book’
Myra thought she had already told him this. Three times at least, thought Myra. He
really should have been able to find this out by himself.
Properties
Myra is right. Nico really should know how to find out about the above himself.
Because as an IT he should know that when an IT thing doesn’t show up or give you
what you want you have to right-click on it and choose ‘Properties’.
Or that that one can find something like ‘Properties’, ‘Preferences’, ‘Settings’,
‘Options’, ‘Tools’’ in every programme in the world.
Myra knew this, even before she was HelpDesk, Myra just FELT:
If you cannot see, then choose View
If you do not like it, then choose Preferences or Customize
If you do not know what you can do, then right-click
Chiara, not hearing this wise Haiku, was sure of her idea about Nico too. She liked
him, but he was just like the others, a stingy magician. With a superego. Not wanting to share. And lazy. Ok, she knew that programmers were lazy, if they were good. And
Nico was very good. But stingy. And a bit conceited too. Programmers sort of
considered themselves as being the elite of IT. But there was worse. Nico wrote all
those good programmes, but then he didn’t understand them himself! She had had to
explain one of them to her WG, because Nico just hadn’t been able to remember how
his own commands worked. And he had written them! Chiara stopped to admire his
photos, turned on her heals and left.
Nico sort of hated her. Chiara, never disturb a programmer when he is in a state of
enlightenment. Nico didn’t like people so much. They were always bumping into his
concentration, making the whole castle of cards he had build up fall down, and he had
to start again and again. It could transform from a castle of cards to a stable and lasting one only when the last card was set. With each card he added, he trembled to be
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interrupted. An he was. People were not his first priority. Ok he liked ‘girls’ and also to travel far away with them. But probably not with Chiara then.
It’s lunchtime
He looked after her, longing for the light to come back. But too late for that now, he
had fallen back on earth, and that had rather hurt, and anyway it was time for lunch. He was meeting his Spanish crowd; at the Peacock Bar to be precise and called so because
one could always see some peacocks parading there.
Lunch relaxed him a bit. And by the way, he still had to think where to go on holidays
next time and with whom. Maybe this time it would be the right one. Because it was a
common joke that Nico was going to his trips with each time a new girl and then
coming back without her. But maybe this time he would find one with whom he could
come back. Or stay there with her. The light came back to his eyes. But not for long.
He felt very tired suddenly.
It was only 17hoo but he decided to call it a day. As an exception, he wasn’t so much
of a workaholic. Programmers are lazy. It was that his light had been darkened at one
point of the day. In the elevator he met the cause of his distress, Chiara. She gave him a brilliant smile, like if she thought he was the greatest man on earth and had just saved it. Nico mused. After all, when she was not nagging at him so that he would teach her
to programme in two seconds, she was a quite pretty girl. Italian like him, but with kind of Chinese looks. He smiled back.
Chiara’s heart made a jump. She heard a kind of a ‘Pang!’ when it touched the top of
the elevator. She would get him. At whatever cost. She would learn to programme at
any price. She would sell her body and soul. And after all, when she saw Nico’s smile,
she realised it wouldn’t be that difficult. Indeed rather easy. And probably pleasant.
Cool.
At 17h01 Leo had an experience similar to Nico’s.
He had been blissfully surfing on giant roll-over JavaScript, in the sea of his HTML
codes. The sun shone, the wind was fine, seagulls were flying over him:
Function MM_findObj(n, d) { //v4.0
var p,i,x; if(!d) d=document; if((p=n.indexOf("?"))>0&&parent.frames.length) {
d=parent.frames[n.substring(p+1)].document; n=n.substring(0,p);}
if(!(x=d[n])&&d.all) x=d.all[n]; for (i=0;!x&&i<d.forms.length;i++) x=d.forms[i][n]; for(i=0;!x&&d.layers&&i<d.layers.length;i++) x=MM_findObj(n,d.layers[i].document); if(!x && document.getElementById) x=document.getElementById(n); return x;
Then suddenly he was violently knocked off his surfboard by Cecile Acrot, one of their
problem users. She was phoning him directly instead of going via the CHD main
HelpDesk first:
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“Mr Veneto, would you come by without delay,” she said in her dronish voice, “and
proceed to the installation of a keyboard which has the ‘Any Key’?”
Leo, having landed hard in cold water, couldn’t believe his ears, but, as most HelpDesk
people with the exception of blue blooded programmers he tried to answer. However,
the explanation literally finished him off. How to explain that Any Key was any key?
His nice script stood there, unfinished, rolling his eyes at him. A roll-over script only looks difficult, it isn’t when you just find the ready-made command for it in your web
page design programme. In Dreamweaver, at that time, it was in ‘Insert - Interactive
images’’. Now Cecile Acrot would have asked “And then where? Could you please
come by and show me?”
Leo, having stayed until midnight the day before, completely overworked, and having
barely escaped drowning, was near suffocation. But there was something he had
wanted to do for days now, but had been completely unable to find out, nor had he
been able to find the time to find out. Nor did he remember that there were things like
the HELP, or F1, as they were always telling their users.
As you know CHD shared a common mailbox, CHD@house123.org. Hilde had given the whole CHD team delegate access to it. Which meant they could access the common mailbox via their own mailbox. Every other workgroup in the MOU possessed such a
common mailbox too. Leo still needed to add the CDH mailbox to his own, but
couldn’t remember how to do it. He took the phone again, to ask Myra.
Myra was a bit bewildered. OK if their users didn’t know, but her own HelpDesk?
What was the matter with those guys today? Myra didn’t know about vampires yet.
About people who artfully suck others out. Taking turns, and now it was hers. But
maybe the pasta with garlic she had eaten at noon protected her. She took a deep breath
and said patiently:
“Leo. You right-click on OUTLOOK TODAY or Mailbox–Leo_Veneto, choose
‘Properties- Advanced-Advanced - then Add’’. Type CHD there.”
“That does not work.”
“What does not work Leo?”
“Today nothing works.”
Boy those guys were having a problem today.
“Not today! OUTLOOK TODAY. In the Window panel to the left. The big Icon at the top.
Or your own name there.”
“No.”
“Leo, then please go and choose ‘View - Outlook Bar’’ in the menu above. Did you do
that?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because all of my toolbars have disappeared. Where is the toolbar with the Send, the
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diskette, the Flag and so, you know?”
“The Standard toolbar?
?”
“No clue. But this manoeuvre of yours for adding the delegate has made it go away.”
Now it was her fault! Was he drunk or what?!
“Leo, the toolbars in Outlook change depending on what you’re doing at the moment.
The toolbar you have when you compose a new message.”
“Ah! But anyway now I have no more toolbars at all!”
Was he near collapse or something?! This wasn’t like Leo.
“Choose ‘View - Toolbar’’ then Standard and Advanced
d.’ OK?”
“Yes ok. But still the whole Outlook is a mess. I don’t see any of my folders anymore.
They have disappeared.”
Should she call an ambulance?!
“Leo. What’s the matter with you? Choose ‘View - Folder List’’ to have them appear.
VIEW! And then go home. How can you keep on working when you’re dead-tired like
that!”
“Yes,” he mumbled, or rather slurred. “But I have so much to do. What do you
expect?!”
The whole thing lasted half an hour. Myra almost tore her hair out. Leo had been
working with computers for years now. He was a mighty webmaster. He could
programme. He was writing in HTML and JavaScript, he was using Coldfusion. And
she was just a little novice in a Support Helpdesk. Obviously that didn’t mean a thing.
Only those programmers were la crème de la crème of the IT world. Or felt like it.