Samurize - cool and handy at work too
25 March 2004, 12:40 PM
#1
Moderator
Thread Starter
Join Date: Dec 1998
Location: Staffs
Posts: 23,573
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
Samurize - cool and handy at work too
I've been tinkering with a great little free utility called Samurize over the past few days.
Essential it lets you display information on your desktop - think the old Active Desktop of IE4 but much much better.
So as an example, he's part of the desktop on my work PC:
You can display information about the local PC ie CPU %, RAM free etc (like my script). Note two drives are network drives and reported fine. If you have a laptop, it will show battery state.
IP address is the current DHCP lease for my PC. The figures about Dastardly are real-time PerfMon counters pulled from our Exchange Server - handy for seeing that mail is flowing properly. Everything so far is done using built in functions. The config is all drag and drop like designing forms in VB or Access.
The matrix section below that is my own work (bar the ping column). It monitors availability of the three servers for ping, web, FTP and e-mail. The Ping uses a script you can download from the Samurize web site. HTTP, FTP, POP3 and SMTP is something I've put together in VB Script. I found a Telnet example on the web and have hacked it into shape to connect to other ports. It's all entirely customisable as you specify the IP address for each item so you could have instant status reports for 20 servers if you wanted too.
If one of the servers fails to respond, the green "go" is automatically replaced with a red "X" icon. Tere's a whole raft of alert options - conditions can be value (ie GT, LT) or text based. Once an alert is triggered you can change image or text colours, play a sound, run another script. You can configure how often the script is run as well. If you can do something in VB Script, then Samurize can display the result. So you could check certain services are running on a server, free memory etc.
The weather section uses another set of scripts from the Samurize web site. It reads an XML feed from weather.com. You get the location for your town (a one minute job), and then chose what parts of the feed you want to plonk into your config.
Finally the calendar is another script from Samurize.com.
Loads of other scripts are available - you can have the headlines from the Beeb news site shown or Now/Next TV listings pulled from Teletext.com. Some scripts will feed current track information from WinAmp or WMP onto your desktop.
Essential it lets you display information on your desktop - think the old Active Desktop of IE4 but much much better.
So as an example, he's part of the desktop on my work PC:
You can display information about the local PC ie CPU %, RAM free etc (like my script). Note two drives are network drives and reported fine. If you have a laptop, it will show battery state.
IP address is the current DHCP lease for my PC. The figures about Dastardly are real-time PerfMon counters pulled from our Exchange Server - handy for seeing that mail is flowing properly. Everything so far is done using built in functions. The config is all drag and drop like designing forms in VB or Access.
The matrix section below that is my own work (bar the ping column). It monitors availability of the three servers for ping, web, FTP and e-mail. The Ping uses a script you can download from the Samurize web site. HTTP, FTP, POP3 and SMTP is something I've put together in VB Script. I found a Telnet example on the web and have hacked it into shape to connect to other ports. It's all entirely customisable as you specify the IP address for each item so you could have instant status reports for 20 servers if you wanted too.
If one of the servers fails to respond, the green "go" is automatically replaced with a red "X" icon. Tere's a whole raft of alert options - conditions can be value (ie GT, LT) or text based. Once an alert is triggered you can change image or text colours, play a sound, run another script. You can configure how often the script is run as well. If you can do something in VB Script, then Samurize can display the result. So you could check certain services are running on a server, free memory etc.
The weather section uses another set of scripts from the Samurize web site. It reads an XML feed from weather.com. You get the location for your town (a one minute job), and then chose what parts of the feed you want to plonk into your config.
Finally the calendar is another script from Samurize.com.
Loads of other scripts are available - you can have the headlines from the Beeb news site shown or Now/Next TV listings pulled from Teletext.com. Some scripts will feed current track information from WinAmp or WMP onto your desktop.
Last edited by ChrisB; 25 March 2004 at 03:56 PM. Reason: Edit URL Code
Thread
Thread Starter
Forum
Replies
Last Post
Scott@ScoobySpares
Full Cars Breaking For Spares
55
05 August 2018 07:02 AM
Mattybr5@MB Developments
Full Cars Breaking For Spares
38
17 July 2016 10:43 PM
Mattybr5@MB Developments
Full Cars Breaking For Spares
20
22 October 2015 06:12 AM
