Author: Bill

I had several versions of Java on my PC and I lamented the fact that I needed to use “Add/Remove Programs” to remove them. This script came in handy although my copy and paste of the code needed several fixups before it would work. The single and double quotes from the copy were funky according to DOS. So I have posted my cleaned up copy. The SyntaxHighlighter Plus plugin has solved this copy problem for me in the past. Good Luck!

Rem to run this file and log the output use: "uninstall java.bat">>java_remove.log
Rem @echo off &
cls
Rem List all Installation subkeys from uninstall key.
echo Searching Registry for Java Installs
for /f %%I in ('reg query HKLM\SOFTWARE\microsoft\windows\currentversion\uninstall') do echo %%I | find "{" > nul && call :All-Installations %%I
echo Search Complete..
goto :NoneFound
:All-Installations
Rem Filter out all but the Sun Installations
for /f "tokens=2*" %%T in ('reg query %1 /v Publisher 2^> nul') do echo %%U | find "Sun" > nul && call :Sun-Installations %1
goto :EOF
:Sun-Installations
Rem Filter out all but the Sun-Java Installations. Note the tilda + n, which drops all the subkeys from the path
echo %1
for /f "tokens=2*" %%T in ('reg query %1 /v DisplayName 2^> nul') do echo . Uninstalling - %%U: | find "Java" && call :Sun-Java-Installs %~n1
if errorlevel 1 (
echo Doing further conditional checking on variables.
for /f "tokens=2*" %%T in ('reg query %1 /v DisplayName 2^> nul') do echo . Uninstalling - %%U: | find "J2SE" && call :Sun-Java-Installs %~n1
)
goto :EOF
:Sun-Java-Installs
Rem Run Uninstaller for the installation
MsiExec.exe /x%1 /qb /quiet /passive /promptrestart
echo . Uninstall Complete, Resuming Search..
goto :EOF
:NoneFound
Rem No Java found to remove from this system
echo No Java found or all versions already removed from this system
goto :EOF

Recently I was debugging why a backup of a QuickBooks file was not working. A scheduled job running on the server was supposed to create a compressed encrypted version on a removable USB drive. The job was written by someone else and I guess they never checked to see if it worked!? I found that itt worked when I ran it interactively but it failed when I ran it as a schedule job. It took me a while to figure this problem out but the QuickBooks folder was actually a shared folder on another computer and the drive mapping was not available in the batch environment. To fix the problem I added the following statements to create a drive mapped as ‘r:’.

	Dim objNetwork
	Set objNetwork = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Network")
	strLocalDrive = "r:"
	strRemoteShare = "\\myserver\Backups_Daily"
	objNetwork.MapNetworkDrive strLocalDrive, strRemoteShare, False

Andy wrote:

My jaw dropped this morning as I read Chester Finn’s Wall Street Journal opinion piece titled The Self-Inflicted Economic Death of Ohio.  First, because the piece quantified some of my gut feelings about Ohio’s talent drain, and second, because of the magnitude of the problem.

It’s So Important To Keep Talent In Ohio « Cincinnati IT – an andy erickson blog

Unlike Andy I am still searching for a word to describe how I felt when I read this article. I have a seventeen year old son and we talked frequently about college and jobs over the last year. Our talks were stimulated by what they did not discuss at high school. Let’s just say he is learning a lot more about the job market from me than from his school and he goes to a “good” school. About a year ago his school started the college selection process. This is a lot earlier than when I was going to school so I was duly impressed. I don’t think I even talked about colleges and majors until I took my SAT test. I was pretty clueless about colleges but I was well prepared for a major in a science or engineering field. What shocked me was that my son’s college counselor was encouraging him to pursue a liberal arts major. I was curious about their reasoning so I started asking questions. The deeper I probed the less I liked about the philosophy of our present education system. It was not hard to figure out that the college counselor’s recommendations were a natural result of the educational system that was in place. My son had plenty of opportunities to try out science and technology courses but was generally steered away from them.  When we met with the counselor and I mentioned that the biggest job needs for the next decade are still in the science and technology fields, she said that he should have pursued a course selection with more science and technology courses in it.  Okay, let’s drop “Conversational French”. Her answer was, “He can’t do that!” Besides she said, “He is taking Honors English and History”. Huh! Another point she made and I have heard it repeated several times, is that you what you study in college does not determine your career choice. This is definitely not true for those pursuing a job in a technology field. Wow! When I worked for a large chemical company we rarely interviewed college graduates who did not have an engineering degree. That was just a fact of life. Another fact of life is that engineers are paid well. If you happened to have and engineering degree and work experience from a co-op program you were gold and would get top dollar. It really looks like the high schools are just going through the motions of college/career counseling.

About a month later he got his PSAT results. He got a 700 on the math portion and the PSAT report recommended that he consider a college with science or technology major. Go figure!

As seen from del.icio.us I must be seen as…