But unfortunately, the Jad website has vanished from the internet.  Can you believe that?  In this day and age, when all you need is a place to host a couple of pages and a couple of small zip files, it’s just gone, and in its place is a dumb generic domain landing page.  

It’s crazy that there is no where else to get Jad.  Crazy because there are tons of tools that sit on top of Jad.  JadClipse, cavaj, JD Decompiler, etc.  But the heart of the thing is Jad, and every one of those tools requires you to download Jad separately, but oops:  Jad has vanished from the internet.  

I managed to find an old version of the Jad exe on an old machine, but then today I tried looking around and found that Tomas Varaneckas set up a mirror.  It was hard to find however, so I’m posting the link here for posterity.  Thanks Tomas!

Fortunately, someone thought to set up a mirror.

Then today I got fed up, tracked down the url for manually downloading it (this forum thread is a good source).  But it still didn’t work!  It kept hanging after a couple of minutes.

Eventually I realized that it might have something to do with my router settings.  I had set connections to time out after 120 seconds in order to better handle lots of bit torrent traffic.  It’s usually not a problem, as my browsers are usually able to resume downloads when connections are broken, even when I lose internet connectivity completely.  But perhaps there’s something about edge / content delivery network downloads that requires a persistent connection.  Anyway, I raised my connection timeout to 600 seconds and now all my Apple downloads are working fine.

Update: scratch that.  Didn’t work totally fine.  The iPhone update still keeps hanging and eventually dying.  Now I’m trying to nurse it along by occasionally “pausing” and “resuming” the download in Google Chrome.  Looks like it might work, if I’m attentive.  What a beating.

Update 2: So nursing it along proved to be too tedious.  After 45min of starting and stopping, it failed at 240/246M!  Arrgggh!  So now I’m thinking maybe it has something to do with the wifi.  So this time I SSH’d into my Linux server (which is wired to the net), used wget to download, and it took 5 minutes.

Update 3: Scratch that.  It turns out I downloaded the update for the 3G iPhone instead of my 1st generation iPhone.  The first generation firmware update keeps failing over and over and over.  It’s killing me.  Somehow I got the 3G version, 246M, in an amazing 5 minutes, but the download for my phone is coming in at 50k/s and stalling out at around 2% complete.  This is ridiculous.

The Problem

You may be familiar with Write-Progress, but if you’re like me, you probably don’t use it that often, partly because  you don’t use it that often, so whenever you want to it means you have to go look up the help documentation or search the web for examples.

Wouldn’t it be much more fun and easy to use if all you had to do was pipe in a collection of stuff, just like with ForEach-Object? 

Loop-WithProgress

I give you Loop-WithProgress.  It works just like ForEach-Object.  Pipe something into it and provide a code block to execute while looping.  In addition, it will write-progress as it goes.

For example, lets say we want to count lines in all the files in C:\.

So we write a function:

filter Get-LineCount { $_ | ? { !$_.PSIsContainer} | % { (gc ($_|gi)).Count } }

Then we pump our C: files through it:

ls c:\ | Get-LineCount

Now maybe that’s fine for you, but if there’s a really big file or you have a lot of files, you might want some more info.  So, we just pipe it through Loop-WithProgress

ls c:\ | Loop-WithProgress | Get-LineCount

This time we get a nice little progress bar showing what item we’re on.  It shows a message saying “Looping - Item 12″.   This alone can be helpful when you’re processing a large number of files, for example if you were recursing through the entire C:\ drive, which could take forever.  But in this case we are dealing with a small number of items whose quantity we can easily get.  Which brings us to…

Item Counts, Percent Complete, and Progress Bars

ls c:\ | measure-object

Tells us how many items there are (in my case, 41).  With this knowledge we can have a progress bar that actually shows percent complete.  We do this by supplying the Count argument:

ls c:\ | Loop-WithProgress -Count | Get-LineCount

Now, that’s kind of tedious to use measure-object, and not very pipeline friendly, so I wrote another function called Count-Items that sets a variable with the item count in it.  When the pipeline is done, it will clear the variable back out of scope.

ls c:\ | Count-Items MyCount | Loop-WithProgress -Count $MyCount | Get-LineCount

If you give Count-Items a variable name, it will use TempCount, and Loop-WithProgress is smart enough to use it.  So we can shorten this to:

ls c:\ | Count-Items | Loop-WithProgress  | Get-LineCount

Reporting Status

This is all fine and good, but what if I want to know which file is currently being processed?  I can report this information back to the UI using the StatusScriptBlock argument:

ls c:\ | Count-Items | Loop-WithProgress -status {$_} | Get-LineCount

In this case I’m just returning the actual item as the status.  When I do this, my progress window will also show the name of the file whose lines are being counted.

Aliases

I’ve been using full-names for all the examples, but I usually alias “~” to Loop-WithProgress and “ci” to Count-Items.  So my one-liner to count lines of code with progress looks like this:

ls c:\ | ci | ~ -s {$_} | Get-LineCount

The code

Here is the code:

function Loop-WithProgress {
	param (
		[ScriptBlock] $ProcessBlock,
		$Count,
		[int] $Id = 0,
		[string] $ActionLabel = "Looping",
		[ScriptBlock] $StatusReportBlock,
		[switch] $BreakAfterCountReached
	)

	begin {
		$i = 1;

		function Done {
			Write-Progress -Activity $ActionLabel -Completed -Status "All done." -id $id
		}

	}	

	process {

		if ($StatusReportBlock) {
			$status = . $StatusReportBlock $_;
		}
		if (!$status) {
			$status = "Processing Item";
		}		

		if (!$Count -and $TempCount){
			$Count = $TempCount
		}

		if ($Count) {
			$completeAmount = [System.Math]::Min($i,$Count);
			Write-Progress "$ActionLabel - $i of $Count" $status -id $id -percentComplete (($completeAmount/$Count)*100)
		} else {
			Write-Progress "$ActionLabel - Item $i" $Status -id $id
		}

		if ($ProcessBlock) {
			$result = . $ProcessBlock $_
		} else {
			$result = $_
		}
		$i++

		if ($BreakAfterCountReached -and $i -eq $Count) {
			Done;
			break;
		}		

		return $result

	}

	end {
		Done;
	}
}
set-alias lwp Loop-WithProgress
set-alias ~ Loop-WithProgress

function Count-Items {
	param ( $Name = "TempCount" )
	$list =@($input)
	Set-Variable -Name $Name -Value $list.Count -Scope script
	$list
	Remove-Variable $Name -scope script
}
set-alias ci Count-Items

It starts fast and feels very lightweight, and managing each tab as a separate process seems to handle my laptop resources much better than Firefox does.  I also dig that I can drag tabs from one window to another.  

It took me a while to figure out that I need to set the MagicBrowser flag on startup in order to get it to work with WinSplit Revolution (which is also awesome), but now I’m loving it.  Loving it.

Except when it crashes.  I’m really getting tired of “Whoa!  Google Chrome crashed!” messages. 

And when it hangs.  The “waiting for cache…” message is KILLING me.

I do miss the richness of Firefox, but most of that could be addressed if Chrome only had plugins.

Not obvious.  But I guess it makes sense.  

DataItemIndex is the index of the row within the overall data set.  DisplayIndex is the index of the row within the currently displayed set of rows, and it is what the DataKeys are indexed to.

My loathing for Visual Studio continues.

Suddenly, every time I ever tried to search for anything, the search wouldn’t even start.  It would just say:

No Files Were Found To Look In.

Find Was Stopped In Progress

Gross.  Nothing fixed it.  Restarted.  Nothing.  

The Real Problem is that Visual Studio is Giving Me CTS

The search feature was really the one thing that made file navigation tolerable in VS.  In Eclipse, there was a “quick open” option that had an autocomplete dropdown.  Just type any part of the file name, arrow to it, and it opens the file right up.  No mousing required.  No expanding of several levels of folders and constantly scrolling within a little treeview.  It is awesome.  And it’s a no-brainer.  I can’t believe how little Visual Studio has evolved in terms of basic little usability things that make developers more productive and help prevent carpal tunnel syndrome.

But I digress.

The closest thing to keyboard-based file navigation is search.  I could just search for “class User” and I’d get a list of files that I could click into.  Not remotely as good as Eclipse, but workable.

Until this bug.

Uggh.

The Fix

Anyway, after searching around, the solution is to hit ctrl + ScrollLock, and then everything goes back to normal.  WTF?  Crazy bug.