I’m uploading today’s batch of pictures but wanted to get this one out as soon as possible: Mount Baker as seen from the Top of Vancouver restaurant. Until we were at the Top of Vancouver restaurant this afternoon, I had never even noticed Mount Baker on the southwest skyline of Vancouver; we’d always been more [...]

I’m uploading today’s batch of pictures but wanted to get this one out as soon as possible:

Mount Baker as seen from the Top of Vancouver restaurant.

Until we were at the Top of Vancouver restaurant this afternoon, I had never even noticed Mount Baker on the southwest skyline of Vancouver; we’d always been more or less surrounded by buildings, except when up at Cypress Mountain and the visibility wasn’t great up there. From the 553 ft / 167 m height of the slowly-revolving restaurant, we got a terrific aerial view of the city and surrounding areas and I was surprised and shocked at the sight of this huge mountain dominating the horizon. I couldn’t tell how the picture would come out–it looked good on the D60′s tiny LCD screen, but you never know until you get it home–but once I saw this I knew I had to share it as soon as I possibly could.

So enjoy. Click the image for a much larger version. More soon.

Sure, you could do ipconfig /all, look for the DNS Servers line and type it after ping -t. Sure, if you’re a loser! You might as well just wait on your ISP’s level-1 tech support line for two or three hours, just to find out that your DSL is down either at the DSLAM or [...]

Sure, you could do ipconfig /all, look for the DNS Servers line and type it after ping -t. Sure, if you’re a loser! You might as well just wait on your ISP’s level-1 tech support line for two or three hours, just to find out that your DSL is down either at the DSLAM or the POP.

Instead, try this:
for /F "tokens=2 delims=:" %a in ('ipconfig /all ^| find /i "DNS Servers"') do ping -t %a
(That should be all one line.)

Expanded:

1. ipconfig /all prints the current TCP/IP configuration.
2. ^| pipes the output of the previous command to the next command. See the linked article for why the caret is required before the pipe.
3. find /i searches the following quoted text, case-insensitive.
4. "DNS Servers" is from the output of ipconfig /all.
5. for /F "tokens=2 delims=:" %a in takes the output from the previous elements (typically something like DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 64.81.79.2), parses it into tokens delimited by a colon, selects the second token and places the result into the named variable %a.
6. do is the “execute” part of for; whatever command follows is run with the parsed parameters.
7. ping -t sends ICMP ECHO requests to the target IP address; the -t parameter causes the pings to continue until interrupted with Ctrl-C.

All clear? Isn’t that better? I’m just saying.

By the way, this is not meant to impugn Speakeasy’s most excellent tech support people. Yes, my DSL has flakier than Marie Callender‘s finest crust for the past few days, but it’s not Speakeasy’s fault and they’re managing the diagnostic/repair process through Covad and AT&T.;

Oh, and if you want to put this in a batch file, you’ll need to double the percent signs in front of the variable. Like this:
for /F "tokens=2 delims=:" %%a in ('ipconfig /all ^| find /i "DNS Servers"') do ping -t %%a