Alex Angelopoulos (aka at mvps dot org)
Anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were
unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom. Their dwellings were apt to
become rather crowded with mathoms, and many of the presents that passed from
hand to hand were of that sort.
- J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
These are obscure snippets of solutions which I have come up with - solutions often still in search of a problem...
Numerical Scripting (Category)
Yes, there is a role for scientific computing in scripting, as any user of MatLab can tell you. This niche are has been further explored by Python (NumPy) and is actively being exploited these days at NASA (which has used Ruby for some scripting support of numerical computing).
Reflective Scripting (Category)
Analyzing Script Performance (Category)
This is a cool trick posted by Joe Earnest, detailing how one can "alias" the name of a script.
Creating User-Defined Types in Script
As pointed out by Jim Warrington, this is relatively easy to do by virtue of the class support in VBScript; it's just a little cumbersome. Here's a routine which automatically generates a "type" for you.
Reading Unix Man Pages on Windows
If you've ever had to do this, you know how annoying it can be. Forget the line ending issue; there is simply no generally available tool that will automatically read a man page and format it or at least strip out format data.
There are better tools which convert man pages to HTML (not to mention the handy WOman package), but this is here as a primitive "format-code-stripper" for anyone interested. Warning: you'll never catch Lobelia sneaking this into her umbrella...
This actually IS an interesting topic for some people, but the particular product - VMWare GSX - is a mid-range version which seems to suffer from being at a "sour spot" - it is much more pricey than VMWare Workstation, but its feature set and cost make it very UN-attractive compared to the next step up, VMware ESX. GSX is an interesting product, but the scuttlebutt is that if you want a high-end VMware, go ahead and get ESX instead.
On a side note, VMware Workstation is a must-have tech tool if you do tech support. It's fast since it uses direct CPU/RAM/disk access, it works natively ON all major versions of Linux and 32-bit Microsoft Windows, and also supports the same IN VMs - as well as NetWare, 16-bit DOS/Windows, many Unix flavors, and with minor hacks can even work with BeOS in a crude fashion.