Adding portable programs to Windows 7 Start menu

A tiny addenda to Raymond Chen's series of posts about how programs appear in the Windows Start menu. According to Raymond's posts, Explorer counts the number of times the program is launched to place it in the Start menu. However, Explorer doesn't add the program's icon in the Start menu if you just start an executable (e.g. a PortableApp or a not-installed program) by entering its path in the "Search programs and files" field; a workaround is to add a shortcut to the program in the desktop.

Showing last modified time with seconds in Windows 7 Explorer

Windows 7 Explorer only shows the last modified time of files and folders in hours and minutes, not seconds, i.e. hh:mm instead of hh:mm:ss. If you use the Properties dialog, you can briefly see the last modified time in hh:mm:ss but if you wait longer, the text in the dialog changes to the pretty useless "n minutes ago" and then a more useless "m hours ago". If you check the file or folder properties the next day, you can see the last modified time in hh:mm:ss again! This misfeature became a problem when I wanted to check the modified time of files created seconds within each other.

The workaround is to change the Long date format in your Region and Language from dddd, d MMMM yyyy to ddd, d MMMM yyyy, which stops last modified date format from changing in the Properties dialog. Note that Windows 7 Explorer's Date Modified column never shows seconds.

Reference to self: use "HH:mm:ss" for 24-hour time format and "dd/MM/yyyy" to ensure that day of month always has two digits.

Stupid LCM Error EPMIE-25014

When loading groups.csv into Hyperion Shared Services (HSS) using Lifecycle Manager (LCM), you may see these errors:

Importing Artifact - Groups.
error /Native Directory/Groups - EPMIE-25014: Failed to import all of the membership info for group [group name1].
error /Native Directory/Groups - EPMIE-25014: Failed to import all of the membership info for group [group name2].
...
Migration Status - Completed with failures.

Basically, LCM couldn't find the member(s) (i.e. user or another group) referenced by some groups in its directory. To find the missing member, you have to look for the common missing member in the groups reported in the errors.

This is a stupid error message because LCM must know which member is missing but doesn't include it in the error message!

UTC using WMI

I wanted to get the current time in UTC (i.e. time without any offset) but there doesn't seem to be a timezone-style function in VBA / VBScript. Here's a function using WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) to get time in UTC and a hack to pad the numbers so that they always have two digits. The output has this format: yyyy/mm/dd hh:mm:ss

'VBA References
'1. Microsoft WMI Scripting 1.2 Library

Function Utc() As String
  Dim ws As WbemScripting.SWbemServices, colItem As WbemScripting.SWbemObjectSet, objItem As WbemScripting.SWbemObject

  Set ws = GetObject("winmgmts:\\localhost\root\CIMV2")
  Set colItem = ws.ExecQuery("SELECT * FROM Win32_UTCTime")
  For Each objItem In colItem
    Utc = objItem.Year & "/" & Right("00" & objItem.Month, 2) & "/" & Right("00" & objItem.Day, 2) _
      & " " & Right("00" & objItem.Hour, 2) & ":" & Right("00" & objItem.Minute, 2) & ":" & Right("00" & objItem.Second, 2)
  Next

End Function

• Win32_UTCTime class from Microsoft
• Time Zones And Daylight Savings Time