I have found that quite often I write a piece of VBA code and will end up calling third-party software from within VBA.  Naturally this poses a problem if the VBA code is taken to a different machine and the software being called is not installed or can't be found by Windows.  As kind of a sanity check I show below a small VBA function that tries to look for the tools "ls", "grep", and "awk" on a Windows machine (obviously these are Windows-ported GNU tools!), determines if they are callable from the command-line, and will exit the VBA code execution if any executable cannot be called.

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I am currently developing an artificial neural network analyzer against the stock market. While still in the very early stages, the program can successfully parse a major market's online database and run the current snapshot of the DB through a feed-forward neural network on a nightly basis; generating various buy/sell positions for each stock in the major market. Also nearing completion are various auxillary database-integrity checkers and performance measuring utilities. Given the size of the project and my solo work on it, I am staying pretty "closed envelope" on this one until it reaches a "ready for market" status. I'll post various updates as work progresses. :)