So I had an odd situation where one company I was working at turned off ALL OUTGOING ports (yes – all including the web) for all employees. You needed special permission and they would enable this. So all remote access was removed for all of my other clients – so I hitch hiked free wifi from a neighbour, but long ago – I moved my “My Documents” to a network drive. To switch this back … one needs to know a few things. My VS 2013’s IIS Express 8.0 would not read or write to its IIS config location (because it was still pointing to a network location which was unavailable) on the My Documents sub-folder. Well, here are the keys to solving it – DO NOT UNINSTALL IT YET – try some things first.

There are TWO registry entries to change My Documents. Read the command line stuff in this article and sure enough this was the key

• reg add “HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders” /v “Personal” /t REG_SZ /d “C:\Users\%USERNAME%\Documents” /f
• reg add “HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders” /v “Personal” /t REG_EXPAND_SZ /d %%USERPROFILE%%”\Documents” /f

Note that the “Personal” key is the one that represents “My Documents” and on Windows 7 points the DOCUMENTS folder under your user profile. It is this 2nd one that was the clincher.

So, a lot of the ports I need at a client are getting shutdown to the point, where I cannot work at that location to get my work done. I have another client not too far that I can SOMETIMES pick up on their wireless signal. Hmmm, what if I had a directional antenna and can boost the signal strength and use their wifi? Well, I made a phone call tomy favourite Computer hardware shop – the Computer Rack here in Calgary to see if they gad an antenna and any ideas. He mentioned that I might consider an ASUS RT-N12 ($45 CDN) and put dd-wrt on it. Yes … I thought – that will do it … then, when I got home and got thinking about it, I had a old router that I put coova network on and … oh look another one – with nothing on it – a wrt54g v5. Lets try! Yes – I got it to work … Continue reading →

Deleting old backups automatically – no it does not work well. Here is how to do it manually.

Links so far in my research worth keeping (no solution yet)
a) recovering a runtime solution – hold down Ctrl-Shift while double clicking application icon and hold them down til you see the dialog
http://www.filemaker.com/help/html/fmpa_tools.24.19.html
b) importing data into upgraded runtime
http://www.filemaker.com/help/html/fmpa_tools.24.17.html#1028635
c) starting runtime solutions
http://www.filemaker.com/help/html/fmpa_tools.24.18.html#1028687
d) naming a filemaker solution and this mysterious file extension
http://www.filemaker.com/help/html/fmpa_tools.24.15.html

Q’s for self: in the docs above, there is

• a runtime app file and
• a solution file – so what is this “solution file extension” and where is this file with this extension?

Sure enough – look for this renamed .fmp12 file or solution file – this is the database file. In fact – the person who “packages it up” using the Filemaker advanced designer tool was prompted to make this extension change so write it down along with the special password or packaging code.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/555159

It works. Now, I have to have this workbook work when others do not have this “other workbook” so I use late binding and am not using “Tool->References” to ensure any of this works. Hard coding the path is also what I did – but since it is string you use to reference the other workbook – this too could be abstracted to bypass the other workbook if it is not opened already or prompt them to load it.

Lets say you have an XML data source and you access it with VBA or thorugh a sheet with a data source already preset once and it worked. Note that this assumes that the link is behind a popup to enter your username/password (Basic Authentication) The next time you go into that sheet or run the macro to refetch the information – you will get an error or no data.

Microsoft in short, has disallowed basic authentication for non-SLL urls. In my case Report Services (SSRS) is an intranet url that does not have SSL or does not begin with HTTPS nor has it been set up that way by IT – so … Office 2010+ products will not work unless you do a registry tweak or enable SSL on the source computer’s SSRS. So do ONE of the following

• Client side adjustment (not ideal)
• SSRS Server computer adjustment

Here is a good post that accurately resets what Excel parses on when you paste text. I have known for a long long time, that the LAST text-to-columns settings is what is used when one pastes data into excel, but I thought I would see (I finally snapped for the last time) what other people did. Well, it is a macro of what I always do by hand – a fake text to columns that sets things in prep for the real one. My issues is that I have all sorts of macros that could set this here or there depending on the last one I ran. Thanks for the post!

http://spreadsheetpage.com/index.php/tip/clearing_the_text_to_columns_parameters/

Here is a good article with many links and debates. I have used the “accepted” answer and gotten 95% accurate results – so why not 100%? I have not solved that one. I am trying the 2nd answer which in the efficiency graph gives better results.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18932/how-can-i-remove-duplicate-rows

Here is a nugget – a friend of mine made a dashboard with no VBA where the user IN EXCEL – pulls down a dynamic value to … lets say “may 2015” and the charts etc. update. One could do this in VBA, but, you don’t have to. I thought it was worth saving/sharing the link.

I have a client who wants some PDFs messed with. To do so, layers need to be split and recompiled. Here are links that will help me

1. decide which SDK to use
2. how to … well … do it.

• A good discussion of pdf libraries
• layers or content streams
• extract layers
• http://www.soft-xpansion.eu/files/pdflib/PDF%20Xpansion%20SDK%20Guide.pdf
• foxxit, sdk documentation
• PDFtron
• pdf creation
• opensource
• separate into text and other
• a good article steering the way
• pdfkit – a nodejs sdk to MAKE pdfs
• pdffill, pdf.wondershare (pdffill object remover)