BasementJack

I recently rebuilt my home domain controller and renamed my home domain that I use internally.

As a result, all the links to my subversion server are now broken.

In other words, my local working copy thinks it’s linked to a subversion server that it can no longer reach.

if only there were a way to update my local copy to let it know where to look…

first I opened terminal (on a mac here, open the cmd prompt on windows)

cd to the working directory

enter svn info – this will display where subversion thinks it’s pointing to

enter svn switch –relocate FROM http://oldpath  TO http://newpath

Video: CODA & SUBVERSION HOW TO

I did a video tutorial recently on how to use CODA (A popular mac editor used by web designers) with the Source Control System Subversion (Using Beanstalkapp.com’s free account offering)

The video is just under 20 minutes long and covers:

Setting up a free account on BeanstalkApp.com
How to configure the free account.
How to configure the ’sites’ tab in Coda to work with the free account.
How to push changes to the Subversion Server (in this case Beanstalkapp)

How to compare an old revision with the current one.

How to ‘roll back’ a code change to an older version that’s in Subversion.

I’m working on a project in PHP at the moment.

Nothing gets a project moving like dropping a good grid control on  a page, spending 2 minutes setting a few properties and having a nice editable grid.

For ASP.NET, I’ve used the obout.com grid before with pretty good results.

Since this is my first PHP project I thought I’d see what grids are out there.

Here’s what I found…

———————

PlatinumGrid – only works with Delphi – no go.
PHPEzyGrid  -sucked – no inline editing.

KoolPHP.net $130 for the suite – nice flexibility – other tools too (combo box, calendar etc)

AppHP.com’s grid – looks nice – cheap $35

phpgrid.com – requires zend optimizer $99

Active Widgets –  too expensive ($500)

DHTMLX – I like that this is actually a Javascript grid – The  good part about this is that the knowledge gained and the grid itself could be used on other platforms (ie ASP.NET) The bad is that there’s some back end server code that needs to be written. also kind of pricey ($200-450) Typically with a pure Javascript based grid, the back end has to be written 100% by you, however, they have a connector product (still in beta no price given) The nice thing here is that the connector works with php, asp.net and jsp.

eyesis – Does not seem to have the features of other grids (no inline editing)
On the plus side, it does seem very easy to use, so there are likely places where this could be a good fit (last update was Dec 2008 however…)

ExtJS is another javascript control set – they claim to have a bunch of big customers.

It’s not cheap ($330) but like DHTMLx you are buying a whole slew of tools.

One nice thing about ExtJS is that they have a designer tool for it.
They also offer phone support (paid not free)

jQuery Grid (jqGrid) – this is a popular javascript grid for use with the jQuery framework. -$300 per platform (PHP/ASP.net )

datatables.net – (jQuery based – donation based)

SlickGrid (http://github.com/mleibman/SlickGrid)
This is my favorate from an end user perspective for it’s inline editing – it’s just like a spreadsheet.

<Query><SoapAction>http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/soap/GetListItems</SoapAction> 
   <Method Namespace="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/soap/" Name="GetListItems"> 
      <Parameters> 
         <Parameter Name="listName"> 
            <DefaultValue>{8529D70B-D632-4CC8-A1E7-2C25F29BE1E0}(this could also be a list name, it doesn't have to be a GUID)</DefaultValue> 
         </Parameter> 
         <Parameter Name="viewName"> 
            <DefaultValue>{2FC6AA42-EA95-4C18-AB07-33E25EBBA85D}(could also be a view name)</DefaultValue> 
            <ViewFields> 
               <FieldRef Name="Resolve_x0020__x0023_" /> 
               <FieldRef Name="Product" /> 
               <FieldRef Name="Release" /> 
               <FieldRef Name="Theme" /> 
               <FieldRef Name="Pre_x002d_Req_x0020_Estimate" /> 
            </ViewFields> 
         </Parameter> 
      </Parameters> 
   </Method> 
   <ElementPath IgnoreNamespaces="True">*</ElementPath> 
</Query>

PHP doesn’t offer getmonth, getday or getyear.

Instead use this:

$unixtime = strtotime($test);
echo date(‘m’, $unixtime);
echo date(‘d’, $unixtime);
echo date(‘y’, $unixtime );

strtotime creates a unix style time (The number of seconds since some point in time around 1970)

Once you have that, you can use the date function as shown.

I’m a computer guy.

In the beginning, life was simple. You had one computer – you kept your files on it. If you backed up, you did so to a floppy disk.

Today, I have a few computers, and I use them for different things, but I need my data on all of them. If they were all desktops, Life would be easy – keep all the files on one, then share it out to the rest. Add a laptop and things get messy.

What I want is to have a local copy of all my files, and have those automagically copied to and from the server whenever changes take place.

For that, I’m using SuperFlexible File Synchronizer.  I’ve tried over a half dozen apps on the Mac for Sync and this one is by far the best. It’s also available in a Windows version, which is awesome, because one of my computers is a windows computer -that solves the problem of what to do there, and SF is available as a bundle that includes both versions.

What makes SuperFlexible better than the others? Control & Options. Superflexible lives up to it’s name. Do you need scheduled sync – no problem. Exclude .DS_Store? Got it. Need to sign into a Windows server before you run the backup? Done. I could go on and on – it seems to EVERYTHING. Here’s a few more things it can do – it can encrypt and zip each file so you can backup to internet based storage like Amazon S3 or Google without worrying about your data being exposed. It can detect when files move so they aren’t simply re-synced. It can add version numbers to your files when it copies them over.  The interface is well refined too. When you run a sync, you can do so in the foreground or background – background is kind of like Autopilot, where foreground gives you a bunch of information – what files are going to copy, in what direction etc…  Here’s an area that set this one apart – you can right click on any file before it’s synced, and tell it what direction to sync, to ignore it, to delete it from one but not the other etc..

I also found it rewarding that during testing, I wiped out the target folder, and on the next run, SF came up and asked if the folder should be re-created. (other tools have given an error in this scenario)

My setup is as follows:
I have a folder I keep all my stuff in. I keep a copy of that folder on my Mac Laptop, and another copy on my home server. On the Mac, I have a Sync job setup with SuperFlexible File Synchronizer that keeps things in both places up to date.  This way, when I’m on my laptop, I’m always working with a local copy of my data. If I take the laptop on a trip, that data comes with me. When I get home, it copies it to the Server.

SuperFlexible File Synchronizer also has some other good qualities and I hope to use it for online backup soon as well. It supports backing up to Amazon S3, and Google storage support is in Beta as of this writing. It also supports FTP & Webdav folders (such as apple’s iDisk). And as mentioned above, it supports zipping and encrypting files which makes me far more comfortable using online storage as a backup target.

I recently picked up an Epson GT-S50 Scanner for a project I am working on for a client.

My Client’s office is using Windows, and at home I have a combination of windows and Mac.

I’ve read tons of great reviews on the Fujitsu ScanSnap scanners (like the S1500), but you have to buy a mac or windows version of those, and they only work with the built in software.  There were some issues when Mac OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard came out, and the scanners lost a lot of functionality for a few months while Fujitsu readied new software.

The big draw to the Fujitsu is how good the software is that comes with it. It does a bunch of things for you – and may people say it “just works”.

After reading a review on the Epson GT-S50 online, I knew the software wasn’t as polished, but wondered how far off it would be..

Impressions:

I connected the GT-S50 to my Macbook Pro and installed all the latest drivers.

The epson has a nice 2 line display that tells you what’s going on, and on Windows you can see what preset you have selected, along with the description.  On the mac, the description is gone, you see Job 01, Job 02 etc…

One button scanning is HORRIBLE. Awful, the worst.  It takes FOREVER to even get the thing started. In fact, I thought I’d time one and it’s been 2 minutes and the software still hasn’t scanned (the panel says Scanning and the software launched on the mac so it’s doing something.) When I hover over the ‘Progress’ Window, I get the beachball of death.

Ok 3 minutes in and I’ll ‘force Quit’, but the scanner still thinks it’s scanning.

Click the red button on the scanner, – power light stops flashing, display still says Scanning.

I thought I’d scan once manually with the Epson scan software, but when I launch that, it shows the icon in the doc, but no menu.

I tried launching Apple Image Capture, but the scanner doesn’t show up so it’s now time to power cycle the scanner.

At this point I’m thinking the scanner sucks, but in reality, the software they have for ‘one touch’ sucks.

The reason you’d buy an Epson over the Fujitsu is because it has a twain driver, and the Fujitsu does not. This means you can use other software with the scanner.

So now I’m out to find out if any of the other software is any good.

I have adobe Acrobat Pro 9.3 installed, and it can scan using the twain driver.

Acrobat does a great job with the scanner, it’s just a little slow. The whole process is slow, but…
If you use Acrobat to scan, you’re pretty much done when you’re done. Since Acrobat Pro does the OCR, the deskew, the page rotation, the auto page sizing & the image compression there’s no need to go into another program to clean it up. In fact ,after you scan, your document is sitting in acrobat, waiting for you to save it – So you don’t even have to go find it and rename it. When you’re done, you’re done…

Still I wondered if I was missing out on the scansnap  - There’s so many good reviews of that thing.

I thought about it for a bit, but decided that the twain interface was something I really liked the flexibility of having.

And the Epson scanner seems better built (11 lbs vs the 6lb fujitsu)

And I’d read more than once about the fujitsu misfeeding issues.

So at this point I feel the Epson has the best hardware, but not the best software.

Enter Image Capture.

The macs come with a program called image capture.

I opened it, and my scanner was there, so I used that – It was fast!

it doesn’t do everything that acrobat does, but if you need to whip up a quick letter sized pdf, it does the trick – quickly!

This has me on a hunt for more apps that support the image capture interface.

So far I’ve had little luck.

I tried 2 or 3 apps that support image capture and in all cases the scan comes up as a gray box.

So I’m not sure what’s up, but somethings up.

I’m also not sure if the image capture driver came from epson or apple.

I need to hook it up to a second mac, one that hasn’t had the epson drivers installed, to see where the drivers are coming from, and then hopefully I can point to either apple or epson and get the problem fixed.

(for all I know the image capture driver might be using the twian driver and not displaying the dialog)’

I read an article today talking about how easy it is to get sued for using commecial codecs like h264, mpeg 2 and mpeg 3, the site below alters alternative codec, that are completely free.

http://www.xspf.org/

The other day I had to extend the C partition on a server.

Microsoft has a command for this, it’s part of DISKPART.EXE

Unfortunately, the needed subcommand is “EXTEND” -which fails on the Boot parition (aka drive C)

Fortunately, there’s an easy way around this – boot from a winPE CD, and the CD becomes the Boot Partition, freeing the C drive for the extend operation to work it’s magic.

Making a WinPE disk isn’t hard, but it’s not as easy as downloading and burning an iso either. In total, there’s 8 commands I needed to enter to make my custom WinPE iso.

About WinPE

WinPE is a ‘PreInstallationEnvironment’ – whatever that means!  To me, it’s a bootable CD, that brings up a windows command prompt. I’ve used one in the past to get files off a retired server that I no longer had access to the password for – boot from winpe, copy the files to a usbkey, done.

Where do you get it?

If you have access to technet or MSDN, you can download something called the windows Automated Installation Kit (Windows AIK) This is filed away with different versions of Windows, it’s not under a menu like tools, or applications, I found it mixed in with Windows 7 as well as 2008R2. Both locations list the same ISO for download.

Unfortunately, the iso you get from technet is the AIK Iso, not the ISO of the WinPE CD you want to burn. You have to first download the AIK then follow the steps below to construct a WINPE iso customized with the drivers you need for your raid card.

Lets begin,

Download the AIK

While you’re waiting for the AIK to download, you’ll also need drivers for your raid card.  You’ll need both the driver (usually a .sys file) and a .INF file. In my case, I looked at device manager to see what driver (.sys file) was in use by the raid card, then I went to HP’s website and downloaded a driver set, extracted it and confirmed that the .sys file I needed was there – there was a .inf with the same name, so I figured I was in business….

(back in a few, waiting for this to download…)

Burn the ISO of the AIK to a DVD (or extract the iso to your hard drive)

Run the Windows AIK Setup (there’s a link to it on the autorun that pops up)

Once thats done you’ll have a new folder in your start menu ‘Windows AIK’ open that folder.

Have a look at the Windows PE manual under documents.

The section I used was ‘Customizing Windows PE’->’Windows PE Walkthroughs’->’Walkthrough: Create a Bootable Windows PE RAM Disk on CD-ROM’

What this does is help make you a bootable CD that will load itself into Ram – you’ll know its running in ram, because the command prompt points to drive X: which is the ram disk.

Before you get started with the above walkthrough, have a look at one more section:

‘Customizing Windows PE’->’Windows PE Customizations How-To Topics’->’Add a Device Driver to an Offline Windows PE Image’

ok what does that mean? well there’s another help option for ‘online’. What’s the difference? Well ‘Online’ means you’ve already booted from the CD, we are still building our CD so we want to use the advice for the ‘offline’ that way, once our CD is done, we won’t need to do anything else to use the driver.

Ok now if you’re clever, you’ve read both sections and have noticed theres something a bit off in trying to merge the two sections – the instructions in the walkthrough tell you to copy winpe.wm to \iso\sources\boot.wim,

but then in the driver section, they tell you to open the winpe.wim to change it. I did so, then when I was done, I just recopied the file to the boot.wim…

Here’s the list of steps I followed:

1. started deployment tools command prompt as administrator
2. ran copype.cmd x86 c:\winpe_x86
3. Dism /Mount-WIM /WimFile:c:\winpe_x86\winpe.wim /index:1 /MountDir:c:\winpe_x86\mount
4. Dism /image:<path_to_image> /Add-Driver /Driver:(Here I put the folder path to the folder with the .inf and .sys files) /recurse
   (the /recurse causes all the drivers in that folder to be added)
5. dism /unmount-wim /Mountdir:c:\winpe_x86\mount /commit
   At this point, we’ve altered the winpe.wim (which is basicallly a fancy .iso file)
6. copy c:\winpe_x86\winpe.wim c:\winpe_x86\ISO\sources\boot.wim
7. oscdimg -n -bC:\winpe_x86\etfsboot.com C:\winpe_x86\ISO C:\winpe_x86\winpe_x86.iso
   (this created an actual .iso you can burn with your burning software)
8. Burn the .iso to CD. I used the free & excellent ImgBurn

That’s it!

8 relatively simple steps and you’ll have a bootable Windows PE CD with the Raid drivers of your choosing!

Pearnote (http://www.usefulfruit.com/pearnote/) is a really clever idea – a sound recording app, along with a text editor.

As you type, some hidden data is stored with your text linking it to that position in the audio recording app.

I can’t imagine how awesome this would be if you were a student and wanted to take notes, and record a lecture on your laptop.

Great idea!

http://www.microsoft.com/click/SharePointDeveloper/