BINARYBB.info - John Galbraith

It started out back in the Windows NT and NT Server days when we made that central network dumping ground. I remember mapping that 10GB drive for the text files and word perfect documents to be stored. It was great. The vision of no more floppy disks stacked up on desks and people accidentally taking the data home in their pockets. The idea of a central drive that we could all dial up into the LAN and get to.  I remember walking around to all the computers and mapping that drive on each individual machine.

Well,  Windows 2000 came out and Active Directory began the beast. We had these servers with 3 36GB drives in a RAID config Wonderful design and fast! We came up with these batch files to map several drives on different servers. Then 73GB drives came out, then 136GB. Unreal data storage and the company just grew into it. We were now using Office 2000 and SQL 2000 that was generating reports in xls and doc formats, then we figured out how to make pdf files from the SQL server and the data blew up out of control. But, everyone was able to get to their drives and their department’s data.

Then came Windows XP, Office 2003, and Windows Server 2003 with Active Directory 2003 functional level. We turned one of those servers into a centralized print server for our 35+ network printers and switched all the login scripts to vbs format allowing us to map printers on login along with mapping drives and doing several other nifty tricks.

Along comes Vista and Improved Vista (Windows 7). Damn it. Suddenly, those scripts are blowing up in our multi OS environment. Do we upgrade everyone? Hell no, some of the legacy software will not run on the newer OS and you have to have Professional or Ultimate to join them to the domain.

We need to map drives and we need to map printers. We can’t map drives with vbs and can’t map printers with batch files the same way on Vista, XP, and 7.  We only have one spot in AD to specify a login script.  Now what?

Here is the solution:

Use both vbs and batch files. Plug the VBS script into Active Directory and have it call your batch file with your old style net use commands in it. It it timeless and works on all the operating systems. Then, map the printers in the script and you are done. This method is actually faster to map the drives then using scripting host and easy to do. Here is the code for your vbs script: IN RED

‘Declare your network object for your printer mapping
Set wshNetwork = CreateObject(“WScript.Network”)

Happy coding.

It takes two elements to effectively hide the scrollbars. First you need to put some CSS in your CSS file or head.

<style type=”text/css”>
body {

overflow: hidden;

}

</style>

Then you need to insert scroll=”no” into the body tag. Tada. Done. No more scroll bar.

John

YES! We do. Legacy systems and older KVM switches call for that PS2 mouse and finding a laser PS2 mouse is a pain in the rear. So, I go into the server room and that mouse is disgustingly jumpy and annoying. When I pop out the ball it appears that someone installed carpet on the roller pins and there was a quarter sized lint ball hanging out up in there. Ewwwwwwww… I had to scrape the grey nasties off of the roller pins and get the mouse out of the mouse. I cleaned up the ball and wala.. a working mouse again. Now, if tons of techs during day shift all touch this mouse, why am I the one to finally do something about it? Or, have we gone ignorant with all the new laser mouses out now?

John

I found out the answer to that question lately when I sat down in front of someone’s MAC and realized I was just an infant on it. I couldn’t find anything and couldn’t help the user. This is a terrible feeling. Am I a PC person? Am I a MAC hater? Well, the only thing I don’t like about Apple is the initial price. Now that I have a little more money rolling into the bank account I can look at options like owning a MAC and being able to support such devices. So, I have decided that the PC I put into my new office is going to be a MAC mini with a 32 inch LCD TV with 1080p HD that I will hook up to the PC via the HDMI cable on the back. The PC has virtually no foot print so there is no beast on the floor or on the desktop chewing up precious space and sucking up dog hair (I have 2 little pugs.)

On top of that, you can go get a 32 inch or 26 inch LCD TV flat panel and use that as a high def monitor for the price of a 24 inch wide screen monitor with far less features and capabilities.  Plus, I can watch actual TV on the TV if need be or have a console for gaming set up.

What really matters is that I get the MAC exposure needed to support people that own them. I really don’t need Linux exposure though I have it already and can make my way around *NIX systems easily. But, people that use nix, usually don’t need tech support for it because they already know how and where to get the information needed to support them. Windows users and MAC users, not so much. On the 25th I worked on a sweet old lady’s computer and she knew how to get her email and scan and look at pictures. That’s about it. What else does she need though. The problem I got called out on was coming behind someone that charged her $99 for a PC cleaning and didn’t fix the original problem. Plus, they left her with ony 256MB of RAM when the COMMIT charge was averaging 560MB at an idle. They put Microsoft Security Essentials which is garbage software. It might rock if they would actually finish the software. Very unpolished and unprofessional looking hunk of crap there.

So, my point in this article, do not limit yourself to Hardware or Software. Don’t limit yourself to Microsoft products or MAC or even Linux while flaming the competitors. Dive into what you are not fond of or don’t have a preference for. Chances are, someone out there disagrees with you and likes what  you don’t like. If you want to help that person and have a happy paying customer, you had better know their systems too.

While browsing the web to research the new WeTab coming out soon to compete with the limited iPad, I stumbled upon the site from a twitter page for more information, a review, release date, and pricing on yoogadget.com. How exciting. Instead, you get to a wordpress admin page. WHAAAAAAT?!?!?!?!?!?!? Yeah! What would you like to name your blog and what is your email address. Then, you do the install, it fails all the sql script installs and gives you the admin password at the bottom.

WordPress is a great software to use for a blog. It is what I am using for this one. All you have to do is exactly what I did. READ THE DAMN INSTRUCTIONS THAT COME WITH THE DOWNLOAD! It tells you how to properly point the site to you database server and schema. Then, it tells you to do the admin script. Then DELETE the script.

This website sucks because the creator failed to follow simple instructions and left a security hole on his webserver. He also promised some juicy information on twitter that his site is not delivering. This is a real stinker of a site. For this, you made the Binarybb.info John Galbraith Websites that Suck List. Congrats.. now fix it.

Ever start coding something and you need to tie it into a data set and can’t remember how..

I found a website that will help with it. Though, it is plastered with advertisements and it is not the prettiest site on the net, it is crammed full of information.

http://www.connectionstrings.com/

Enjoy,

John

This is a simple formula and a few extra steps to format it the way you want it.

Let’s pick a date to count down to. Note: This has to be a date in the future because you can’t count down to a date that is already passed. How about Christmas this year. Let’s put it in a common date format that is rarely confused like DDMMMYYYY. So, 25DEC2010 will be the date we use in the formula in that format.

Now, we want to convert the date into a numeric value. Every date has one and Excel can add or subtract it. So start your formula with your equal sign:

=

then add the date value:

=datevalue(“25DEC2010″)

Now you have converted 25DEC2010 into a datavalue. Next you subtract the datevalue of today but do not specify what date today is so it will take the default of now. that would look like this:

=datevalue(“25DEC2010″)-today()

You will notice that the field put a date that is WAY in the past in a date format. You want a number so right click on the field and go to format cells. Change the data type from date to number. Now,  you will notice a number. Now in a cell before or after give it a label like “Days until Christmas.” Every day you open the spreadsheet, the number will update with countdown to the date you specified.

Have fun with this one. I use it to count down to deadlines for projects and important dates like my anniversary, wifes birthday, Valentines day, and other days that could potentially get me in trouble if I forget them.

Enjoy,

John

Spreadsheet programs are amazing. They are probably the most versitile inventions to date yet, if not abused (Using them to STORE data like a DATABASE), they can be something of great use to your project, organization, or anything really. We all know that we can plug in formulas and do exiting things like track how much we spend on Baconators at Wendys. You can also give some boxes a 3D look with a simple color and border trick.

1. Put a darker shade in some cells for a back ground color. Not too dark or it will have a reverse effect.

2. Give the box you want the stick out as 3d a lighter shade or white even.

3. Give that box a thick outside border.

You will notice that the box now pops out at you. Try it.

Enjoy

John

www.mpmis.com

This one is a great example of out of the box and into play. I bet they have a great deal of resources in their building but I really have no desire to find out based off of their web site. It is about 8 pages of nothing with a boring design and no content. They spout a little off in their service page but I didn’t even read it. If I wanted to read text files I would go to textfiles.com and read interesting ones from old BBS systems.

Their saving grace was a tiny link on the bottom of the page labeled Contact Us. It had their address, contact number, and email address. They could easily dump their entire site and make it that one page with the same effect.

This website sucks. I really hope they fix it.

John

I get new user requests every day for this blog but I don’t enable any users. Most of them have a .ru email address or gmail.com email address.  I have no idea which ones are human and which ones are bots so I suspect that they are all bots. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. Here is the deal. I am going to create a page that is open to post a reason why you want posting rights to this blog. I would love other user’s input. I just want to ensure that you are human and not going to post some lame viagra or cialis crap. My website is a place of free technical information, not a russian brides advertisement.  I will try and get that page up and running by the end of this weekend.

John