Software History

I recently came across a site called TED. It’s a web site for the annual Technology, Entertainment and Design conference.  The web site itself has a showcase of videos clips from conference speakers and is worth a look.  The thing I want to quickly post about however is something I think is quite innovative … an interface I’ve not seen anywhere else (yet).

A little while ago I received a request for the installation of Spotify on a work computer. I’d not heard of it at this point so I did some research and discovered that it was a piece of software that linked you to a massive library of music on the Internet. After a bit of discussion in trying to ascertain what the business case was for installing this to a work computer it faded away.

Unfortunately due to illness it’s taken me a couple of extra days to put this together, but at the weekend I attended The Gadget Show Live (GSL) at the NEC, Birmingham.  The Gadget Show is a UK television programme shown on Channel 5.  Each series has a weekly show and it showcases new technologies and compares leading products against one another.  it’s usually a good watch and the journalistic comparison is presented at a layman level and at the same time tends to offer some insightful points on practicalities of individual items.

Today has been a very busy day!  An early start saw me pulling together a variety of thoughts and pieces of information in preparation for the Higher Education Academy’s ICT team away day.  This was the first away day the team had ever had and there was certainly some apprehension as to how the day would pan out.

I’ve recently been helping some colleagues develop some reporting templates and they had a very particular requirement around drop down lists (which I’ll probably post about at some point in the future).  One issue that did occur however was that the dynamic lists that were incorporated into the workbook were added to and even though I had mentioned to the users about using Excel’s name manager to redefine the range of cells with that name, they forgot and inevitably the workbook would end up back with me to rectify.

When I’m asked about setting up a new wiki for a group, I often recommend PBWiki as it has a number of good features and for education it can be used for free.  Since I work within the HE sector this is a simple and quick solution for many of the cross-institutional groups and many people are familiar with it.

Today I was taking part in an online presentation from Dr. Simon Ball of JISC TechDis; one of his regular HE updates.  They use an online presentation system known as Instant Presenter to deliver the presentations on a roughly quarterly basis and they last for about half an hour.  A genuine whistle-stop tour.

Here’s a little tip for anyone who owns a Sony PRS-505 eBook reader.  It has a couple of expansion slots on it for an SD card and a Sony Memory Stick Pro Duo, and whilst these are intended to allow you to expand the number of books you can carry around there’s a bit of extra functionality you can draw upon here.

I have a problem with my mobile phone number … I can never remember it because I rarely tell it to anyone any more.  So when I do need to tell someone and there’s no one around who can tell me what it is from their phone I have to resort to looking it up on my own phone.  The quickest way I’ve found to do this is to punch in a special Vodafone code.

Today I came across an issue in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 (a.k.a. MOSS).  I was trying to upload some Microsoft PowerPoint slides into a slide library in a My Site and everything had gone fine with the first presentation, but the second one I tried came up with an error:

It’s been rather busy of late and I’ve only just got chance to start posting again.  So I thought I’d best begin by posting about the weekend of the 8th, 9th and 10th of May.

Recently I’ve been working a little bit with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.  It is recommended that Internet Explorer is used to interact with this web based system as it provides the widest and tightest integration and range of features.  Unfortunately I have a strong preference for Mozilla Firefox over Internet Explorer.

I’ve been tinkering recently with some things around portable applications which I will probably post more about in the hopefully not too distant future.  One of the things I’ve been trawling around for and busily configuring are various free web server packages that are “portable”.  Unfortunately it has taken a fair bit of effort to actually track down and configure something that is portable enough.   The problem for me is that I have a particular need to locate the web server within a particular sub folder and in the case of most software packages this is not an option.

It’s been quite a few weeks since I’ve been able to devote any time to blogging. It has just been a really busy time for me. However I’m currently sat on a train between Edinburgh and York so it’s an excellent opportunity to have a bit of a catch up. Specifically I wanted to post something about one of the biggest things I’ve worked on recently - The Higher Education Academy Conference 2009.

I like using VBScripts and the Windows Script Host to resolve issues as it has proved quick and flexible for most tasks.  One thing I have found problematic on occasion is the installation of the scripts on a user’s PC.  It takes time to do if it is not being deployed using logon scripts, group policy, etc.  To this end I decided to write a function to allow a script to install itself.   The script below is primarily made up from three functions/routines.

Sometimes I need to create shortcuts with VBScript especially if the script is being installed and a shortcut needs to be created to the script.  The code to create a shortcut is quite straight forward,  but the CreateShortcut() function presented here pulls everything together into a single reusable form.  Optional parameters that you don’t want to use can be filled by the use of NULL and environment variables can be included in file paths to make this as flexible as possible.

I’ve seen a few variations over the years on how to create a progress bar and an update window in VBScript.  I’ve taken many of the ideas and some of my own to create what I hope is a flexible solution that not only allows you to display updates, reports, etc., but also a reasonable looking progress bar.   If you want to skip ahead then the code is at the bottom of this post and includes an example, but for those of you who want to know a little more about how to use it or how it works I’ll explain some of the whys and wherefores.

Power saving options on computers are something that I personally think are great.  They not only help reduce carbon footprints, but they also help draw out even more life from your laptop battery.   One of the main ways in which this is done (others being things such as disabling hardware) is by having an inactivity option that turns off the screen and the hard disk after a period of inactivity.  Unfortunately there are times when this isn’t something you want.  The primary example of this is when you are giving a presentation.

National Rail Enquiries in the UK have cornered the market for iPhone apps for UK rail.  It used to be open and there apparently used to be a pretty reasonable app out there for free.  National Rail’s app on the other hand is not as nice and costs a few too many pennies for many people.

There are lots of Twitter clients out there for smart phones, but you can also tweet from a ‘dumb’ phone.  The trick is to use a service like TwitSay or TwitterFone.  Once you register, these services give you a local telephone number to call.  You can then record a short voice message.

On Windows XP you may find that you need to carry out some tasks as an administrator for which you would logon as  an administrator (local or network/domain).  If the user is already logged on then you can choose to run as administrator for many activities by selecting run as from a file’s context menu.  However not every type of file has this option.

I spend an inordinate amount of time at home sat on the sofa in front of my TV working on my laptop.  I have a nice little media set-up consisting of a Mac Mini connected to my Sony Bravia TV which provides me with a nice little Internet connected multimedia option.  Rather than watching TV all the time I frequently find that I want to listen to some music while I work and because I’m quite fickle with what I want to listen to at any time Spotify has proven to be a great little piece of software.

I was scripting some Active Directory extracts today and I needed to check if a string of text contained two colons.  I was checking if the detail on particular entries was to minutes or seconds; e.g. 13:25:33 vs. 13:25 .  I couldn’t find a function to count occurrences within a string so I ended up writing my own….

In the past I’ve used FSUTIL to create large test files of data to process.  Unfortunately you need administrator permissions to use this utility.  I decided to write a command line utility (called “Make Test File” but abbreviated to MTF.EXE) to allow non-administrators to do the same.  It’s written in VB.NET so it isn’t as quick as FSUTIL, but as they say “it does the job”, and it fulfilled my immediate needs.

Recently a number of my friends have hard hard drive failures and have asked me to retrieve data from their hard drives.  I’ve been reasonably successful in each case recovering well over 95% of the data in each case - thanks not to me but the proliferation of free data recovery tools out there on the Internet.

Annoyingly VBScript does not have a “Ceiling” function, i.e. one that takes a number and rounds it ‘up’ to the nearest integer (whole number).  So since I had need of one I wrote one.

Last week I attended a second workshop on Evidence Net.  It was launched a few weeks ago at The Higher Education Academy Annual Conference 2009 and has been growing in use across the HE sector ever since.

I probably should have realised a lot sooner than I did, but there has been something a bit odd with my SpotIT feed on my RebootIT blog of late.

After FlagIT, RebootIT, PostIT and SpotIT, ZoomIT sounds like part of the theme. Unfortunately it isn’t, but it is a great free tool from SysInternals.