By Matthew Hile on 2/27/2009 2:01 PM

While looking to solve a different Outlook issue I ran across this post. It solves a common problem - intending to send an attachment but forgetting to do so.

The post has a macro that reads your email message before it is sent. If it finds the word "attach" in the message and there are no attachments it reminds you to add one. This will be a great way for preventing me from looking foolish (at least in this one area).

This code and the instructions worked great for me in Office 2007.

By Matthew Hile on 1/29/2009 2:08 PM

I develop charts for Excel that are to be viewed on the screen AND printed or copied on black and white printers/copiers. To do this I make use of the various chart pattern fill formats that allow me to apply some sort of crosshatching fill to the bar(s).

Yesterday, as I was graphing in Excel 2007, I found out that this was no longer that option. I could only use gradients or graphic images to make my bars distinct. arguh!

Off to the web.

The first resource I used was from Eric Patterson, a program manager on the Excel team. His blog post on Chart Pattern Fills did much of what I needed and included an Excel add-in tool. However, it only used black patterns so the nice look one would get on the screen or when a color printer was used were not available. 

So back to the web.

The second site had an add-in that allowed me to create colored pattern fills - exactly what I needed. This one is by  a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Andy Pope from England. He has a lot of great chart help but for my purposes I honed in on his Pattern Fill Add-in. That page contains both the downloadable add-in and another link with instructions about how to add add-ins to Excel. His solution worked like a charm and it's free! Thanks Andy!

By Matthew Hile on 1/27/2009 7:49 AM

After my recent computer crash I decided to install Vista 64. I had 4GB of memory installed on my computer but the 32 bit version of Vista (or any 32 bit operating system for that matter) could not access all of it. After that install everything worked EXCEPT I could no longer sync Outlook with my Palm based Treo 650.

I searched the web and sent questions to various support sites. Basically the story is that Palm does not support syncing on Vista 64 and they seemed unlikely to ever do so. (Another sign of Palm's downward spiral.)

There is lots of chatter on the Internet about difficulties getting various Bluetooth devices to work on Vista 64 - my solution was to go to the Vista hardware compatible center and purchase a device that was compatible with Vista 64. I ended up with a IOGear GBU321 which is a 2.0 USB adapter, Class 1.

I got everything installed. I linked the two Bluetooth devices so they would talk with one another. I walked through the "Set up new device" on the Treo which created had me create a virtual serial port on the PC to us in syncing. Having completed all of the steps I clicked the HotSync button on the Treo and ...

Error on the Treo "Unable to initiate HotSync operation because the port is in use by another application."

So back to the Internet. What did I try?  Firewall on/off (on PC), slowing the speed of connections (on the Treo), changing com port (Treo), uninstalling and reinstalling Bluetooth (PC), standing on my head...

What finally worked? After much plunking around I found a post that mentioned NOT checking the box for serial transfer in the HotSync configuration on the PC. (Right click the HotSync manager on the system tray, go to the "Connections" page, uncheck "Serial" and check "Bluetooth".) This did not make much sense to me because the transfer was to occur over that serial port but... unchecking the Serial option worked and my phone was happily syncing with my desktop!

So give it a try. You can sync a Treo Palm with Vista 64!

By Matthew Hile on 1/26/2009 3:45 PM

One morning at work I had happen a computer user's worst fear. Trying to boot I got a "no boot device" error. What this means is that my computer's hard drive had become corrupted and could no longer be read. My computer had two drives configured as a RAID 0 that means that parts of each file was written across two drives to make reading and writing faster. In checking the physical drives the RAID controller reported one as being off-line with errors. So, even though only one of my drives was bad, because the data was spread across two drives I would be unable to boot.

I quickly bought a new single drive as a replacement. Tossed it in and turned to my backups. I had my system set to automatically backup - this is the only way that it will happen on a regular basis. I have been using NovaStor backup because it allowed me to specify exactly what I wanted backuped and from where. (The backup software that comes with Vista allows on to specify what but not from where so I was never really sure what it contained.)

My first discovery was that the drive had failed during the most recent backup. And, because I had not paid enough attention to the process, each backup deleted the previous one before it ran. 

Next I tried too recover from a 4 month old image backup of the system (this one created by Vista's backup tool). That got me part of the way there recreating the files as they were 4 months previously. To make up for the difference I went to the aborted backup and was able to restore all of my documents directory from the previous work day.

At this point all was good except that my offline outlook files had not been backedup before the disk failure and all I had were 4 month old copies. Now I store all of my messages in these files so to loose them was to loose 4 months of activity - something that would be a real problem for me. To get those I needed to get back into the old disks.

So we put the bad drive into another computer and fired up our copy of
SpinRite. This software can do remarkable things with failed hard drives. It worked on the bad drive for 317 hours identifying numerous unreparable sections.

After SpinRite was finished I pulled the new drive, reinstalled the two previous drives and rebooted. After some machinations Vista started and I moved the two needed outlook files to an external drive. Thank you SpinRite!

I reinstalled the new drive copied the outlook files and was back in business with no missing data. I have since modified my backup procedures to keep multiple generations of my file backups and decided to start doing a full image each month. Hopefully, with this approach I will not need to go through this painful process again.

By Matthew Hile on 12/7/2008 11:58 AM

I recently discussed the availability and presentation of St. Louis' regional crime data. For the city of St. Louis, the Post Dispatch's site STLtoday.com has the best graphic presentation of homicide data. An interactive bar chart that presents 4 years' data. While it is colorful and does provide individual monthly data when the mouse hovers over bar - it is not at all clear what you can learn by looking at this graph. It is not easy to compare changes month by month, to look at trends across a year, or to see underlying patterns in monthly rates.

Rather than simply complain I thought I would try my hand at making the graph understandable.

First I tried a simple line graph. But the overlapping lines made it difficult to see individual patterns. There was no reference to what one might expect on average. So it did not improve the utility of the graph at all.

Next I tried each year paired with the average of all years. This allowed a variety of comparisons. 1) By comparing each year with the average it is easy to see when months have more or less than would be expected. So we can see that 2008 has been pretty much consistently higher each month. 2) It also allows us to see the pattern across the months - you are less likely to get murdered in January and February than any of the other months. 3) Additionally, it also allows us to predict that there will be a spike in rates in November of 2008 when that data becomes available.

Now following the suggestions of graphics visionary Edward Tufte I decided to see if we could further simplify the presentation - conveying the same information with less ink. I believe that the final graph does this by removing the extraneous lines and the vertical axis information. This has the advantage of focusing the viewers attention on the main points - examining the pattern of homicides across the year and differences between the years. It looses the interactive features of the original but it does deal with the fact that the original graph really did not provide any more information to the viewer than a simple table of numbers.

Are there other ways to graphically ring information out of this data? Let me know what you come up with.

 

NOTE: This entry is cross posted on both my personal and professional blogs.

By Matthew Hile on 11/26/2008 9:23 AM

I struggled today to get the What's New module (version 3.03.00/4.03.00, available as a Supplementary Download) to work in a DotNetNuke installation (version 4.9.0). The installation went well and the configuration worked as expected. However I had two problems. First, the paging function did not work. I could click the page numbers and see the appropriate pages in the Edit mode but once live no paging occurred. Second, sometimes I would get no results (like when I changed users) in the What's New window. I tried a variety of settings but nothing helped. Finally I thought to change the Cache Time (in the Settings/Page Settings section) from 60 seconds to 0 (zero). That did the trick. You can see the result on our MoSBIRT site.

By Matthew Hile on 9/24/2008 3:35 PM

I was listening to a .Net Rocks! interview of Eric Brechner, the director of engineering learning and development for Microsoft Corporation. His group is responsible for improving the people, processes, and practices of software development across Microsoft through the application of Human Performance Technology. His blog posts, I. M. Wright’s “Hard Code”, typically start with a rant and weaves that into a useful lesson in the human side of work/life. This he does is with humorous touch. He has combined a number of the more memorable posts into a book by the same name.

In the show he is discussing the reception of his posts at Microsoft and mentioned that he did not expect staff to go to the external blog but would "...include it in the email I sent just minimizing the effort required to actually get the column." (about 21:47 into the podcast).

I have been touting the advantages of using RSS feeds for years. In this way users can decide what they want and automagically pull new information from web sites. This is the general currency of blogs and news sites. But if Eric is needing to package his information into emails for the clearly tech savvy individuals at Microsoft I will need to rethink my insistence and come up with some alternative approach.

By Matthew Hile on 9/17/2008 7:56 AM

I started having difficulties this morning with one of my DNN sites that uses SSL to protect the entry of a user's name/password combination. Before logging on I could view the publicly available web pages. After signing on, however, I still only saw the publicly available pages (there was no indication that I was signed on). Clicking the signin button again displayed all of the tabs (visible and invisible) but when I clicked on any that were NOT secure I was taken to a blank secure sign in page.

I cleared the cache, deleted cookies, even restarted the computer and tried again all to no avail. Then I remembered that my copy of NoScript had been updated when I started. Checking out the change log for the most recent version I found these additions

v 1.8.1.2
=====================================================================
x Switched "HTTPS|Automatic Secure Cookie Management" off by default:
  even if all the reported login issues (especially the ebay.com one)
  have been fixed, it probably deserves more testing from opt-in
  volunteers before a general "default-on" release 
+ Unsafe cookies can be handled either globally (default), or per tab
  (noscript.secureCookies.perTab)
x Fixed "force HTTPS" not working across some redirection patterns

This lead me to the NoScript options page. When I unchecked the "Enable Automatic Secure Cookies Management" option my site worked as expected. Rechecking it caused a failure. Adding my site to the "Ignore unsafe cookies set over HTTPS by the following sites" list also fixed my problem.

So, from this it looks like there may be a difficulty with the cookies being set by DNN when it uses SSL for security OR a problem with NoScript's new options. I am not sure which.

UPDATE: I heard from both the NoScript and DNN folks (within an hour of my reports). The consensus was that it was probably a problem with NoScript and its initial implementation of Automatic Secure Cookie Management. It is useful to note that the Newer versions of NoScript have turned this feature off by default. As for DNN, it uses "standard asp.net forms authentication cookies" and "automatically marks all cookies as being HttpOnly, so that cross-site scripting attempts cannot intercept cookie details to use in authentication/impersonation attacks."

By Matthew Hile on 7/30/2008 5:41 AM

I was working on a new DNN module and had made a variety of changes. I clicked the debug button to get a fresh build to test and ... nothing. My build failed but there were 0 errors. So I dumped the web cache, restarted IIS rolled back of the code to a previous version and ... "build failed" 0 errors.

Doing a search, I found that this was not a unique experience (with as many folks as there are doing development how could there be a unique experience - we all share the same pains). The kernel of my solution was found in this post. The steps in Visual Studio (2008 is the version I am using) that did the trick were:

1. Tools > Options
2. Projects and Solutions > General
3. Check the box for "Show Output window when build starts"
4. Projects and Solutions > Build and Run (if you do not see the last option make sure that the "Show all settings" check box, at the bottom left of the Options window, is checked.)
5. Set MSBuild project build output verbosity to "Diagnostic"

In my case at least, this gave me enough information to figure out where I was failing and got me on the road to fixing the problem.

By Matthew Hile on 7/15/2008 12:06 PM

Next week (21-July-2008) I am presenting an overview of the DNN Repository module to the St. Louis DotNetNuke Users' Group. In anticipation of that I wanted to make my PowerPoint slide stack available.

I have been using the Repository module for some time to provide users with downloadable files (which is only one of the module's uses). The real advantage of this approach is the "Dashboard" which allows users to quickly select a subset of documents based on user assignable, and hierarchical, categories and attributes. From a user's perspective this was a big step up from DNN's default Documents module. When I used that users could sort by the various categories but there will still so many items that they found it difficult and confusing.

After preparing for my presentation I have learned quite a few things about the module. First, it's utility is good for things like directories and even blog posts - that is things that do not have attachments. The module's templates (both packaged and user create) provide a very nice and powerful way to customize the layout of the items in the module. The next version promises to make the creation and management of these even easier and more powerful.

However, for my purposes, providing downloadable files, there are some significant weaknesses which will send me looking for other modules. These are:

• A GUID is added to the name of each file uploaded. This GUID is changes when ever the file is updated. This permits multiple files to have the same name. In the file versioning promised future version this will also come in handy. However, it seems search engine unfriendly.
• The module does not support DNN secure directory format. Thus files are accessible (if you know the GUID enhanced file name) from the Internet regardless of the DNN security settings.
• Links to the files can be embedded into other DNN pages. However, if the file is updated (thus changing its GUID) the link will break.

So while the module has the really great ability to filter documents, its other difficulties will make me search for a better way to provide search engine friendly, securable files* to my users.

 

* NOTE: I do realize that security and search engine friendly are incompatible goals. In my sites sometimes I want one and sometimes the other. However, this module provides neither.