Samsung Android 4.3 update nightmare

My old Galaxy note had the 4.3 update.
Now the usb connection doesn't work.
Thank goodness we can copy the photos via the micro sd card.

Hoping another update fixes this.
We did try to put the phone into debugging/development mode but still it doesn't work.

What's funny is my S5 was updated to 4.4.2 and it works fine.
Takes a while to get used to the difference in the left bottom button, where you have to hold it down for a few seconds to get the app menus as a single tap is the switching option.

Windows 8.1 and Office 2010

Got the question at work last week about a migration to Windows 8.1.1 64 bit.
Funny how no-one even thought about Office 2010 and whether the 64bit version was a bad idea?
Let's see what they come up with now I have informed them that there is no benefit and just a lot of pain to go to the 64 bit versus the 32 bit version of office.
Most likely if something has been signed off by someone who has no idea, then it means a lot of changes to add-ins and VBA code that is used.

sql server and tfs

Do you check in your schema of your databases?

We had the infrastructure guys extraxt the schema for each database on our two main prod boxes.
Then these were checked in to a team project for each database server.
If we had a larger development team we might have created a team project for each database.
Now to show all developers how to use tfs. Why do they make it so hard?

Dtsx packages are different as they are all in one project.
Made a mistake of adding them all to one project and then compiling tried to include them all. Be carefull of thos one.

Running barefoot or forefoot takes time:

After running a little faster with more focus on forefoot landing, we noticed our knees got a little sore. This might be more due to where my foot lands.
So today hit the treadmill in my vibrams. Hitting the foot with my big toe and one next to it first. How one's foot and foot muscles work harder this way. Maybe we just have to get used to this.

So for those with runner's knee or just trying to transition to forefoot running, it takes time and a gradual build up.

There's also the glute, hamstrings and hip exercises along with balance and running drills. So far haven't found the magic 3 exercises to strengthen your core for running. It's more like the dozen.

My list of core exercises for running include:
Crunches
Wall sits
Glute bridges
Walking sideways with stretchy
Single leg squats on step
Quick straight legged jumps on forefoot (good for warmups)
Plank
Side plank
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Running without injury

Running without injury.  What an easy and difficult task!
You only need to do a few simple things to run injury free.
Finding this out isn't always easy.
I pulled a hamstring 2 years ago but still managed to run the city2surf from sydney to bondi beach.
Then last year I had a shin splint and ran the city2surf with my leg tapped.
This year I got IT band pain and was almost about to stop running altogether.
Then I found the solution and ran pain free in the city2surf (except for the usual muscle soreness).
Whilst I am still refining the solution, the sad part is that 90% of web sites, youtube videos and professionals (physiotherapists/podiatrists/doctors) only treat the symptoms and don't provide a solution so you end up with more injuries and more pain.

Pure CSS Multi-level Menu for IE7

I cannot wait until XP finally dies and everyone is using Internet Explorer 9, FireFox or Safari.
Until then ( around 2014) we have to cater for IE7 and * and sometimes 6.

Simple things like pure CSS menus can be a burden and other css 3 tricks which you jjust cannot use.
That being said, found this great little bit of code for Pure CSS menus which works for IE7 and IE8.


http://www.devinrolsen.com/pure-css-menu-with-infinite-sub-menus-tutorial/

Although, I must say having multiple levels isn't very navigation friendly and this is just a design forced on me by a client and the simpler, less click model of navigation is always better.

This menu is just so simple and easy to set up that I had to link to it as most of the multi-level menus use java-script and in this case we are trying to avoid using that.

Toastmasters Distrcit 70 competition was quite interesting

Yesterday was at the Annual Toastmasters International Finals for District 70.
This is where the best speakers in NSW and ACT compete to go to America.

There were two educational's as well and they were great value.

Can't wait to use them when I do my next speech.

One was done by an actress and she spoke/presented about adding presence to your speech.
Couldn't get enough as she was so fluent and practical with her advice that the following presenter had a very hard act to follow.

The Dinner was quite a formal affair.

Nearly everything to do with competitions requires you to wear a suit or business attire and the Dinner was a Gala Dinner which translates not as a Festive Dinner (which is what Gala translates to) but as a Black Tie event in some circles.
So I wore my black tie with the little grey elephants!

The Winner had tried to perfect his speech for three years!

I'd better start making up my speech now...

##

Off to the Toastmasters Annual Conference in Sydney in two weeks time.

After just missing out in the last set of competitions, I've decided to go along and check out the one's who've made it through a few levels and also go to a few educationals.

This is in two weeks time. So watch this space for more.

My speaking needs some tweaking. A bit like what I do with software! :-)

Need to add more flourish, annecdotes, livid comparisons and more structured and focused speeches.

Oh well more work but it's all worth it.

The President of our club asked me the other day, now I've done the first lot of 10 speeches, which advanced ones will I do?

Will pick a few so I can pick and choose the most appropriate.

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Developing Word versus Excel

Had to tweak some word applications this week.

Now I know why word developers use select all the time.
It's the only way they can do things.
And what about how you cannot loop through processing pages easily unlike in Excel where you can loop through worksheets.

Now we have to come up with the ultimate document splitter.
Because there are so many massive merged documents which need splitting and renaming based on references in the first page.

Will have to publish some of my utilities soon.

How to select colours for Excel Charts in Excel 2007/2010

Microsoft Office 2007/2010 comes with the new office themes tabs.

Charts require 6 colours to be setup and then Excel uses this to generate charts with all 6 colours and shades thereof or as shades of one of those 6 colours.

Most clients will setup their themes without taking into account Excel Charts or the new data bars features.

In other words they’ll set the first or 2^nd colour or even totally miss the 6 ones required altogether.

Themes need to be stamped per workbook otherwise they start with the standard out of the box office theme.

Most clients have between 2 to 4 main colours that their branding guys have supplied. What this means is that you have to create other colours or repeat the given colours to prevent non-corporate colours from being used.

In the rare cases where clients supply 7 colours, you just use 6.

Creating the other colours is a tricky process. Some colour wheels allow you to provide 3 colours and they’ll give you 3 blended ones.

e.g. Blue and Yellow blend to make a green colour.

This link provides a nice example

 http://www.colormatters.com/color-and-design/basic-color-theory

Regards,

Tom Bizannes

Excel Developer Sydney Australia

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SharePoint 2010 Administration

This exam which is a requirement for many a Gold Partner to get the SharePoint Fast software included in their Partner package is an interesting one.
According to one of our guys who passed the second attempt:
It was quite scenario based is what he said.

So there are four main areas, but what is is really that we need to do to pass?
a) One needs to be able to plan therequird hardware as well as how what needs configuring inside SharePoint
b) Then there is the deployment - and there are various ways to do this
c) Then there is a maintence, monitoring and backup/restore strategies
d) Finally there is the all imortant search, content management and Business Intelligence side of things.

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Excel Chart - Line Chart Marker Styles

Sometimes clients want various settings for their line charts.

The markers on their line charts can be circles, squares, crosses etc

Today we'll just focus on the four main styles

The VBA code is ActiveChart.SeriesCollection(1).MarkerStyle = 1
And you would loop through each series collection.

So the critical numbers are:
None --> 0
Square --> 1
Diamond --> 2
Triangle --> 3
Circle --> 8

SharePoint 2010 adoption

Forrester: SharePoint 2010 Adoption Trends and Third Party Software -- Redmond Developer News

PowerPoint 2007 add-in issues

Created a PowerPoint 2007 Add-in for a client to add buttons in the ribbon to paste in excel objects and also to break the linked objects.
But it didn't run on my tst pc!
After some muckign around, found these worked fine in the addins directory.
So was it hte d: drive area that was causing issues?
Tried d:\temp and it worked. But the d:\!Clients didn't.
They all were in trusted locations so the only difference was the exclamation in the file name.
Why would this cause issues?
Another case of finding a workaround for some Microsoft Office Product.
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Tom Bizannes is a Microsoft Developer who can talk the language of Business Users.
He works best with a good cup of coffee.

Studying for the SharePoint Administrator Exam 70-668

There are 4 main areas one nees to know very well to pass this:

1. Designing a SharePoint 2010 Farm Topology (27 percent)
2. Planning SharePoint 2010 Deployment (26 percent)
3. Defining a SharePoint 2010 Operations Strategy and Business Continuity (25 percent)
4. Planning for Search and Business Solutions (22 percent)

What does this mean for my study?

It looks like I know the first 3 areas quite well and the 4ths ok except for some of the new stuff or should I say, the marketing fluff that Microsoft outputs as some of what they are asking for seems a little ambigous.
Will now go over tehir learning plan and do a few step by step SharePoint installs and configuration.


This is going to mean a little work over the next week or so.
Here's to my painful journey to dichipher and study for an exam with no real studfy book or course material except what one can glean from the requirements.

Found out that there are hundreds if not thousands of links to mini articles at technet and msdn.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/library/ff627858.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd776256%28v=office.12%29.aspx
So will go through these, plus hte help, and one of the wrox books and this will hopefully be what is required.

Marketing XMas email

Interesting discussion was had when I drafted up an emai lto go to all consulting clients in nsw.
The big question was, why are you mentioning New stuff we don't do yet?
Why don't people get it?
This is the draft as below...but need to tweak it with even more "New" stuff....
Some of the new stuff allow one to put in a picture of a parrot....better than web photos eh?

Merry Christmas ….,

We hope you’ve had a good year.

This year has been an interesting one for ###’s consulting services in the following three areas and

we do thank our clients who have worked with our consulting and development teams in the following areas.

aa)      Microsoft Office Conversions and Upgrades

bb)      Document Management (Quality Office Add-ins)

cc)      Content Management (WebSite Development)

 

Microsoft is bringing out some exciting new solutions next including Parrot for CRM (note you need SharePoint for CRM) and the new versions of Exchange and Sql Server.

So you’ll hear new terms such as ”Social Marketing” and “Digital Marketing” in a lot of their communication.

If you have any Microsoft Consulting or Development requirements call us on 02-9249-2700 or email us.

The top three points of consulting/development work above include:

a) Office Conversions:

·        The Speed testers to prevent locking and slowness issues with Excel and Access when you upgrade Microsoft Office

·        Rebranding and updating Templates and Macros in Word is always busy

·        New Charting and Reporting Solutions that use the new Excel format to output professional graphics and numbers

b) Document Management

·        MacroView DMF leading the way with more useful functionality than most traditional DM systems

·        ClauseBank enabling you to squirt in word snippets into your emails and corporate documents

·        Saving Messages to SharePoint – the hottest add-in for SharePoint world-wide.

c) Content Management (Web Site Development):

·        The SharePoint Standardiser – to bring all document libraries into a standard configuration

·        Using the new DotNetNuke Content Management System with it’s nice new editor and SmartPhone Templates

·        ASP.Net and the old Classic ASP Web Development has also kept us busy this year with clients’ websites and intranets

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SharePoint 2010 Administration exam

For the Microsoft Gold Partnership renewal coming up in 2012 this requires 4 people to do the exam below.

Exam 70-668:

PRO: Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Administrator

Designing a SharePoint 2010 Farm Topology (27 percent)

Planning SharePoint 2010 Deployment (26 percent)

Defining a SharePoint 2010 Operations Strategy and Business Continuity (25 percent)

Planning for Search and Business Solutions (22 percent)

Interesting how the farm topology is worth more than the other parts......

For SharePoint Consulting Services click this link

Microsoft Access 2007/2010 Exporting tables to Excel

Interesting question:

There is a command in access VBA that's been around for ages called TransferSpreadsheet
Funny enough there are a few variables to do with te format:

acSpreadsheetTypeExcel12 --> this is to export as .xlsb
acSpreadsheetTypeExcel12xml --> This is to export as .xlsx

e.g.:

DoCmd.TransferSpreadsheet acExport, acSpreadsheetTypeExcel12Xml, "MyTable", "c:\temp\MyTable.xlsx", True

acSpreadsheetTypeExcel9 --> This refers to Excel 2000 format . e.g. MyFile.xls


The intellisense doesn't give you a acSpreadsheetTypeExcel10 or acSpreadsheetTypeExcel11 so maybe these don't exist.

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Rotating Images on a web site

Interesting but simple request.

Three images to rotate every 10 seconds on the front page of a web site.

Well this called for an Animated PNG. We first quickly tried an Animated Gif but the 256 colours makes pictures files quite grainy.

There is a Firefox add-in but it didn't work with our latest version so we downloaded a free but useful utility called "APNG Anime Maker."

Now the client has a very nice rotating set of images on their web site.

Just waiting for the next tricky bit of logic.

Just for your information, the alternative was some groovy jquery logic and even found that DotNetNuke has a free Widget Module called the Carouselat http://dnnwidgets.com/.

Still the Animated PNG is the simplest and easiest way to go in this case, but can see us using some jquery logic in the future for Web Development.

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CSS Div Overlapping the footer area

CSS can be very tricky as well as being quite elegant.
Sometimes you wish you'd stuck to html tables, and with html 5 becoming more prevalent, everyone will soon switch back to tables.
One issue we had recently was overalapping divs.
This was caused by the heightr being set on a div on the right side so the bottom footer was appearing over the top.
It seems the div itself expanded more than it's height.
The solution was to remove any height styles in the div and everything fitted.