I came to find out that my mother’s computer’s hard drive was failing. Programs took a long time to open and the computer would suddenly reboot for no reason. I discovered that the hard drive had bad sectors, which means potentially lost data if it decided to quit before I could save the data onto a different drive. Various GNU/Linux-based systems saved the day.
Continue readingHere I will explain a solution that worked for me to configure an Ubuntu workstation to authenticate with an Active Directory domain. The workstation was able to browse domain resources (ie, filesystem) without having to log in and it pulled the AD group information from the domain controller. A process was used to map certain groups to Linux (Ubuntu) groups, however extensive verification of the results could not be performed.
Continue readingI was helping with a method to check a user’s password against the domain via a program called UMRA. The idea was to use basic JavaScript validation for some of the password checks, but then to send the validation to the server for true verification. There currently is no process for checking a password without first creating the account and checking the error code from Active Directory. I did some searching and found various different methods from Microsoft, but nothing that hit the nail on the head. Then doing one final Google search for “vbscript domain policy” lead me to this website.
Continue readingI purchased the JVC Everio hard disk camcorder with the intention of quickly copying the movie files from it and burning them to a DVD. Since I use Ubuntu and since the camera automatically detected as a USB hard drive, I did not install the supplied software, opting for open source applications instead.
Continue readingWhile helping out a fellow developer I decided to try to determine which method of string searching was faster, LIKE or equals. I wanted to discover the basic result, with no indexes to speed things up, and no thoughts regarding underlying database principals of LIO, disk, or memory access. Just a simple test of speed. We can go on all day testing LIO (logical IO) performance and other variables, but I think they would effectively come to a similar conclusion.
Continue readingTriggers allow a set of SQL code to run on several types of SQL actions, such as INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE. For instance, upon an INSERT, the SQL engine will call the trigger configured for the INSERT action. The trigger specified will have programming logic to perform actions on other systems. With OLE Automation enabled in SQL, the trigger will have the ability to perform actions using COM objects.
Continue readingAhhhhhhhh!!! That’s me pulling out my hair every time I start working with divs, CSS, and the DOM’s innerHTML property using JavaScript. I can never figure out if I’m doing something wrong or if someone somewhere made a huge mistake when they made innerHTML.
Continue reading
One of the problems with basic Windows PDF document viewers is you can’t save as another file format. This is most likely for copyright reasons, but what if you need to copy the contents of a PDF image document to a Word document?
Continue reading
