Contrary to what RIM and other people might have you believe, it is very possible to install and run Blackberry Enterprise Server (including BES Express) on a Windows XP Professional computer. To further complicate the problem, these same folks will also tell you that there is no way to install the Exchange System Manager using the Small Business Server 2003 CD’s.
Of course, all of this is simply not true, and the setup is smooth as long as you know what to do. RIM won’t provide technical support for this configuration, but we don’t really care, now do we?
Continue reading
At the company where I work, we use a software program called MaxView to perform bid take-offs for large construction projects. We have configured several custom symbols in MaxView which we use to count items in large mechanical prints, and it takes about an hour to configure these symbols. Rather than configure these symbols individually for each new user, or an existing user who lost his settings, we needed a simple way to export the settings from one computer/user to another.
Continue reading
There’s a problem with Bank of the West’s EDS Pro software: it doesn’t assign the necessary permissions to the registry keys it creates for the OCR plug-in component during installation, effectively locking out any user from running the software except for the user who originally installed the software.
Continue reading
Anyone who wants to build a professional looking add-in for Microsoft Outlook knows that it’s important to make their add-in appear flush/stock/standard/factory, which means implementing the add-in functionality directly into the native Outlook interface via the toolbar/ribbon/menu/property pages/etc. An important part of this is understanding how to use IPictureDisp, because this is the only image type that Outlook will allow you to use for CommandBar controls.
Continue reading
Introducing GO Detach for Outlook. This small add-in lets you bulk save e-mail attachments (or body text) from Outlook to your hard drive. Whether you use it to free up space in your mailbox or personal folder (PST) file, GO Detach will boost your productivity by automating several repetitive tasks at once. For example, GO Detach can save multiple attachments from multiple emails into separate folders based on certain criteria of your choice. Be sure to check out the screenshots.
Continue reading
Perry’s Music Streamer has evolved into what is now called Nest. Do check it out!
For lack of a better name, Perry’s Music Streamer is a web application that I’m currently developing which enables you to stream mp3′s from your home computer using any other computer or device with a modern web browser. Here you can find more information about this project. The project was started in June of 2010 and has been going strong since!
Continue reading
Posted on October 5, 2010 by Perry under Blog, Programming Tutorials, Software Development
Interact:
This tutorial is part of a series: Part 1 | Part 2
In Part 1 of this tutorial series, I presented a way to use the .NET TreeView control as a file browser similar to Windows Explorer in functionality. As we navigate through this TreeView, the BeforeExpand event is handled so that each node is dynamically populated as soon as it gets expanded.
The second part of this tutorial focuses on displaying the native system icons for each file and folder in the TreeView.
Continue reading
A few years ago I attempted to write an ID3 tag parser for MP3 files. The ID3v1 specification was easy to understand and implement, but the complex ID3v2 specification threw up some hurdles with SyncSafe integers, encoded bits, multiple sub-versions (ID3v2.2.0, ID3v2.3.0, ID3v2.4.0), and custom frame data. Needless to say, I couldn’t implement the specification properly and my parser would trip up on certain MP3 files, but I’ve recently revisited this project and fixed the showstopping bugs.
Continue reading
Perry’s ID3 Tag Viewer parses ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags stored in MP3 files. Not only does it extract common data such as the Artist, Album and Title, but it also extracts frames that contain data which MP3 players and tagging software simply do not care about, such as Private (PRIV) frames, User Defined Text Information (TXXX) frames, and other custom third-party frames that might contain hidden/encrypted data. Perry’s ID3 Tag Viewer utilizes a custom ID3 tag parsing library written from scratch, based on the official specifications at ID3.org.
Continue reading
Broken Website = Unhappy Client
I read an interesting article today which had some useful feedback on when and why WordPress users were updating to the latest major version, WordPress 3.0. Based on the comments in the article, I noticed a few trends as well as some good insight.
Continue reading
Upload.com, relative of Download.com and part of the CNET.com network, does not allow a person to create a developer account and submit software if his or her website contains a blog, even if the blog and software are legitimate endeavors.
The fact is, GlassOcean.net needs more promotion in order for my software to reach a mass audience, and one way to do this is to submit the software to various “File Hosting” websites. Download.com is the first one that comes to mind.
I submitted my personal information yesterday to Upload.com.
8 hours later I was denied.
Continue reading
In this tutorial you will learn the basics of how to upload WordPress to a web host. This is particularly useful if you want to host WordPress yourself and use your own domain name to efficiently promote and market your blog. Uploading WordPress to a web host and using a personal domain name also makes your blog look more professional.
While it is certainly possible to host your blog for free at www.WordPress.com, what they are doing is simply providing a service for people who do not have their own web host or the technical know-how to upload and maintain a WordPress installation themselves. Hosting WordPress requires some PHP and database knowledge among other things. Furthermore, www.WordPress.com does not allow advertising for hosted blogs unless the blog attains VIP status.
Continue reading
If you have a shared web hosting plan like I do with 1&1 Webhosting, you most likely do not have direct access to the computer which your website is hosted on to install and configure the mod_rewrite plugin for Linux/Apache or the ISAPI_Rewrite plugin for Windows/IIS, either one of which is required to get Permalinks working in WordPress.
However, there is another way to this by editing the .htaccess file in your root WordPress directory.
Continue reading
Many of the Move Comments plugins for WordPress do not seem to work properly in WordPress 3.0, so I needed a way to move comments around from one post/page to another, as well as retain any threaded/nested comments. One could always move comments by modifying the database directly with phpMyAdmin or something similar, and this is what I had to resort to. Modifying your WordPress database directly isn’t something you want to do every day, but sometimes it is completely unavoidable. It took me all of 5 minutes to figure this out, so it shouldn’t be too difficult for you either.
Continue reading
I touched on this subject before in my previous article titled WordPress Tip: the_category Without Links, which focuses on the WordPress get_category function, but I decided to write this article so I can focus more on the general implementation of PHP functions with WordPress, and so that people will have an easier time locating these tips via a web search.
Some WordPress plugins require you to add shortcodes to your pages/posts to utilize the plugin, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you were already using shortcodes. Whether or not you’ve had any experience using WordPress shortcodes, this tutorial has what you need to get started.
Continue reading
You see, the_category template tag outputs the name of every category a post belongs to, but the category names are linked to respective category pages that I do not want my visitors accessing. Here on GlassOcean.net I try to obscure the category pages that WordPress generates because they are not as customizable as I would like. Therefore, I needed a way to list the categories that a post belongs to without the links.
A Google search for “wordpress the_category without links” returned an article by Robert Mirabito titled How to remove link from the_category in WordPress, which led me to the understanding that I would need to use the get_the_category template tag instead of the the_category template tag. However, Robert’s example inserts a space character as the delimiter, and changing this delimiter to something else results in the delimiter appearing after the very last category. So if you used a comma character as the delimiter, you would end up with something like “Posted in Blog, Services,” which looks bad. This led to some more searching.
Continue reading
I’ve been keeping my eye on WordPress.org over the last week in anticipation of their major upcoming release – WordPress 3.0 – and I’m happy to see that it’s finally here!
Following the simple upgrade instructions at WordPress.org, I backed up the GlassOcean.net website and database, deactivated all plugins, then performed the automatic upgrade from the WordPress admin interface. About 15 minutes later and GlassOcean.net was running on the new WordPress 3.0!
The only problem I ran into was with the highly customized basic2col theme I was using. Upon visiting the newly upgraded GlassOcean.net I was presented with a PHP parsing error, so I switched over to the new Twenty Ten theme. This is the default theme that comes with WordPress 3.0, which likely means it is easily customizable for newer 3.0 features. Twenty Ten is actually a nice theme that closely resembles the minimal black-on-white style I was going for with the customized basic2col theme anyway. I’m happy with the switch.
GlassOcean.net will be undergoing many changes over the next few days while I continue to customize the appearance and layout to compensate for all of the WordPress 3.0 changes. I’ll be tweaking the “Twenty Ten” theme to match what I had with the “basic2col” theme, re-activating plugins and finding alternatives for those that are not yet supported in WordPress 3.0, as well as tinkering with all of the new features.
It’s an exciting day for WordPressers!
I’ve fine tuned a few more things in the never-ending quest to organize this website so it flows logically and is easy to navigate for my readers.
First off, you’ll notice that I’ve created a new navigation menu and static pages for all of the main categories: Blog, Services, Music Productions, and Software Development. Previously, I was using the WordPress “Categories” widget as my navigation menu, and clicking into one of these categories provided a neat listing of all the posts related to that category. However, I soon discovered that the block of text which appears before the post listing on a category page was not very customizable. Unfortunately, the WordPress category editor is not up to par with the rich-text editing capabilities seen in the WordPress post/page editor, so I needed a way to work around this.
Continue reading
In my previous article From WordPress to Joomla and Back Again, I wrote about how I made the switch back to WordPress after giving Joomla a long trial run.
My migration plan back to WordPress was fairly simple: I had Joomla installed in my website’s root directory (glassocean.net) and I installed WordPress in a subdirectory (glassocean.net/wordpress) where I could begin setting up, customizing the theme, and migrating articles from Joomla.
While the Moving WordPress instructions in the WordPress documentation were easy enough to follow, it wasn’t until I noticed that the SexyBookmarks plugin wasn’t rendering properly in my articles that I must have done something wrong. I tried reinstalling the plugin, but it kept hanging up during the “Unpacking contents of package” phase.
Continue reading
I’ll miss you Joomla! After using Joomla 1.5 for a good few months, I’ve decided to give it a rest and migrate back to WordPress. Publishing content in the exact format that I want is such a breeze with WordPress, and a big step up from Joomla’s constant tweaking.
This was a hard decision to make since Joomla is such an excellent content management system with heaps of awesome extensions, but that’s part of the reason why I’ve chosen to abandon it.
Continue reading
Glass Ocean is Perry Butler's Blog, Music Productions, Services, and Software Development.