The Linux Page

Help other users realize that everything is possible, especially avoiding Windows for their own personal use.

Welcome to The Linux Page


Fox Trot by Bill Amend. Click to enlarge.
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This site is a collection of my own work with Linux. Certain things are easy, others take time to decipher and if I ever need to repeat the work (which usually happens!), then I need to remember everything by memory or... have a site with all the steps taken and to take again.

The following are my most recent posts:

Today I worked a bit with jQuery to create an advanced form. Advanced just because it is tabbed and appears in a pop-up, nothing too major really. Maybe later I'll add some tests to validate the data being entered before someone can submit the form...

In any event, I ran in a problem which was to create a set of click callback functions (event handlers) and each of which should make use of a different index. So... I have 4 tabs and each one has a number: 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Say I call each one of these numbers #tab1, #tab2, #tab3, and #tab4. Now I want to create a click function on each one ...

Today I wanted to check whether a table existed in a MS-Access database from a macro define in a MS-Access module.

The test opens the specified database (databaseName) and from that object checks wether a table definition exists (name). I wonder whether there would be a better way to go through the list of items and just know whether an item with that name exists or not instead of generating an error (because the underlaying system will anyway search that list of items for the name, although it may be faster this way in visual basic.)

There is the function I wrote (sample usage: if ...

As I was working on a new Report, I had two fields with computations.

These are easy to handle, for example, for a Total you write something like this:

=[Quantity]*[Price]

And you get a product of the quantity and the price.

That works great. At first I had a very simple query and it looked like there was a problem in computed field, but I still decided to first add the WHERE clause to allow the user to limit the data to a given set of dates:

WHERE (((Invoice.CreatedDate)>=[Enter start date:])
   AND ((Invoice.CreatedDate)<=[Enter end date:]))

Notice all the parenthesis. Also ...

Introduction

These are common questions for MS-Access users:

  • How can I get the name of the currently logged on user?
  • How can I get the name of the computer the user is working on?

Both names are available in the Kernel and we can make use of a function declaration to access those names.

MS-Access Functions

To determine the name of the current user:

Private Declare Function GetUserName Lib "advapi32.dll" _
    Alias "GetUserNameA" (ByVal lpBuffer As String, nSize As Long) As Long

Public Function GetLogonName() As String
    Dim lpBuf As ...

Broken window that looks like a bug.

Today I started having some problems with my Microsoft Access tables.

I had a default value set to Now() and it would tell me that it was invalid. I removed it and the save worked.

What would really be the problem though?

The thing is the compiler is used against ALL your Visual Basic modules and if any one of them fails to compile, then you get the error. I had one error in one module. Definitions of external (DLL) functions such as GetUserName() and GetComputerName() must all appear before any function declation. I had the GetUserName() declaration such as:

Private Declare Function ...

For a week now I have had a warning when shutting down saying that there was yet another update to install on shutdown...

I did not really check on it for that long, but today I decided to check the auto-update as I was running the computer. There was the installation ready to be run. So I clicked on the button to start the installation.

After a moment, the installation process stopped with a really weird error:

Error message: Code 13EC, it's an unknown error.

It's funny that any programmer would create an error that the computer cannot figure out... Way beyond me.

This being ...

Yesterday I got a surprise. My junk email stayed in my Inbox instead of going to my Junk folder... Why?

The automated function doesn't give you any error. It just doesn't do anything.

When I tried to mark a message as junk, that's when I got an error message saying...

Your Junk Folder is Full

Wow! I looked again... but I knew. It was still FULLY empty. Hmmm...

Looking around I found a post on some random website saying that the limit of a folder was 4Gb. Okay. But my folder is EMPTY. I look for any other Junk folder, just in case another one was filled up. Nope. All empty! (I ...

Today I needed to test a transfer from a file system to another making sure that a 750Mb file was being tranfered correctly. For this I wanted to run an md5sum on the file from the native OS (MS-Windows) and then on the target OS (Linux).

I found a nice utility that worked right in and returned the correct result (what I'd expect.)

MD5sum by Jem Berkes, SysDesign

Okay, it has been a little while now, but each time I just have to search forever to find out how to create a multi-level numbering list.

By default, a list will appear as this:

1. Chapter

    1. Section

        1. Sub-Section

Which may work for you, but in many cases you want to have all the list numbers appearing in your section and sub-sections as in:

1. Chapter

    1.1 Section

        1.1.1 Sub-Section

Okay, so that in itself it actually very easy, but it used to be that you could ...

Today I had an interesting experience... all of a sudden, all the blocks of a given theme disappeared.

It has been working just fine for months, so I really wasn't sure what the heck it could be.

The fact was that the theme was called the same as the module (as I work for a given client, I tend to do that...)

At some point, I must have added a function with a specific name and that would influence the theme. The result being blocks going bye bye!

I checked and the block content is computed just fine, the problem is the theme('block', $block) call. Although the ...

Unfreeze your Mouse when it Froze

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