Welcome to The Linux Page

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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:

PHP glob function does not return softlinks

I use all sorts of tricks in order to duplicate functionality without actually duplicating PHP code.

One of the main, easiest way under Unix is to create softlinks. First put all your code in one folder, then create a softlink to it. That gives you two paths:

Report Sub-forms & their Recordset

Today I resolved a problem with setting up a sub-form recordset in a report.

In a form, you can do a lot of things, but reports are very much constrained. Most certainly because that way they are more sure that the data won't change while printing the report. But for sure, it is very annoying.

I got this error first:

"This feature is only available in an ADP"

In itself, that error means totally nothing. I have no clue what an ADP is. The solution to that error is available in Microsoft website here:

Managing your own Drupal Download Site

The other day, I was thinking, it would be nice if I could find the way to manage my own download site so people who use my modules that I do not provide directly on https://www.drupal.org would still show as expected (i.e. Green in the update window).

I found this page about it: https://www.drupal.org/node/210984

This is done by creating a service in your Drupal environment. You should use the ready made script named:

project-release-serve-history.php

which you can find in the D6 version of the Drupal project named Project. Being very ...

IrfanView

I created this page to have a place to save my copy of IrfanView.

I have to say that the author has made his download so complicated (at least last time I tried it was deadly complex!) that I have to just keep my own copy somewhere. Maybe it's illegal, but the software is freeware anyway.

You can find the original (and most certainly more advanced version) on his website: http://www.irfanview.com

There other tools one can use to work on images as follow:

QuickBooks and the Invalid Date error!

In my work with MS-Access and QuickBooks, I'm slowly progressing toward incredebilitiousness (some Franglais as we say in French).

I was working on adding Items to the ItemInventory table. All you have to do is an INSERT or an UPDATE.

Cannot start X11 properly

My Story

I have had this problem for a while now.

On my server, I run X11 whenever I work with it. Otherwise, I quit X11 since it otherwises uses a lot of resources. This gives my users a much better experience (i.e. better browsing and a lot of it happen at night for me because I live in California and I have loads of hits from France, Algeria, Tunisia, Marocco, etc.)

So... my wife and I both have a Unix account and we both start our own version of X11.

Hers rarely get stuck, mine seems to get stuck once a week or once a month.

Often, it is because after she quits I have to wait for

Editing of a MS-Access table

Whenever you want the end user to edit a table, you create a form that shows a set of cells. These are defined in your form Details area. Up to here, nothing special about that.

The fact is you cannot easilly access rows individually. That is, the TextBox, ComboBox, etc. in each row is considered the same whatever the row. So if you change the background color of a TextBox, all the TextBoxes of that column will be highlighted, not just the current row.

Whenever you open a dialog in MS-Access, you may need/want to get a result.

The MsgBox function is often enough and it can be used as a function. Unfortunately, when it isn't enough and you want to create your own modal dialog, you cannot call a function. The call is DoCmd.OpenForm and that's a sub-routine. No choice.

The idea is simple, we need to open the dialog, let the user interact in some ways, then return the value the user just entered and move on.

Simple Sum

When you create a form in MS-Access and include a sub-form with a table in it, you may want to compute the sum of a field. This is done simply by creating a TextBox and writing the following in that box content:

=Sum([Column-name])

Where "Column-name" is (obviously) the name of the column you want to sum up.

This is neat, but it breaks if the specified column has an unsupported type. Very strange, but for me it breaks with a currency column! That feels a bit weak to say the least. According to my testing and what I have found on the net, it should work with any ...

MS-Access and variables set to Nothing

In VB and MS-Access, whenever a variable referencing an object is set to Nothing, you cannot access any field since the variable does not actually point to a physical object.

This, code like this breaks:

	Dim r Is Object 
	r = Nothing 
	...
	r.Field = 5  ' Breaks if r is still Nothing

Thus, you need to test whether the variable r is defined.

Unfreeze your Mouse when it Froze

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Managing your own Drupal Download Site

My Story

Simple Sum