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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:

MS-Access weird = [Field] error...

I started using MS-Access not too long ago, but this one is really getting me each time.

Once in a while I get this error telling me that the Form is messed up, that a field or a macro just do not match. That macros are missing even though I ask the Form to call the corresponding functions. And some other strangeness like those.

Ensure rendering happens in MS-Access

Today I bumped in another problem: I want to show my user a message saying that I'm terribly busy looking for data in the database. Because I use ODBC with QuickBooks (QODBC to be precise), the system is somewhat slow. Therefore, it can take a little while and people just can't wait and they start clicking everywhere like crazy. That's a big problem...

Problem

I had a problem with my CuteMenu1 module and tried many times to fix it but just could not find the problem with Internet Explorer.

The fact is that I created dropdowns that are supposed to be full width, but that did not work, somehow.

I wanted each item to have a pre-defined height. So in the style for my DIV I wrote this:

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1. This is a Drupal module. You happen to have Drupal? Download CuteMenu now then!

View & Track tabs in Drupal sites

If you have your own Drupal site, you may have noticed a set of tabs appearing at the top. The View and the Track tab often appear on your site even for anonymous users. This is really annoying!

Here I show you what I see when I go to one of my pages. The View, Edit and Track tabs.

Problem

As I'm working with MS-Access, I'm learning all sorts of things.

I had to write my own SQL because the database management was such that a simple form just did not fit well (i.e. things like multiple unique keys to be checked between MS-Access and a QuickBooks database...)

The SQL is relatively easy to write (there are a few tricks with MS-Access, for instance, dates are written between hash characters: #2009/01/01 00:00:01# and you cannot use all balls or it fails!)

Now, I tried to use the same form to:

Marking a Subversion tree with a label

Subversion Labels?

At this time, Subversion does NOT support simple labels.

This would be neat, but it simply isn't available.

What I usually want to do is mark all the files in a folder with a label to mark that point in time as a specific version. There is no feature in Subversion to do that.

There are many different things you can do to circumvent this problem.

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svn merge, How does it work?

Whenever I try to merge, which does not happen very often, with the SVN source control system (i.e. Subversion), I have to test 20 different ways before I finally find the right way.

Now, I'm writing the solution that works for me.

The command I have to use is:

svn merge -r N:M file:///path/to/svn/file /destination/path

The path to the SVN file is the same as what you would use to check out that specific folder (file).

Dates in MS-Access & QODBC

Working with MS-Access and writing SQL queries to run via QODBC to get data from QuickBooks, I ran in a problem with dates.

I needed to sum the sub-total of all the rows for a given year. So that is pretty simple SQL1:

SELECT SUM(subtotal) FROM Invoice WHERE YEAR(TimeCreated) = YEAR(NOW())

That does not work. So I tried to generate the year in the macro code and sticked that to the statement:

SELECT SUM(subtotal) FROM Invoice WHERE YEAR(TimeCreated) = 2009

And that does not work either.

I tried ...

1. Although at first I tried with BETWEEN, I simplify my samples here

MS Access classes

As most people know, all of the MS-Office macros are written in Visual Basic.

Visual Basic is for sure a huge whole lot better than the BASIC I had on my Apple //c. For one thing, it does not require line numbers and you can declare functions, procedures, and have local variables (FOR loops that use the variable I do not overwrite the variable I of the FOR loop from the calling function!)

Since MS-Access 2007, we have the possibility to create classes!

RETURN statement in BASIC

Like many programmers, I switch between languages quite often.

I have worked with BASIC before since I had an Apple //c and used other Apple ][ computers that had some (really bad, early) BASIC language in their ROM.

At the time, the worst part was the line numbers. You had to write in BASIC as if you were writing assembly language. And I'll skip the numerous problems with memory...

Unfreeze your Mouse when it Froze

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Problem

Problem

Subversion Labels?

RETURN statement in BASIC