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:

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...

Remote CVS with SSH

To read files out of your repository via SSH, set your CVSROOT variable to something like this:

export CVSROOT=":ext:login-name@host//cvs/path/root"

What tells CVSROOT that it will get the data from an external host is the <em>:ext:</em> at the start of the URL.

The <em>login-name</em> is your name or whoever's login name you can use to connect to the computer.

It is assumed that you can already connect with SSH.

Access 2007, or where are my menus?!

My Boring Story

Microsoft Office is making progress... or... is that really progress?!

I got a great little surprised when I met face to face with Access 2007 and all the menus were gone. I wasn't warned about that one! Not only are they gone, you MUST use little tiny icons in the place of menus so it takes you an awful long time to learn the icons, but not just that, YOU have to choose which icons will appear on your toolbar.

What is an RSS feed?

An RSS feed is very common on all new websites. It has been around for years now. As of today you could listen to thousands of RSS feeds and be totally swamped by all the news...

But what is an RSS feed?

The way users know about RSS feed is in the form of a URL. The URL points to a file on a website that includes data. That data file uses the specific RSS or RDF format, which uses XML as the base format.

So it is in fact very easy to generate an RSS feed. All you have to do is write an XML file with the proper tags and attributes as defined on the W3C and ...

PAD File

PAD File Module for Drupal

Introduction

You can find my PAD File module on Drupal.

It is intended for any company and individual that has executable files for download but its customers and potential customers. The PAD File describes the content of such executable to the target machine (robots that spider the Internet for PAD Files).

With the module you can create, import, update and delete PAD Files as necessary. It automatically generates the XML files and maintains them on your website without you having to do anything about it.

It is also intended ...

Drupal & the No Error Reported

Let's start with my rant!

I like Drupal, in general. But like most PHP code bases, if an "error" (mistake) occurs, nothing is reported.

I spent hours trying to make one of my menu work (Note that the "menu" module is also called the "links" module.) It just did not want to go. In order to have the nice breadcrumb and other such features, you need to have menus with sub-sub-menus...

Lists and using images as bullets

One thing we do with lists on a website is to put a small image to replace the default bullet with something that looks nice in the theme.

If you are still reading the documentation on how to place an image in a list to replace the default bullet and what you read is some talks about list-style-image then you are in the wrong direction. Of course, this works great with Mozilla. But Internet Explorer does not understand the concept of list-style-image at all.

3 columns with CSS

Introduction

Often, when you build a website, you want columns.

Common designs include

Unfreeze your Mouse when it Froze

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Main Menu

RETURN statement in BASIC

My Boring Story

PAD File Module for Drupal

Introduction

Let's start with my rant!

Introduction