The Linux Page

No AfterUpdate event on Check Boxes in MS-Access?!

Symptoms

  1. My checkbox does not have an AfterUpdate event
  2. When running, I cannot de-select that check box once selected

Discovery Process to Solution

In MS-Access, you often want to run an action after the user changed something in a form.

at job spool growing

How it works

The at command is often used to start a process at a later time. It can run any script at a specified date and time.

For instance, if you want the computer to send you a signal in one hour, use something like:

cat signal | at -q z now + 60 minutes

Assuming that the file named signal contains the commands necessary to generate the signal. Then in 60 minutes, the script will be execute and the signal will be heard or shown.

Connections to clamav.inoc.net, why is that?

Lately, I noticed that I always had a clamav.inoc.net connection. I was wondering why... I did install clamav but I did not recall changing anything in Apache where I'd get requests from the outside that would look like clamav.

The fact is I also installed freshclam. By default, that gives you a line like this in your netstat -a64 listing:

    tcp   383     0 halk:38272       clamav.inoc.net:www     CLOSE_WAIT

Most of the time you won't catch it when it is still connected and sending/receiving data. The deamon that accepts the connections is freshclam and it will save the new data ...

Automatic Datasheet Columns Width with MS-Access VBA

You may have noticed that whenever you create a Datasheet you can double click on the right edge to resize the column to the widest text currently defined in that column.

This is neat but if I create a table with 10 columns, that's work. Especially if I need to reload data in that table each time I use it, 10 times an hour. (i.e. 100 x double click would definitively kill me!)

Of course, you may not need to resize all 10 columns each time, but wouldn't it be neat to have the columns width auto-adjust with the data you put in that Datasheet table?!

I think it would be!

The solution ...

QODBC and update of table lines

Today I bumped in another problem.

Some QuickBooks tables cannot properly be updated with QODBC. In my case it was the SalesOrderLine table. The first error I got was:

Error parsing complete XML return string (8)

I just couldn't be sure what that meant...

I had looked at the XML output closely and noticed that the identifier of a line was improperly shown in a separate tag.

The fact is, I just could not update multiple lines with FQSaveToCache flag set to 1.

Trouble with SSL certificates...

Today we discovered that our SSL system on our server broke when we upgraded the server to Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid.)

The technical error message is rather cryptic:

  SSL connect error; error:140773F2:SSL routines:SSL23_GET_SERVER_HELLO:sslv3 ...  
          ... alert unexpected message (https://secure.example.com/path.php)

I also get this message from HttpRequest (in our PHP server running with Apache):

Failing INSERT INTO without errors

Story

Inserting a row ina database is done with the INSERT INTO command line. This is quite standard SQL.

MS-Access supports the INSERT INTO instruction too. You can write macros that make use of it.

I have used it for a while and had not problems. But yesterday I discovered that there was a case when it simply wouldn't work at all. The strangest thing was that it did not work with an MS-Access database without any one error. No error at all.

Apache eating file descriptors

Today we again ran in an out of memory error. As we are adding more websites our foot print is growing... Our servers use a VPS that has limited resources and whenever the limit is reached, the system automatically kills processes. How the VPS selects the process to kill isn't clear to me, but twice it has been our database manager meaning that all of a sudden all the websites stop working.

So... We got an extra bit of RAM because our package allowed it, but that's still small.

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: