Access 2000 web page showing HTTP 500 internal server error

We had to move our web server to a new Windows 2008 R2 server.

Everything copied over ok using Web Deploy to copy over IIS settings.

We had a problem with a website that had an Access 2000 backend database.

• Connection issues
• HTTP 500 internal server errror

 

Connection issues

Firstly it wouldn't connect at all. We found that this was due to the Win 2008 not having the correct Jet drivers. (It has changed to ACE).

HTTP 500 internal server errror

The next issue was that some pages were showing Server 500 errors when users clicked on them. It looked to be when users were trying to modify the database. In one case the issue was due to the database file becoming read only when it was moved to the new server. and in the other case it was because the lock file (.ldb) file had been copied over with the main database file. Once the lock file was deleted it all started to work as it should.

Hope this saves people some time

Plain text email not wrapping correctly

It has been a while!

Now that summer have finally arrived in the UK I thought I should come out of my blogging hibernation.

Here is an interesting one to start with.

At work i have been developing a system that requires a log to be emailed to users. For this particular application I was developing in Delphi but the same problem seems to occur with many other languages.

The problem was that any emails that were sent from my system were stripped of there line breaks. At first I thought that the issue was in Delphi. After a bit of debugging I found that delphi was send the information correctly as separate lines. Even the outlook notification was displaying the line breaks correctly. However when the full email was opened all text appeared on one continious line.

After a frustrating few hours I found a stackoverflow post.

Some of the solutions suggested were:

• Convert the email to HTML format so that '
  ' breaks can be inserted when required.
• Add extra \r\n at the end of each line
• Add %0D%0A at the end of each line
• Add a (.) dot at the end of each line.
• Re instated line breaks in Outlook by going into Format -> Unwrap text when viewing the email.

I decieded to go for the dot solution and it worked fine.

Hope this helps someone.

Windows Server 2008 File Share Clustering and OSX 10.4

At work we had to bring a Apple Mac back into service. Since decommissioning the Mac we have moved to a clustered file server on Windows 2008 R2.

We tried to get onto some shares on the Windows 2008 R2 clustered file server and got an error saying directory or file does not exist. Looking on the web we found that there were a number of people with the same problem. It seemed to be an issue with clustered file servers because we successfully connected to shares on non clustered file servers.

Our Apple Mac is on OSX 10.4 but the problem seemed to be more previlant on 10.5 AND 10.6.

We found a few posts that said that you could get around the problem by typing the port number in the 'Connect to server' option.

For example 'smb://[servername]:139/[share]' however this didn't solve our problem.

We finally found a work around by using a hidden ($) share in the path to the shared folder.

For example 'smb://[servername]/X$/path/to/share'

Hopefully this will help someone as it was an odd issue that took a bit of solving

Generate list of non repeating numbers in Excel

At work we had to create a list of new telephone numbers for employees.

We had a list of employees and had to assign a list of telephone extensions to the names. This had to be random and each number could only be used once.

The we did this was to copy the list of names into Excel. Then we used the RAND function to assign a random number between 0 and 1 to each name. After this we sorted the list by the newly created random number column. This gave us a random list of users. Finally we copied in the sorted list of telephone extensions into a column next to the employee name column. This gave a random list of telephone extensions to employee names without any any repetition.

Below is an example of what we did:

With a column for your list of names and a column for the random number you can randomise your list of names by simply ordering the list by the random number column. When you are happy with the random list of names then all you have to do is enter your sequential list of numbers into another column.

Simples!

Remember stuff by doing something memorable

Mr. Forgetful, a photo by Lily White on Flickr.

I am constantly trying to remember if I actually did things.

For example did I lock the car door before coming into the house? Did I set the alarm when I left the house? Did I shut the kitchen window before going to sleep?

During an average day we do so many things in 'Auto Pilot' mode that we can not remember if we actually did them. A number of times I have had to turn the car around and go back home to make sure that I have indeed locked the door. Most of the time the door has been locked but the thing is that I cannot remember doing it. It is frustrating and it can be a big waste of time.

I thought about why I cannot remember all the important little things and realised that it is because these little things are repeated so often that the brain gets bored of remembering them.

My solution to the problem is to make forgettable tasks more memorable.

Some of the ways I have made repetitive task more memorable are:

1. Sing a little jingle after doing the task or action. For example sing 'I have locked the door' in the tune of a song you like.

2. Do a little dance after doing the task or action.

3. Just say the task out load after doing it.

All three of these options are used to make the task more memorable so that your brain thinks it is worthy of being remembered.

This has helped me (when I remember to make the task memorable ;-). So I hope it helps someone else