nickhowell.co.uk

Joining Windows 7 to a Samba Domain

nick — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 12:08:53 +0000

This is a problem I ran into at YSTV recently. We run a Samba 3 domain and have recently upgraded our Edit PCs to use Windows 7. Unfortunately Windows 7 out of the box will not join a Samba domain, saying that the “Domain does not exist or could not be contacted” after asking you [...]

From Hate to Love in a little over a year…

nick — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 00:38:41 +0000

It has been an interesting year, and those of you who know me should certainly agree. This last year has been my Industrial placement year as part of my Degree – All fun and games you might think. Mostly, you’d be right – aside from the daily struggle of commuting to Leeds every day. It’s [...]

Access is Denied Exception when writing to Spreadsheet from ASP.Net

nick — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 17:48:52 +0000

I recently got the following error message whilst trying to write to an excel file using the openXML library in ASP.Net and C#: System.ApplicationException: Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED)) at System.IO.IsolatedStorage.IsolatedStorageFile.nGetRootDir(IsolatedStorageScope scope) at System.IO.IsolatedStorage.IsolatedStorageFile.InitGlobalsNonRoamingUser(IsolatedStorageScope scope) at System.IO.IsolatedStorage.IsolatedStorageFile.GetRootDir(IsolatedStorageScope scope) at System.IO.IsolatedStorage.IsolatedStorageFile.GetGlobalFileIOPerm(IsolatedStorageScope scope) at System.IO.IsolatedStorage.IsolatedStorageFile.Init(IsolatedStorageScope scope) at System.IO.IsolatedStorage.IsolatedStorageFile.GetStore(IsolatedStorageScope scope, Type domainEvidenceType, Type assemblyEvidenceType) at MS.Internal.IO.Packaging.PackagingUtilities.ReliableIsolatedStorageFileFolder..ctor() at MS.Internal.IO.Packaging.PackagingUtilities.GetDefaultIsolatedStorageFile() at MS.Internal.IO.Packaging.PackagingUtilities.CreateUserScopedIsolatedStorageFileStreamWithRandomName(Int32 retryCount, String& fileName) at MS.Internal.IO.Packaging.SparseMemoryStream.EnsureIsolatedStoreStream() at MS.Internal.IO.Packaging.SparseMemoryStream.SwitchModeIfNecessary() at [...]

Spamtastic!

nick — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:33:50 +0000

This weekend saw a sudden surge of spam comments coming my way. Strangely though, the comments seem legit. No links to various websites, not random text – nothing. Just a few sentances that are so generic they seem relevant. I let the first couple through – It wasn’t until I noticed i had comments from several [...]

Scheduled PostgreSQL Database Backups

nick — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 20:37:40 +0000

I’ve just started using PostgreSQL as my database of choice for a few projects, and needed some way of scheduling backups. As a result I’ve created the following small bash script that will backup a given database and put it in a gzipped tar archive. You can find the script in my svn repository here. Usage is [...]

Stream video in FLV format over HTTP using VLC

nick — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 17:38:40 +0000

A while ago I rebuilt the video streaming solution at YSTV so that it used flash video. Not wanting to pay for Adobe Media Server, I opted to try and create my own, as it were. I knew that VLC could stream video so I set off to get it to stream flv. Fortunately for me, [...]

Show SVN revision number in PHP

nick — Fri, 15 May 2009 12:16:29 +0000

I recently had a need to display the current svn revision of a php based website on the home page. This is particularly useful when working on a website as part of group and you have a central dev server than runs a copy of the latest code. It allows you to quickly and easily [...]

Excel – Update formulas on Open

nick — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 10:16:11 +0000

Most of the time this is a relatively trivial exercise. In the majority of cases, simply setting ‘Workbook Calculation’ to ‘Automatic’ in the Excel options will give the desired effect. However, I recently stumbled across a situation where this doesn’t work. If you find yourself entering data into an Excel workbook through some other means – [...]

Getting Postgresql 8.3.x on Gentoo

nick — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 08:47:42 +0000

I recently had some fun and games upgrading PostgresSQL on my Gentoo box – I was running 8.2.7 and needed 8.3.x for it’s support of ENUM types. After some googling I found this blog which explained how to do it. There were a few extra steps for me, however, so I though I’d repost my findings [...]

High Quality h264 MP4 Videos with ffmpeg

nick — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 17:12:50 +0000

I’ve recently been doing some research in the area of producing High Quality MP4 files with the h264 codec. Of course, my program of choice for encoding to this format was ffmpeg with the libx264 codec. I just wanted to share some of my findings, in particular a few example commands for creating these videos. [...]