John Croson's Blog Home

First, I realize this is going to generate some issues for some, since Twitter 's use is primarily for micro-blogging , keeping connected with others, but some have been using it for other various reasons. Image via CrunchBase I think the producing backlinks (which really doesn't work as far as Google is concerned...but I digress) and driving website traffic are two good examples, and these are what I've been investigating with a couple of accounts at Twitter. One of those accounts is @zippydpinhead . I picked on him because I used to read Zippy the Pinhead comic strips in HighTimes magazine in my early 20's and thought it was...*dude*...*funny*...*cough**cough*... I primarily use Ubuntu for my workstation these days, but have used Linux for years on the desktop and in small enterprise. My experiments were first to see if automation worked. Fortunately we have curl and a multitude of posts on the subject floating about the internet. My zippy character posts several...

Image via Wikipedia Looking for methods to exclude files in our Indexing Service repository, I found some information on the MSDN with sparse descriptions of registry values. Fortunately, Microsoft KB article 322896 provides a direct set if instructions.

I recently wrote a VBScript utility that queries the contents of an Indexing Service database, finds the indexed Fax documents ( CCITT Group 4 (2d) Tiff's), sorts and moves them to another repository located on a SAN. Option Explicit Dim oCon Dim oCmd Dim oRst Dim sQry Dim sString Dim sScope Dim sAqScan Dim sFile Dim sPath Dim sMoveTo Dim sNum Dim FSO Dim sDate Dim sDosText Dim sDateDir Dim sDateDiff Dim sMonth Dim sDay Dim sYear Dim nCnt '/////////////////////////////////////////// ' ' Create the FSO ' '//////////////////////////////////////////////// Set FSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") '///////////////////////////////////////////////// ' ' Scope, Aquaius scan dir and Query. ' '//////////////////////////////////////////////// sScope = "F:\Incoming Fax\CWHHM\" sAqScan = "F:\Scanned Docs\Aquarius\14CWHHM\" sQry = "Select Path, Filename, Size, Contents " _ & "FRO...

One of my clients required job accounting for an iR C2550 Canon printer. This is how I did it TM . Step One : Set up printers on server Set up two printers on the server. One will be used for color, the other for B&W. Give them names that differentiate this. On the Security tab of the drivers, ensure that the Manage Printer ACL is not checked. B&W Specific Driver Settings: General Tab , Printing Preferences, Quality Tab, Color Mode is set to Black & White . Advanced Tab, Printing Defaults, Quality Tab, Color Mode is set to Black & White. Device Settings Tab, Job Accounting is checked. Device Settings Tab, Job Accounting, Settings, Allow Password Setting is checked, and 1000 is in the ID field. Password is blank. Do not use Job Accounting for B&W and Confirm Password when Printing are not checked. Color Specific Driver Settings: Quality steps 1 & 2 from above should default to Auto Detect. This should not be changed. Device Settings Tab,...

My employer, IHBSOnline.com , uses the Efficon Articles 3.x module in DotNetNuke to aid in driving website traffic. Every morning, I troll the news sites , and add News content items to the module. Then I use Twitter to announce these additions. I can easily browse to the posts and see the number of hits these items generate. Image via CrunchBase I also use the iFinity Google Analytics module to track my web traffic . Unfortunately, you can't add this module to any post, since technically, it's not really a page. I played around a bit, and found that I was able to add my code to the DesktopModules/Articles/ArticleDetailsStandard.aspx, and start tracking my posts!

I've always disliked the fact that I couldn't print to our Canon iR C2880 in color. It's not got the postscript option, which had I known how difficult it would have been for non- Windows PC's to use it, I would have investigated that option. They advertise the fact that the folks at Codehost, Inc. make a product called BrightQ that will print to these machines, but I never got it working well on my SuSE distribution . Image via Wikipedia I just recently updated my desktop from SuSE Linux Desktop Enterprise 10.1 to Ubuntu 9, and I've not been more pleased, but STILL couldn't print in color to our Canon...until now. I found a thread about this subject here where a kind soul named Andy informed the board that Canon Australia released Linux UFR and Postscript drivers in Deb, RPM, and source  (link updated 7/29/2013)! According to the documentation, the following Canon printers are supported: LBP3360 LBP3370 LBP3460 LBP5360 Image via Wikipedia ...