Dundeemedia Ltd

I thought it would be useful to let you all know what’s going on at the moment in Dundeemedialand.

Well, we’ve finished phase one of our automated service and invoicing system - which as it stands doesn’t mean much (although it does mean that I can produce invoices a lot quicker than before!) - however phase two allows service call / order information to be added and signed for via a PDA which means that:

1. You the customer receive an instant email detailing work done.
2. I receive a signed order form right to my accounting system. 

Also in development:

• Document Management system. Paperless office with full text searching and custom fields.
• Salesforce appointment scheduling system.
• Desktop editor for the CMS we were developing (probably end up as an image uploader)

And that’s all I can let out of the bag at the moment!

Recently, a client of mine was plagued by “missing export in msvcrt.dll” error messages, which mostly affected Autocad - of course, being an Architects it was a huge problem for them which otherwise required a reinstall of the machine.

After some research on the newsgroups, I found that the problem seemed to occur after using the SBS 2003 R2 client installer on a windows 2000 machine - not good, especially when adding a new computer using the wizard resulted in a popup on login that would only go away if you gave in and didn’t click postpone!

So, how to fix the dll problem, well, simply copy it back to the system32 folder? Nah, Windows 2000 has Windows File Protection in place, and that coupled with the fact that mscvrt.dll is used quite a lot and is 99.9% likely to be in use makes it a hard problem to fix. Oh, and did I mention that the error message might not relate to msvcrt.dll but in fact to one of the other dll files from the VC Runtime?! Aarghh…

Anyway, long story short I created a batch file that fixes the problem. It contains the important dll files from the last Visual C Redistributable and a couple of batch files. Download, Extract and run FIX.CMD and your error should be gone!

(Please note that I cannot be held responsible for any damage caused by the use of the fix - it has been tested and works with the system I needed it to work with!)

Well, I finally got around to updating our website. I’ve had this design in my sandbox for a while now, but haven’t had the time to do anything with it - until now that is - I decided to turn what I had into a theme for Wordpress, and even though it’s not 100%, it’s a lot lot better than what we had.

This has been a real pain for a while for me: You buy a system with XP Home preinstalled because it’s cheap, and then put XP Pro OEM on… but WAIT!! - you have to do a clean install (which isn’t that difficult) but it means you have to find drivers and stuff when it should be easier…

Well, I think I found a solution - not for production though, as I’m sure it violates Microsofts Windows EULA:

1. Boot into Windows
2. Start the Upgrade from a RETAIL copy of XP Pro
3. When the system restarts, replace the retail cd with the oem cd

And hey presto, an upgraded XP Home OEM

Kind of a moot point really, as XP is going away to the nursing home - ah, how we’ll miss you…

Pressing the signature button within Outlook 2007 options didn’t cause the signature editor to appear (also the editor options didn’t cause the editor options to appear)

Fix:

I’d noticed earlier in the day that I couldn’t “view source” from
within internet explorer. Deleting the temporary internet files fixed
this, and also fixed the above problem in Outlook 2007.

Update: This seems to only fix the problem a few times, hopefully a Service Pack will be available that will fix this!