Monday, October 31, 2011

Security Groups and Policies for a Windows User

In Windows environment, resources authorizations are usually done by checking a users security policy.  When you are writing a program, you often need to find out your own security group/ policy, so you can test your program with your own credentials.   However, it isn't always convenient to bother the system administrators to get details of your settings.

In a situation like this, you may want to try the tool gpresult

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/gpresult.mspx?mfr=true

With it, you can see settings about yourself.

v-tools and Access

If you have inherited an Access database from someone, one of the problems you may face is finding your way round.  As things can be done as queries, forms and modules etc., it can be a bit difficult to find your ways.

I have recently come across this tool called v-tools.  It offers many features for Access database, but the one I found it most attractive is the ability to do "deep searches" on all objects.  For example, if you search for the "Orders", it will look for all objects such as tables, queries, modules etc and show you any involved.

Did I also mention it is free?

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Routing paramaters in MVC

In .NET MVC, you can access the routing parameters by using RouteData property of the ViewContext object similar to below.

ViewContext.RouteData.Values["id"]

Saturday, October 15, 2011

Ubuntu 11.10 ... and its problems

Ubuntu 11.10 seems to be the worst I have tried so far.  Since my graphics card isn't new enough to support the new graphics features, I can tell the visual part of the system.  However, it broke my sound.  Now my system is "silent"

After upgrade, the system failed to detect my


00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 02)

I am a system user, and I just want a system work.  Guess with Ubuntu ... it seems it is still too much to ask!

Update:

At last I found this website.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=205449

By following the instructions, I at least managed to get sound back (sort of).

For some unknown reason, snd-intel8x0 was backlisted. Once I comment out the snd-intel8x0 in the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-alsa.conf , I got my sound back (well on speaker out jack anyway. My tower is a business machine with internal speaker. Still have no sound with the internal speaker. Nevertheless, it is a progress)

# blacklist snd-intel8x0