Remove “Name ActiveX Control” from SharePoint site

To remove the ActiveX install request on a public facing website or an intranet site  that does not use presence information, I followed the following (really old, but hey it worked!) blog post. It involves adding a custom js file to the master page:

http://vspug.com/mossman/2007/09/13/fixing-the-name-dll-activex-problem-the-mossman-way/

SharePoint: Easy way to download or copy list attachments to document library

I didn’t find a complete solution when I googled this, so I am writing down the steps how to get SharePoint list attachments copied to a document library (or in general, just get the list attachments to a local folder).

Business problem: A SharePoint user (not a developer) wants to take attachments collected in a list and store them in a local folder or upload them to a document library:

1. In Windows Explorer, go to My Network Places > Add Network Place
2. In the “Add Network Place” Wizard, click next and select “Choose another network location”, click next
3. Type in the url of the Sharepoint site that contains the list (I assume you have admin rights on that sharepoint site), e.g., http://intranetname/topics/projects/sitename
4. Click on your newly created network location in Windows Explorer. This should give you a folder view of your SharePoint site.
5. Select the folder “Lists” > and find your list name. Within your list folder there will be an attachments folder.
6. You will notice that the attachments for each list item are stored in individual folders (we will remedy that in a second).
7. Copy all folders to your local drive in an empty folder like attachtemp.
8. To get the folders out of their subfolders, simply do a search for all the file types you have in them (in my case I was simply looking for *.doc*). The search will list all the found files in a flat view. Now you can copy them out of your search window to where you need them. Since I wanted to upload them to another SharePoint library, I simply copied them into the root of attachtemp.
9. Go to your target  SharePoint library and upload all files (Note: If you have hundreds of documents, make sure to temporarily disable “require file check-out” so that you don’t have all files checked out to you after uploading. Once done, set the library back to require check-out if applicable.
10. Done, yeah!

Simple free diff tool for Mac OS X 10.5: Kdiff3

I needed a diff tool to compare text files on my Mac, and it turned out to be a time-consuming endeavor to find a basic free diff tool. One option is to install the Mac developer toolkit Xtools, but if all you need is the diff tool, why would you want to install 750MB worth of other tools you’ll never use. Plus, first you have to sign up for a free developer account, and if you are not on the latest Mac OS version, good luck figuring out how to find the Xtools version that works with your OS. I downloaded Xtools only to realize that I wasn’t able to install it afterwards because I am still on Leopard (10.5). I then looked again for free tools and found an app called mend which I couldn’t figure out how to download from the site, plus  it needed Fink installed first (so I got stuck again…).

I was successful with my next try. And the winner is: Kdiff3 (Kdiff3.sourceforge.net)! Simply downloaded it and double-clicked the app file. Took me nothing but 3 minutes. Nice.

CamelcityContent V2.3 for Joomla! not displaying user name

I recently installed CamelcityContent (v.2.3) to give authors and editors the option to view their unpublished articles from the frontend. However, the user name doesn’t show up in the user column. I updated the code as follows to display the name of the article author.

in file models/all.php:

change the following lines in  function _buildQuery():

cc.title as categorytitle
FROM #__content AS a

change to

cc.title as categorytitle,
u.name as username
FROM #__content AS a

in file views/all/tmpl/default.php

change

echo “<td>”.$l->created_by_user.”&nbsp;</td>”;

to

echo “<td>”.$l->username.”&nbsp;</td>”;

“Warning: Missing argument 3″ error after restoring joomla site with kickstart

I used joomlapack/kickstart to download my live site to localhost. After I was done, I was first greeted by a blank page. To resolve this, I first turned on Error reporting > Maximum in  Site configuration >Server. This then showed me the errors after refreshing the homepage. Error was “Undefined index: class in D:\wamp\www\modules\mod_superfishmenu\tmpl\default.php on line 36″. A forum post showed how to update this file to make the site work again. After that I was up and running, except some unfriendly errors in my module locations, all starting with “Warning: Missing argument 3 for…”. Another forum post to the rescue. Solution was to change some code in the affected files.

function onPrepareContent( &$article, &$params, $limitstart )
Replace it with,
function onPrepareContent( &$article, &$params, $limitstart = null )
or
function onPrepareContent( &$article, &$params)

Did the trick, thought I would take note of the solutions for my own sanity since I will probably do similar backup/restore actions in the future.

Lawsuit against Arizona State University for considering Kindle DX

Two weeks ago, the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) and the American Council of the Blind (ACB) filed suit against Arizona State University (ASU) for planning to use Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader as a means to distribute textbooks to students. While the latest version Kindle DX has text-to-speech capability for e-books, strangely the Kindle menu system itself does not have such a feature. This means, at this point the Kindle is no good for blind users.

Sadly enough, ASU pointed out in an e-mail statement that they have a Disability Resource Center and accomodate users with disabilities that way.  Sounds somewhat lame and shows how even universities don’t have clear policies in place that would signify a true commitment to accessibility. The simple fact that they start a pilot program before checking a device for accessibility just doesn’t sit right with me.

The correct approach would be to notify Amazon about a possible interest, but to note  first and foremost that unless their device is fully accessible, the Kindle could not be considered for higher education (both for legal and for ethical reasons).

For more details,  read the NFB Press Release.

SharePoint datasheet view suddenly stopped working

While working in datasheet view in a SharePoint document library (WSS 3/XP Professional/IE7) and switching back and forth between different views, the datasheet view suddenly stopped working and displayed an error dialog saying :

“The list is displayed in Standard view. It cannot be displayed in Datasheet view for one or more of the following reasons: A datasheet component compatible with Windows SharePoint Services is not installed, your browser does not support ActiveX controls, or support for ActiveX controls is disabled.”

Luckily, I found a post that suggested to delete your cache to solve the problem. Did it (had to close the browser and log back into my SharePoint) and it worked! Here’s the original blog link:

http://geekswithblogs.net/paullee/archive/2009/05/01/sharepoint-datasheet-view-errors.aspx

“Edit Task” button in Word 2007 not working on click

I had a Sharepoint document for review which was connected to a task,  so the “Edit Task” button showed up in the message bar right underneath the ribbon in Word 2007. However, when I clicked on it,  nothing happened. After googling the issue, I found a solution to my problem. It required to update the registry (always a scary thing). One comment to the blog post that I followed had instructions how to put the command in a .reg file and run it, which I did. Worked beautifully and didn’t mess up anything (lucky as usually!). If you need this solution, go to Kerry’s MOSS blog.

WebAIM screen reader survey results

WebAIM has conducted a screen reader survey from Dec 08 - Jan 09 with over 1000 responses mostly from users who use a screen reader on a day-to-day basis. It was interesting to see that JAWS is still the predominant screen reader (74% of respondents), while competitor WindowEyes comes in second (23%).

This makes sense, since JAWS and WindowEyes have been the leading screen reader products (with both voice and braille output) for many years and are used to not only access the web (like some newer free “light” browser plug-ins which are really not useful for users who already have a tool at hand to access their office applications and interact with their computer in general). Reported browser preferences (68% IE6/7 and 39% FF) indicate that the original JAWS/IE combination is holding strong. Read more: quick summary of what accessibility features are used most often.

WAMPServer Install with innoDB parameters causes MySQL error

I didn’t know that you can do either a XAMPP or a WAMP install on Windows to run Apache/MySQL/PHP for local testing, so I thought going with WAMPserver would be the better choice because of the W factor in the name. I needed the install to compare different CMS systems. I had no problems installing Joomla!, Drupal, and Plone, but I just couldn’t finish my installs for the collaboration tools ProjectPier and OpenGoo (which is pretty much an extended ProjectPier version).  The latter require  innoDB support,  and I followed a tutorial for installing Project Pier on XAMPP (http://www.projectpier.org/node/223), because there were no WAMP instructions. It had instructions to add the innoDB parameters to my.ini in the mysql root folder. More: how taking out innodb_log_arch_dir from my.ini solved my problem.

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