Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is a powerful tool that comes with any of the paid editions of SQL server. By design its main function is to extract, transform and load data into databases however by mixing in CSV exports and PowerShell commands it can help automate various workflows. Although I won’t delve into too much detail in this… Read more
Happy New Year!
A happy new year to everyone!
Moodle and Capita SIMS – Database enrolment (a short how to)
One of the holy grails of Moodle is having it such that students are added to the right courses in an automated way. This becomes particularly true if you have individual courses for each and every class each of which could have up to 30 enrolments to go through (just far to many to do using manual methods). Moodle has… Read more
Windows Authentication when using Safari on iOS8 does not work – Workaround
In recent testing with iOS8 (specifically 8.0.2) we’ve discovered that any web application (in particular we’ve got a number of in house applications that were built using Visual Studio Lightswitch 2013) that relies on Windows Authentication (on Microsoft Internet Information Services) simply does not work. In particular users get to the login prompt screen to enter their username and password… Read more
Where I work…
Well the new school term is upon us and I have (at last!) had the time to do a photo of my office setup. In the photo above we have- 2x HP 23bw 23″ IPS monitors These beasts recently replaced a pair of 1440×900 resolution monitors – given that I’m doing a lot of database work at the moment it only… Read more
Plantronics Voyager Legend – Firmware Update
Just a little snippet before hitting September…..Having recently tried to update the Firmware on my Plantronics Voyager Legand at work (using a Windows 8.1 problem) I found that the MyHeadset Updater (http://www.plantronics.com/uk/product/myheadset-updater) tool cannot handle web proxies (without having the URLs it tries to reach out to being in a authentication bypass list). As I only had one headset to… Read more
Cloud Coffee…just a little fun!
A few days ago I saw something on a social networking site about what Pizza would be like if it was a ‘Cloud Service’ – afraid I don’t know who to credit for it so I won’t post it here but I did give into temptation and make my own about Coffee!
My favourite feature of Windows Phone 8.1 (thus far) – Auto turn back on WiFi
After playing with Windows Phone 8.1 on my Nokia Lumia 1020 for the past few days (since general release in the UK) thus far my favourite feature has to be the ability for the phone to automatically turn back on WiFi (after a set period of time) after you turn it off. Certainly where I live and work WiFi is… Read more
Looking back on setting up a Moodle install – Introduction
The past few weeks at work have been filled up with going from what has been a very successful pilot of Moodle 2.6 to a fully featured install of Moodle 2.7.1. Hopefully as time allows I’ll be able to get out some posts about how each aspect of Moodle goes down with the staff and students but for now this… Read more
HP ProCurve 2610 – Basic Setup using console cable
In this guide I am going to show how to perform a very basic setup of a HP ProCurve 2610 Layer 2 network switch using a serial to console cable. First up you will need a serial to console cable and a PC that has a serial port. If you don’t have a PC with a serial port (old HPs… Read more