I recently discovered the “Slipsum Generator” which is quotes from Samuel L Jackson’s movies… then someone in the office mentioned the Bacon Generator (discussing some choice cuts of meat and bacon).
This web site has these 2 generators plus several others listed (Bacon, Hipster and Zombie ipsum are my favourites). http://theultralinx.com/2013/08/10-hilarious-lorem-ipsum-generators-web-designers.html
Enjoy!
I just recently got a Surface Pro 3 for work and I absolutely love it. It truly is a replacement for a laptop… and when you consider that the new SP3 weighed almost as much as my previous laptop’s power brick, it’s a welcome change. There have been a few things that have been bugging me, but most of them I have overcome – the latest one was an unusual problem and seeing as there’s very little info out there about it, I thought it might be worth sharing.
It was always my plan to use an SDXC card to store Videos, Music and my OneDrive files. These are all things where the I/O speed is not particularly important, and portability (being able to transfer from my workstation at home to my Surface for work) is… so when the SDXC card stopped working after about 30 minutes I couldn’t believe it! I Googled around for people in similar situations and it appears as though it used to be a common problem… but most of the current issues seemed to be hardware-related – all of the power-management issues have been resolved with firmware / software updates from Microsoft themselves since the start of the year (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2914219, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2919355). The temporary fix (for me) was to take it out and put it back in again, but that only worked for 1/2 an hour at a time… and in the meantime the OneDrive App switches off because the drive it’s supposed to be writing to no longer exists.
What’s a guy to do? Initially I thought there might be some power management feature setting somewhere that is causing it to shut down after a bit of inactivity, but there were no drive power settings in my Power management control panel applet – maybe they’re hidden on the SP3?
Well… the easiest way I found to have it stay connected and dodge the power management shenanigans is to go to Device Manager and under the Properties for the SDXC drive, change the Removal policy from “Quick Removal” to “Better Performance” – This prevents the Power saving settings from switching it off. Anyway, problem solved!
Now I just need to find a way to remap some of the keyboard settings and I’m a happy camper! I’ve done it before, just need to remember where the registry keys are…
I don’t mind the idea behind Metro apps and I like the security they bring. However there are a couple of things I dislike about them, which really should not be problems in the first place, but are because of the way the App model was implemented.
Turns out that with a little bit of fiddling, you can create normal Desktop-style shortcuts for your metro apps, with the nice icons and everything… and thereby work around these issues 🙂
The process follows:
Start-Transcript $env:SystemDrive\Users\$env:username\Desktop\Log.txt
$installedapps = get-AppxPackage
foreach ($app in $installedapps)
{
foreach ($id in (Get-AppxPackageManifest $app).package.applications.application.id)
{
$app.packagefamilyname + "!" + $id }
}
Write-Host "Finished : Press any key to exit... View Log.txt for AppUserModelId's"
$x = $host.UI.RawUI.ReadKey("NoEcho,IncludeKeyDown")
Stop-Transcript
Done! Okay, so it’s not particularly easy, but it’s doable. Leave a comment if you would like some more detail on any of the steps!
I’m a fan of the keyboard. I would rather have a keyboard shortcut to anything than having to reach for my mouse… Enter Bayden’s SlickRun.
SlickRun is a way of setting up shortcuts to perform a series of actions on the computer. I just press <ALT> Q and enter the shortcut into the search box… For example:
You can configure your own shortcuts or use some of the pre-canned ones available as “packs” on the download page. Grab it here: http://www.bayden.com/SlickRun/ – Made by Eric Lawrence, the author of Fiddler <–Guy’s got cred.
Wow – Normally I’m impressed at projects on Codeplex, but this has just blown my mind. http://responsivesharepoint.codeplex.com/ – this is a project that converts your SharePoint pages to a Responsive design – Brilliant! And it works on 2010 as well as 2013 – Brilliant! And it’s using the publically available responsive Frameworks Twitter Bootstrap (2 and 3) and Zurb Foundation (4) – Brilliant!
We’re building a web site for a client currently using RD and the way it works in a device agnostic way is… hmmm, a word to sum up what I think of Responsive Design… I know – Brilliant! Big convert to the “unified approach”…
Oftentimes when setting up user profile images in SharePoint, we “house” the images in a website so they can easily be updated by the corporate photographer (seriously – some companies like to have a standard image “look” for their user profiles, part of their onboarding process). anyway, bad news bears if you are using Chrome, and sometimes even IE is a little flaky in the way it renders the image – Instead of getting a pretty profile pic, you get the dreaded red X (missing image icon).
I believe the underlying issue is related to CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing – http://enable-cors.org/ – Note if you are trying this you need to enable it on the site requesting the pictures, not the site hosting the pictures) Happily, SharePoint 2013 has a switch (powershell only) that lets you enable the ability to remotely host the images – Try this on for size:
asnp Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell
$ShowMyPhotos = Get-SPWebApplication http://intranet.domain.internal
$ShowMyPhotos.CrossDomainPhotosEnabled = $true
$ShowMyPhotos.Update()
Voila! Photos appear… This solution was found on Wictor’s blog: http://www.wictorwilen.se/sharepoint-2013-enabling-cross-domain-profile-pictures
It seems that sometimes in Microsoft, the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing… like where the right hand recommends the use of SQL Aliases when connecting to databases within SharePoint, but the left hand is building Access Services for SharePoint which does not recognise them… Ah yeah!
When you try to create a service app for Access in SharePoint 2013, you get an error message saying: A connection could be established to the application database server but mixed mode authentication isn’t enabled. Now if you are using Windows Authentication (and good on you for doing so) you don’t need to enable Mixed mode authentication just to get the app up and running, you simply need to use the SQL Server’s machine / cluster name (and instance if it’s not the default).
Problem solved!
I’ve just rolled out the March 2013 Public Update (PU kb2767999) and August 2013 Cumulative Update (CU kb2817616) to a SharePoint server. Got to admit, it’s been a while since I did any of this, but… yeah… never had to re-register SharePoint Services or stop and start services in order to patch an app. Guess I’m getting lazy…
From March Public Update onwards, the process is to stop the following 3 services in this order, run the update then restart the services in the reverse order.
net stop SPTimerV4
net stop OSearch15
net stop SPSearchHostController
Install Update
net start SPSearchHostController
net start OSearch15
net start SPTimerV4
The info is covered here… http://blogs.technet.com/b/tothesharepoint/archive/2013/03/13/how-to-install-update-packages-on-a-sharepoint-farm-where-search-component-and-high-availability-search-topologies-are-enabled.aspx (I mean, is there a deployment out there somewhere not running search?)
Not only that, since the PU (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2767999) for every non-service pack update applied to the server you need to follow the process as indicated above… AND re-register the Workflow engine. I’m sorry, what?????
Error:
Microsoft.Workflow.Client.ActivityValidationException: Workflow XAML failed validation due to the following errors:
Cannot set unknown member ‘CheckInItem.ItemId’. HTTP headers received from the server – ActivityId: 0a36dc6a-c872-41c9-8302-310378bfc1de. NodeId: 2013-SP. Scope: /SharePoint/default/7bf81cf4-ef48-4507-a0b5-53f948d26fd0/b44b51c4-8b55-4cfb-993f-66f6f873bafa. Client ActivityId : ea960b9c-dd02-5067-249a-2f0446fce574. —> System.Net.WebException: The remote server returned an error:
Not sure why they have to throw away the association for a CU or hotfix… ah well.
I keep having to hunt down the fix for this, as I work with a lot of production SharePoint environments that are not exposed to the web… and this error is symptomatic of the lack of connectivity.
This is the article I used to use http://blog.muhimbi.com/2009/04/new-approach-to-solve-sharepoints.html but this article seems to be a smarter approach… http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753863.aspx
The fix is easy, and can be done through Group Policies (either local or Domain-wide, useful if you are running a separate domain with a 1-way trust to an existing domain).
Group Policies –> Default Domain Policy –> Edit, then…
Change it to:
The other tabs can be left as is, but on this tab both options are selected by default – they need to be unticked.
Brad
| Kusuma Alapati on Document Libraries and Lists c… | |
 | Harish Kasture on Exchange Setup encountered a p… |
 | Robson Giovanni Pari… on SharePoint Designer 2013 (SPD)… |
 | Gilmar Maia on Changing the My Site URL… |
 | Mark E on SharePoint Designer 2013 (SPD)… |
SharePoint Blog 