Have you ever wondered how on earth you can export spreadsheets from Numbers on the iPad to Microsoft Excel? I have and much to my dismay I found the above combination of software may as well be known as a royal pain in the proverbial rear end. Recently I decided as part of my studies in photography I would use Apple’s Numbers application for the iPad to capture a series of information for each of the shots I was taking on a roll of film (yes that is correct, film… not digital LOL).
Much to my dismay I found that once I had filled out the spreadsheet, the only formats that I could export from the Numbers application were either to Apple Numbers, or PDF. However as my main computer is a PC I obviously don’t have Numbers as the iWork suite is only available for Apple OSX.
Therefore I found myself in the difficult situation of how to get the file across to my computer so that I could convert it and continue work on it in Microsoft Excel. In the end I figured out the only way was to do the following:
- In the Numbers application on the iPad select the cells you wish to copy and copy them by tapping on the selected cells once and select copy
- Open up a word processing application on the iPad, in this case I chose DocsToGo
- Create a new word document and paste the text in
- Email this to yourself and open it on your PC
- Copy the text by selecting it all and clicking Ctrl + C
- Paste this into a new excel workbook. Obviously you lose any formatting however you get the data over and it will correctly place it into rows and colums.
Until such a time as Apple enables the ability to export to a competitors format I would strongly recommend that you use a different app (such as DocsToGo) that natively supports the Microsoft Office formats so that you do not run into these issues.
If anyone has any other ideas I would welcome hearing how you get around this frustrating issue.
Stuart
Recently I ran into an issue with the VMWare vSphere Host Update Utility that was causing it to report that my ESXi server was up to date when I was well aware that several newer builds were available. After much poking around on the web and coming up trumps I had to set to work to attempt to resolve the issue myself. Therefore I managed to devise this procedure which should hopefully resolve issues when the vSphere Host Update Utility is ignoring updates or in other words simply not detecting that updates were available.
I found a relatively simple procedure which should clear the cache out and cause the vSphere Host Update Utility to do a complete rescan of the host and correctly detect that there are updates available. Due to the newest release of vSphere 4.1 which no longer uses the Host Update Utility this affects only versions 4.0 and earlier (though I was experiencing it with ESXi 4.0 U1 myself)
To resolve the issue follow these steps:
- Load up the Host Update Utility and remove the host causing issues from the list
- Uninstall both the VMWare vSphere Host Update utility and the VMWare vSphere Client
- Reboot your computer
- Install the vSphere client and Host Update Utility Again (for good measure I put these in a different folder to the original)
- Load up the Host Update Utility, add back the ESXi Host and scan for the patches (You should now see any new patches available).
I hope that this can help someone else out as I have to say it drove me up the wall for some time.
If anyone has any simpler way of this I would certainly welcome it.
Stuart
This one is good news for all you geeks out there. It looks like O’Reilly Media have extended their discount offer of Buy X eBooks get X eBooks free (where X is however many you want to purchase). O’Reilly I would think are most famous for their “Liama” and “Camel” book series for various programming languages including everything from Perl, to PHP to C/C++.
So the good news is you can get 50% off any eBooks you purchase. You can visit http://oreilly.com to see all the books that the have available. As below you get the eBooks in multiple formats, all DRM free.
The coupon code you have to use is “BXGXF” as per the below email I received, they had a thing at the bottom saying “Forward to a friend” LOL so I hope they do not object to me mass releasing it to the interweb.
Some of the books that I have purchased and have read/am currently reading that I would recommend are:
And just in case you are wondering what I have in my collection you can see the image below of all the O’Reilly eBooks I have.
One issue I have run into time and time again at work is when either myself or colleagues leave themselves logged into Terminal Services (using Remote Desktop Protocol or RDP for short) on a server and therefore lock out anyone but themselves from logging back ON to the server. Obviously this is targeted at servers running on the Wintel architecture.
This issue cropped up for me again and I was struggling to find a way to kick the other terminal services connections or terminate them or (well LOL I had a few other thoughts that were kinda graphic but hey we are trying to be professional here). Luckily a colleague was able to assist me and gave me this gem which I was unable to find elsewhere on the net (probably from a lack of the correct keywords).
If you need to force access to the console session for a host running Microsoft Windows Server 2003, MS Windows Server 2008 or probably a host of other Windows server and desktop hosts, give this little command line switch a try.
On the run command prompt of the computer you are connecting from (the guest) instead of running plain old ‘mstsc’ instead run ‘mstsc /v:hostname.yourdomain.com -console /admin’.
I have no idea why (and will try to do some research later unless someone else can shed light on this) the straight up ‘-console’ switch did not work as a lot of people on the net said it would, without the ‘/admin’ switch I just kept getting the error “Terminal Services had reached the maximum number of licences” and so on.
So… I hope this helps you out next time pesky wabbits leave themselves logged onto your servers and stop you from logging on to RDP.
Stuart
Recently I ran into a problem I have seen all too many times, someone had entered the wrong URL in the admin panel of a WordPress blog and they could no longer log into the application to fix the issue. Normally this would break wordpress so that you couldn’t use the admin panel and require a manual update to the database however I came up with the idea to use WordPress’ own functions to enable an update of the URL without using the admin panel.
So there was born the idea of WP-Recover. A simple script to do one very simple task, allow you to change the wordpress blog URL when it is not working or you have entered it incorrectly.
I have decided to use the new power of my Open Source Battlefield Wiki to document the script so you can access WP-Recover on the OSBattlefield site.
A brief how-to:
1. Upload recover.php to your root wordpress folder (the same folder that wp-config.php exists in).
2. Open your wp-config.php file however you would like and get the first five charaters of the AUTH_KEY string (excluding the ‘ )
3. In a web browser access http://www.yoursite.com/yourwordpressfolder/recover.php
4. Enter the new URL for your site (ensuring it is in the format ‘http://www.yoursite.com/yourwordpressfolder’ without the ”)
5. Click Submit
6. Once you receive a confirmation message DELETE recover.php from your wordpress folder. Leaving it there is a DRASTIC security risk.
Download
Getting Help
Ideally if you need assistance please pop over and log a bug/support request on the JIRA Bug Tracking Site, although if you have any issues using that you can also use the Open Source Battlefield Contact Page or leave a comment here.
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