Technical – John Selkirk

Wix: Installing a shortcut to a URL with an icon

For months now an installer that I created using the InternetShortcut tag has been without a nice icon.

I decided to trawl the web and work out how to create a shortcut that could contain an icon.

It turns out you can actually use a standard Wix Shortcut IF you perform a few steps. First you need to define an icon like so:

<Icon Id="Shortcut_Icon.ico" SourceFile="<path to icon>" />

Note: The Id of the icon has a .ico extension. This is important as Wix does not generate a correct shortcut if this is not present.

Then, you need to setup a property which contains the URL you wish to have the shortcut launch:

<Property Id="Shortcut_Url" Value="http://the.url.you.would.like.launched" />

Finally, you need to create a shortcut that uses both the icon and the URL property:

<Shortcut Id="SampleShortcut" Directory="DesktopFolder" Name="Sample" WorkingDirectory="SampleDir" Description="Launches Website." Target="[Shortcut_Url]" Icon="Shortcut_Icon.ico" />

The result is a shortcut that will launch the users default browser to the specified URL.

Fixing Orphaned Users in SQL Server

One of the first tasks when loading data from a backup is to match up the
users in the database with the ones defined in SQL Server. Getting data
from clients continually and having to do this you would think I would
remember it but unfortunately no, I have to lookup it up each time.

So this one is mainly for me!!!

EXEC sp_change_users_login 'Update_One', 'john', 'john'

Dark Room

I have been getting up early again for the past few days and reverted back to an application I have been using for a while.

The application is called Dark Room. It is a c# word processing application that has a black background and green text. I know it sounds strange but when your eyes have not adjusted to the light yet this app is wonderful.

I use it for about 30 mins until I can brave using normal bright tools like Outlook. I then simple copy the email(s) I have been writing into new outlook messages and send them. Done.

I stopped doing this a while back as it was hard to type properly but with my new laptop and it’s backlit keyboard (just bright enough – not too bright!) it makes sense again.

ORA-01034: ORACLE not available

I have seen this error so many times that I thought I would note down the resolution (for me anyway)

When logging into the database you get:

ORA-01034: ORACLE not available.
ORA-27101: shared memory realm does not exist

To solve you connect to sqlplus as follows:

sqlplus /nolog

connect sys/sys as sysdba

When connected, startup the database using:

startup

The database will startup and can be connected to as normal.

15 years in Mobile GIS

Well there you have it. 15 years have gone by and I hardly even noticed it. I have been developing, consulting and a whole host of other tasks in the Mobile GIS world now for 15 years!

Back on January 5th 1998 when I joined Conic Systems Ltd. little did I know that I would be still in this industry.

Times have changed in the GIS industry over the past 15 years. I started developing in VB3 and C++ (can’t even remember what rev number!) using an in-house graphics/GIS engine which still to this day has some great ideas in it. It was the precursor to MapObjects and still has users.

Smallworld was dominant in the utility market at that time and the link between Smallworld and Conic took up the most of my time.

That was working life until, in very quick succession, Tadpole bought Conic and we moved from a proprietary engine to using ArcObjects. I never delved into Avenue programming and have only seen ArcView 3.x about 3 times in my whole life!

Now we are in an age of server based GIS with mobile devices syncing when they can.

Users have moved from laptops to iOS and android devices and expect fit fit purpose applications.

I happened upon the GIS industry and am glad that I did.