Free Conference Call Service

If you are able to limit conference calls to 6 people and book them in advance (which most people should)

 

Then this service which is FREE! Will work. It’s called Talkyou and is available here: http://www.conference-call.me/

 

Turn your Windows 7 ethernet connection into a Wireless Access Point

I travel fairly regularly and often find the hotels have an ethernet connection but no wireless. This is a pain as i like to use my Blackberry. I was all set to use ICS in Windows 7, but despite looking like it should work, it doesn't seem to be compatible with an iPhone.

After a bit of googling, I found some software called connectify, which is free! I downloaded it and had a wireless network up and running in my hotel room within minutes.

Check it out here

Slow Wireless Connection allof a sudden?

This baffled me on a client machine today. The wireless was running slow to access netowrk resourcese. So much so that files were failing to load.

The problem was due to IE settings, tools --> internet options --> advanced

Then reset advanced settings, seemed to cure the problem

How to Setup an entire website for free

OK time to post something a bit more mainstream, but very useful indeed!

I recently had a need to setup a small consultancy website for myself. I hadn't designed or built a site for many years and didn't really have the time to build one (or the skills.)

However I've found a solution that allows for:

free .co.uk domain name
free hosting
free web site design (well you have to enter some content)
free email

I've set this up to link in to my iPhone and have also been able to monitor the traffic, all for free.

The site that I have setup is at www.kamit.co.uk however I'm going to create an additional site with screenshots to allow others to utilise this.

Just watch this space

Excel Strip out a string

In Excel, when trying to remove a string of charactes, I regularly use the fomula below. When manipulating data from AD, this proves to be very useful, so in the example below, all data is removed before a semi colon within a string:

RIGHT(F433,LEN(F433) - FIND(";",F433))

AD Last Logon time

OK, I have taken this script off someone else's site, but that's because it's so useful.

To run the script save it as .vbs somerwhere on a DC adn run this command:

cscript script.vbs > d:\temp\output.txt

The script details are below:

Option Explicit

Dim objRootDSE, adoConnection, adoCommand, strQuery
Dim adoRecordset, strDNSDomain, objShell, lngBiasKey
Dim lngBias, k, strDN, dtmDate, objDate
Dim strBase, strFilter, strAttributes, lngHigh, lngLow

' Obtain local Time Zone bias from machine registry.
' This bias changes with Daylight Savings Time.
Set objShell = CreateObject("Wscript.Shell")
lngBiasKey = objShell.RegRead("HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\" _
& "TimeZoneInformation\ActiveTimeBias")
If (UCase(TypeName(lngBiasKey)) = "LONG") Then
lngBias = lngBiasKey
ElseIf (UCase(TypeName(lngBiasKey)) = "VARIANT()") Then
lngBias = 0
For k = 0 To UBound(lngBiasKey)
lngBias = lngBias + (lngBiasKey(k) * 256^k)
Next
End If
Set objShell = Nothing

' Determine DNS domain from RootDSE object.
Set objRootDSE = GetObject("LDAP://RootDSE")
strDNSDomain = objRootDSE.Get("defaultNamingContext")
Set objRootDSE = Nothing

' Use ADO to search Active Directory.
Set adoCommand = CreateObject("ADODB.Command")
Set adoConnection = CreateObject("ADODB.Connection")
adoConnection.Provider = "ADsDSOObject"
adoConnection.Open "Active Directory Provider"
adoCommand.ActiveConnection = adoConnection

' Search entire domain.
strBase = ""

' Filter on all user objects.
strFilter = "(&(objectCategory=person)(objectClass=user))"

' Comma delimited list of attribute values to retrieve.
strAttributes = "distinguishedName,lastLogonTimeStamp"

' Construct the LDAP syntax query.
strQuery = strBase & ";" & strFilter & ";" & strAttributes & ";subtree"

' Run the query.
adoCommand.CommandText = strQuery
adoCommand.Properties("Page Size") = 100
adoCommand.Properties("Timeout") = 60
adoCommand.Properties("Cache Results") = False
Set adoRecordset = adoCommand.Execute

' Enumerate resulting recordset.
Do Until adoRecordset.EOF
' Retrieve attribute values for the user.
strDN = adoRecordset.Fields("distinguishedName").Value
' Convert Integer8 value to date/time in current time zone.
On Error Resume Next
Set objDate = adoRecordset.Fields("lastLogonTimeStamp").Value
If (Err.Number <> 0) Then
On Error GoTo 0
dtmDate = #1/1/1601#
Else
On Error GoTo 0
lngHigh = objDate.HighPart
lngLow = objDate.LowPart
If (lngLow < 0) Then
lngHigh = lngHigh + 1
End If
If (lngHigh = 0) And (lngLow = 0) Then
dtmDate = #1/1/1601#
Else
dtmDate = #1/1/1601# + (((lngHigh * (2 ^ 32)) _
+ lngLow)/600000000 - lngBias)/1440
End If
End If
' Display values for the user.
If (dtmDate = #1/1/1601#) Then
Wscript.Echo strDN & ";Never"
Else
Wscript.Echo strDN & ";" & dtmDate
End If
adoRecordset.MoveNext
Loop

' Clean up.
adoRecordset.Close
adoConnection.Close
Set adoConnection = Nothing
Set adoCommand = Nothing
Set adoRecordset = Nothing
Set objDate = Nothing

Excel Strip the first characters from a cell

I always forget this:

=RIGHT(A1,LEN(A1)-2)

In the above example 2 is the number of cells to strip off.