Andrew Taylor

A useful tool I discovered for viewing and setting Exif info in image files (e.g. JPEGs, TIFFs) is Microsoft Photo Info. This is a free tool from MS as part of their PowerTools range.

It can be downloaded from the Microsoft web site here.

Exif data is meta data embedded within image files, usually added by digital cameras, which includes data such as aperture, focal length, shutter speed, white balance, ISO speed and date/time taken. This can be very useful for analysing photos after you’ve downloaded them to your PC to see perhaps where you went right or wrong with a particular photo and how it could be improved. I’m using this info in my series of blog posts describing my own photos.

This tool allows you to see this data easily but also make modifications to fields such as the title, photographer, description, keywords etc. Useful for managing your photos long term.

Just a quick post to say congratulations to my brother Simon who received his degree results today – a 2:1 in Media Technology BSc Hons. Well done!

The first of a series of blog posts giving more details about some of my photographs.

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Something I’ve needed to do recently in the day job is to email the log file of NTBackup to a designated person for checking daily. A scheduled tape backup runs every night at midnight and the resulting log file needs to be sent to the business IT helpdesk to check that the backup completed successfully.

Having searched around the web for a bit I couldn’t find anything that did exactly what I wanted as one vbscript and not multiple batch files, or just pseudo code. So I’ve written my own; the code is below and can be freely used as long as the acknowledgement remains.

Some bits need customising, such as the to and from address for the email, the location of the log files and the SMTP server address, but it should be obvious where to make the changes.

The script emails the log file which has the same ‘last modified’ date as the current date, so needs to be run the same day as the backup log is created (i.e. not 7am after an 11pm backup the day before). That can probably be tweaked however. If no file is found with the same date, no email is sent. Again this could be tweaked to send an email saying so.

You’ll need to schedule this script to run after the backup is known to have completed (or failed). Say 7am for a midnight backup schedule. Any queries, feel free to contact me and I’ll do my best to answer.

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If you want to create an HTML link to a specific page in an Adobe PDF file, this is easily achieved with the following syntax:

<a href="file.pdf#page=4">Link to page 4</a>

For example, this link to the official Adobe documentation on this.

Does it work? If you’re reading this on Facebook, then yes

My day job currently includes the design, build and deployment of Active Directory services. As a user of VMWare ESX, most of our AD infrastructure is built as Virtual Machines.

However, over the last week I’ve come across problems with this environment, or more specifically, VMWare Tools. Rather than repeat what’s already been posted – here’s some links:

http://blogs.dirteam.com/blogs/jorge/archive/2005/11/14/60.aspx

http://blog.baeke.info/blog/_archives/2006/1/24/1720712.html

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?forumID=21&threadID=18782&messageID=211835#211835

Just a quick post for anyone wanting to block SMS messages being sent to your BT landline – just call 0800 587 5252. You can either allow messages at any time, between 9am-9pm, 8am-11pm, 12am-6am or block altogether.

The number to listen to and delete SMS messages is 0845 602 1111

Facebook is rather cool. Feel free to add me…

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=502514633

Over the last few days I’ve had several misssed calls from an 029 number.

Since they’ve tried a few times (and genuinely I’ve been unavailable or on another call) but never left a voicemail, I had my suspisions.

Interestingly, searching on Google for the number involved revealed my suspicisions are true:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=02920240069

Loads of people moaning about this company trying to sell them upgrades and changes of contracts. I think I’ll continue to “miss” their calls.