Martin W Smith

I’m finished work now for the holidays so to anybody reading this blog have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Enjoy.

Merry Christmas

In all my software projects now I use SVN for my source control and although very good most of the time, does have a tendancy to break sometimes.

One of the issues I get sometimes is while updating my working copy from the repository, I get the following errors:

“svn: Checksum mismatch for ‘aaa’; expected: ‘xxxxx’, actual: ‘yyy’”

You can ofcourse just delete your working copy and do another checkout, but this is not always an option for me as some of my code is heavily embedded in my development environment. So I needed another solution.

After searching the internet for sometime I came across this blog post with the following solution:

1. checkout a clean copy to a temporary location
2. for new and your problem checkouts, go to the folder where your svn mismatch error is thrown
3. in that folder, go to .svn folder
4. copy the entries file over from the clean copy
5. svn cleanup on the problem folder
6. svn update

Problem solved!

The Wife and I took my 3 year old daughter to see Disney Princesses on Ice yesterday at the O2 and we had a lovely day. I’ve not been to the O2 before and I found it to be a really good venue, getting there was pretty easy and parking was no problem whatsoever. Although Disney Princesses aren’t really my thing it was well worth the money to see the look on my daughter’s face, she was mesmerized from start to finish.

My Little Princess

I’ve now completed my move to my own domain, which is being hosted by justhost.com. There are a lot of webhosts available on the internet, but justhost.com offer unlimited space, transfer bandwidth, domains, sub-domains & mysql databases, plus a lot more besides, all for a reasonable price. I can’t vouch for support or uptime as yet but setting up was petty painless and their Control Panel is easy to use. Installing this blog was very easy, I had it up and running in a matter of minutes. If you’re considering a web host then you can’t go wrong with justhost.com, in a few weeks I’ll probably write another post once I’ve had a chance to check performance etc.

This blog is now being hosted on my own domain martinwsmith.co.uk the new url is blog.martinwsmith.co.uk.

I’m currently working on a project that requires the automatic rendering of files to PDF, MS Office files work ok but there’s a problem with Visio and Tiff files  so I wrote this simple console app in VB.NET.

Module Module1

Sub Main(ByVal args As String())
OpenFileWithAcrobat(args(0), args(1))
End Sub

Private Sub OpenFileWithAcrobat(ByVal InputFile As String, ByVal OutPutFile As String)
Dim AcroAVDoc As Object
Dim AcroPDDoc As Object
Dim b As Boolean

AcroAVDoc = CreateObject("AcroExch.AVDoc")
b = AcroAVDoc.Open(InputFile, "Temp")

If AcroAVDoc.IsValid Then
AcroPDDoc = AcroAVDoc.GetPDDoc()
AcroPDDoc.SetInfo("Title", "")

If AcroPDDoc.Save(1 Or 4 Or 32, OutPutFile) <> True Then
Debug.Print("Error")
End If

AcroPDDoc.Close()
End If

AcroAVDoc.Close(0)
AcroPDDoc = Nothing
AcroAVDoc = Nothing

End Sub

End Module

The app uses Acrobat Professional 9 and takes as its parameters the path of the file to be rendered to PDF format and the path of where the file should be saved to.  eg. renderer.exe “c:\temp\file.tif” “c:\temp\file.pdf”

It works really well as it maintains page sizes and orientation.  It will needs some error handling adding before it goes into production, but for now it works ok.

I’ve been experimenting with various Social Media sites for a little while and I’ve met some interesting people, I even got some help with a presentation I was working on.  I thought I would add some links to my Social Media profiles:

Twitter
Friend Feed
Facebook
Google Profile
LinkedIn
Google Reader

Welcome to my new personal blog, this blog will be a dumping ground for ideas, thoughts, code excerpts, tips, links and anything else that pops into my head.