Recovering Previous Versions from SharePoint

Scott S NelsonLeave a comment

A few weeks ago I discovered that other people had mistakenly made changes to a draft of a technical document I was storing in SharePoint for which I had sole responsibility for. At the time we did not know how to access earlier versions of the document and I had to painstakingly review the entire draft and re-verify every detail.

Today I needed to compare revisions of a document that was stored in SharePoint with updates made on another machine. When I went to compare tab in this SharePoint managed document, I discovered how to find earlier versions!

Under the Review menu in Word, the Compare section has additional options for documents stored in SharePoint:

Compare Menu with SharePoint Library
Compare Menu with SharePoint Library

From here you can find the versions SharePoint has stored

SharePoint Library Revision Dialog
SharePoint Library Revision Dialog

And, once I knew what to look for, finding the Microsoft documentation was easy 🙂

If you found this interesting, please share.

Port Tunneling with Putty

Scott S NelsonLeave a comment

Recently I had a situation where a combination of firewalls and load balancers prevented me from testing an application. Fortunately, an experienced server admin had a solution that I am sharing here: Use putty for port tunneling.

Create and save an SSH session for the host

Create Putty Session
Create Putty Session

Load the session, then go to Connection > SSH > Tunnels

Enter Putty Tunnel Details
Enter Putty Tunnel Details

Enter port and server info then click Add

Save Tunnel Connection
Save Tunnel Connection

Click Open
Return to the Sessions and Save to store for future use
Now you can access the remote machine:port by using localhost:port, i.e., http://localhost:8080 will take you to http://anyhostname:8080 in the above examples.

This can also be done with BitVise Tunnelier (shown below for accessing MySQL):

BitVise SSH Tunneling
BitVise SSH Tunneling
If you found this interesting, please share.

All Work and No Play…Mass Update Your MP3s with Cover Art

Scott S NelsonLeave a comment

Rather than buy a new car to get a dashboard computer, I just bought a tablet and mounted it on my ashtray. For the music, it is easier to see what is playing from cover art, but not all of my MP3s have it. So I went on a search..

I will save you the trials and errors of a half-dozen programs that will run on the latest patch of Windows but require adding the images one-by-one (I have 11,000 songs on the tablet). The only program I found that adds the images automagiclly is MP3 CoverTag. Well, it is supposed to because I read a dozen articles that said it did. Problem is, Microsoft has patched it to death and I could not run it.

I got around the patch issue by doing the following (extra steps added for those that didn’t already have the VMs handy):

  1. Download VirtualBox
  2. Download an old Microsoft-provided VM.
  3. Import the VM into VirtualBox. During the import or before starting it:
    1. Bump the RAM up to at least 2GB
    2. Add a shared folder that auto mounts where you will put your MP3s to update
  4. Start the VM and make sure Windows Update is set to Never Update
  5. Download MP3 CoverTag
  6. Log out and create a snapshot so you can always go back to it the state of an unpatched machine with MP3 CoverTag installed

Now you can run the unpatched VM and MP3 CoverTag will work.

Enjoy!

If you found this interesting, please share.