How to Setup a CI/CD Pipeline for Storybook.js using Gitlab
I just spent a few hours setting up a Gitlab pipeline to deploy a Storybook.js site. Of course the end result ended up being much simpler than I made it out to be. Like everything else on my blog, I'm sharing in case anyone else can use the information to save time.
Just put this in your gitlab-ci.yml and it'll take care of caching the node modules and building your static version of Storybook to deploy.
How to Clear Archive & Read-only flags on Files in Windows in Bulk
I ran into an issue where I had to move files from one system to another and was running into issues because files had been set as read-only, had the archive flag set, or both. It was causing the system to skip files which wasn't acceptable. Normally you could just use Windows to clear it in bulk, but that could potentially mess up file permissions. I needed a way to automatically just clear all flags but respect permissions.
I did some searching and didn't find a utility that would do the job and most of the solutions I found required Powershell which wasn't available on the system I was on. I ended up writing a quick console application in C# to do the trick. I've made it free and open sourced it in case anyone wants to use it.
If you need just the app, you can find the release build here with instructions. The app also prompts for input to make things a bit easier to use. There's no install, no tracking or metrics, or anything else related to privacy concerns in this app. It's a simple throwaway utility to get the job done and move on.
https://github.com/gregvarghese/clearflags/releases/tag/1.0.0
If you want to see the source code, that is available here:
https://github.com/gregvarghese/clearflags/
Please note that I did this in about 10 minutes for my own use so error handling is pretty much non-existent. I mention this because I did run into one issue where Windows was somehow seeing a folder with files in it as a file and it couldn't be deleted or renamed and the utility couldn't get past it until it was resolved. I didn't spend much time debugging and just used my Mac to rename the folder and Windows was able to recognize it after the change, so the utility was able to continue processing.
How to Generate a Page for Each Day of Month in Microsoft Word using VBA
I briefly joined my wife at her practice to help her grow the business and figure out how to make things more efficient. One of the things I learned is that my wife created a sign-in sheet for the office in Microsoft Word. Every week she would open the file and manually enter the date for each day of the week and then print out the documents. I took over the responsibility for a month and it annoyed me due to how inefficient the process was and I decided to automate the entire thing. I couldn't find a solution to the problem online so I had to roll my own and am sharing the code in case someone else can benefit from it.
The script will calculate the first day and last day of the month and then do a loop to append the date in the "Day, Month day, Year" format (i.e. Thursday July 17, 2019) to a text field.
There are a few important steps involved to get the script working as is:
Open up Word, then open up VBA, and copy and paste this snippet into a module. When you run the function, it'll create a copy for every day of the month. I also created a function to start at a specific date in case you run it in the middle of the month.
How to Get Laravel Debugging to work with PHPStorm and MAMP Pro 5
This has been one of the more aggravating things I've had to deal with in setting up software for development. I've followed the official documentation from JetBrains, over 30 other blog tutorials, and literally failed in getting any of them to work.
I figured out an easy way to make the setup work so I'm sharing it in case someone else finds it useful and for self-reference since I'll probably forget how to do this again in 6 months when I start a new project.
Happy debugging!
How to Automate Sending Emails through Outlook interop using C#
I was tasked with a tricky issue in sending emails. Due to security concerns, the client's IT team was not willing to share SMTP information for their mail settings and was only willing to set up an account in Outlook directly on a dedicated machine without sharing the password with us to send the emails. The client's ask was to send emails through Outlook without letting users see the emails or Outlook itself.
Sending emails through Outlook can be done using Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook but the documentation is really lacking. If you need to do the same, I hope this will save you the hours of time it took me to figure out what ends up not being complex code.
Create a new desktop application project in Visual Studio. Install the Microsoft Office Interop for Outlook. I used the NuGet package manager to install it since it wasn't present on my system:
I created a static class to send the email through Outlook. Note that my error handling code was replaced with Debug.Writeline. Remember to modify it to handle errors or implement logging so it doesn't fail silently.
Email.cs:
Example on how to call the class:
email.html:
Self-signed SSL certificates not working with MAMP and Chrome
I use MAMP Pro for most of my PHP development and Chrome has annoyingly been blocking the self-signed SSL certificates MAMP generates, saying the certificate is not valid and "Your connection is not private":
Thankfully, I found an easy solve to fix this. These steps assume you've created a host in MAMP. You'll need to go to the SSL tab of the host you are trying to fix and
Go back to Chrome, and reload the page and the certificate should work now:
How to get shape type in Visio using VBA?
I'm working with a Visio 2016 file with over 100 tabs and need to extract the data (mainly text, connector from/to, and shape) for data processing for a processing engine. I was trying to figure out how to get the shape type name in Visio using VBA. For example, in a flowchart, I'm trying to figure out how to tell if a shape is a process, decision, data, etc. The
property seems to always return 3 which appears to be visTypeShape from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/api/visio.visshapetypes. After hunting through all the available properties on the Shape object, I found that the shape.Master.Name property will return the shape name, but you need to check if it's Nothing first in case it's not a shape.
I didn't do that and it kept breaking the script originally because some of the pages had text fields and the first few items on the first sheet I was working with were text boxes. Hopefully this snippet will save you the time I wasted figuring it out.
How to Prevent Raspberry Pi Zero from Blanking or Sleeping
I was setting up a Raspberry Pi Zero in an office to use for displaying a slide show of pictures on a TV in the waiting room and dismayed to learn it would constantly go to sleep after a few minutes. I researched and tried setting the consoleblank=0 in config.txt with no luck along many other solutions, but learned none of them worked for the Raspberry Pi Zero.
I'm not sure why, but I got an error that some dependencies were not installed. If that happens to you as well, run this command in terminal:
and then run the install for xscreensaver again
Now under Preferences, you'll see a new option for screen saver:
On the Display Modes tab, you'll see a drop down for Mode. Choose "Disable Screen Saver":
Your raspberry pi zero will now no longer go to sleep.