Islamisten

Gedankengang kurz nach dem Aufwachen:
Islam-isten, wie in Terror-isten, .... wie in Chr-isten?

Linkstation and a UPnP Media Server

I had Twonky 4.1 running on my Linkstation for quite a while (could be two years or more) without any issues.

Then I wanted to listen to an audio book and noticed that the track played in alphabetical order instead of track order! Makes no sense with an audio book ...

Well, this is paid-for software so I contacted their support and got the response that I should upgrade to a new version to fix this.
I did so, but the darn program ended with a segmantation fault.
So I downloaded a new version (5.x), which I would be willing to pay for, but it did not work either. It seems to want to watch for file system changes while my OS does not allow for this, so the program stops.
Since the builds for NAS devices are not officially supported, I did not get any further support. Now I wish I had pirated my original license insetad of paying for non-existent support ;-)

I felt kind of lost until I checked the NAS-Central pages for alternatives. There are many!

Meanwhile I tried Mediatomb, which gives you a whole lot of options, indexes by author, album, etc.
It took me a while to get it configured, having trouble with the character sets.
Unfortunately Mediatomb has a high footprint on memory, the index database is rather large, and it takes ages (really!) to index. I gave it four days on my machine, and when it was still not finished, I deinstalled it. (No, I do not have that many files!)

Then I came across this very simplistic tool: UShare. By "simplistic" I mean that it does not do any indexing at all, it just gives you access to your directory structure. Good enough for me, I had been browsing my music by directory in 99% of the cases anyway.

I installed UShare within five minutes and was ready to go instantly. The browsing speed is amazing, the impact on my Linkstation close enough to zero for me to not notice anything.

Thanks a bunch to the guys who develop UShare!!!

P.S.: Most guys out there say Twonky is the most stable software out there and it works for them. Well, good for them, unfortunately not for me. I'd go back to Townky if they would help me fix that problem.

DNS-Less Connections with Microsoft Access - The Easy Way!

When you read about portable applications written in MS Access, there are basically two approaches:

• write a VBA procedure that modifies the connection string of all linked tables in such a way that the user does not need a DSN
• write a VBA procedure that creates the necessary DSN

The funny thing is when you migrate an Access database to SQL server it automatically creates link tables that do not require a DSN!

Well, there is a way to achieve this without writing a little program in VBA:

1. Open Administrative Tools - Data Sources (ODBC) aka Microsoft ODBC Administrator
2. Create a File DSN there with all the connection parameters
3. Go back to MS Access and use the File DSN you just created to link your tables, and voilá, they do not need a DSN!

If you already have linked tables that rely on a DSN, there is an easy way to fix this:

1. follow steps one and two from above
2. Open the Linked Tables Administrator
3. select all tables and check the little box in the lower left corner, press OK
4. when Access asks you for the DSN, just select the File DSN you created above

I am not sure whether this information already exists somewhere; I was not able to find it, I had to stumble upon the solution by accident. Even on Microsoft's pages I only found the programmatic approach.

Hope this helps someone out there!