RobPlatt.com

We used to use Adobe FlashPaper to embed pdfs into our site. This made viewing a pdf  easy, most people have flash installed, right?

No… and chances are, if they don’t have adobe reader, they probably don’t have flash.

A better/free solution would be Google Docs Viewer.

Use Google Docs to quickly view documents online without leaving your browser.

Embedding Docs Viewer into your page, gives you the same usability as FlashPaper, but without Flash needing to be installed. Now we can give our users the ability to view our pdfs, directly in our browser, without any third-party dependencies. (You may also provide a non-embedded url, to open in full screen)

We did run into one problem. We received this error on one of our pdfs:

Sorry we are unable to generate a view of the document at this time

Replacing the spaces in the filename with %2520 solved the issue. %20 and + did not.

Trying to install SQL Management Tools on my machine threw an error related to Visual Studio 2008 not having SP1.

I installed Sp1… Same error.

I tried uninstalling Visual Studio. It threw up on registry errors, office errors, etc. I removed office, fixed the registry errors – still no luck.

I forcefully removed Visual Studio using Perfect Uninstaller. Still no luck installeding SQL Management Studio.

Then I stumbled across this page: http://blogs.msdn.com/psssql/archive/2008/08/11/sql-server-2008-visual-studio-2008-sp1-and-net-framework-3-5-sp1-explained.aspx

This page may help too: http://www.galcho.com/Blog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=4afabe28-002a-409b-9076-f7f6ee6bd55e

Removing the registry keys described in the article did the trick. Now lets hope I can get Visual Studio and Office back on here 🙂

I use CrashPlan both personally and professionally as my backup choice.

CrashPlan will let you back up to a remote server,  for a small fee, just like any other online backup software. What makes CrashPlan so unique, is that you can back up to your friends, or your other computers, for free, regardless if they’re on your LAN or not. You can back up to multiple sources as well. For example, a PC in house, and a friends PC across town. You have the convenience of a local restore being quick, and the security that your data is off-site in case of a disaster or theft. Oh, yes, your data is encrypted. No need to worry about others seeing financial and other private information.

For personal use. It’s free. Though a bit limited. You can upgrade to CrashPlan+ to make use of some great additional features, like data de-duplication, real-time backups, heavier encryption, and file versioning. However, if you want it for free, it’s still the best choice out there.

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