Video Conversion

I found a great GNU (Free but not Open Source) application today for converting video called WinFF.

If you are in a situation where you are limited by the format or codec that your video uses this might help you convert to the format you require. It is fairly straight forward and basically provides a graphical interface to FFmpeg. Check it out here.

Mime-ing Excel

I'm currently overhauling some old PL/SQL code, tidying up almost a decade of comments and on the fly changes.

Part of this included Excel generation from PL/SQL, in the past in my own code I've headed down the route of using XML Spreadsheets however one of the previous developers managed to format the data into a proper XSL formatted spreadsheet using Data Interchange Format (DIF).

One of the issues I was having though is the generated file was being named after the PL/SQL package and process name (package.process), it was missing all the nice MIME information. So for reference this is how you should be structuring your basic Excel MIME header in PL/SQL:

owa_util.showpage;
owa_util.mime_header('application/excel',False);
htp.print('Content-Disposition:attachment;filename="NAME_HERE.XLS"');
owa_util.http_header_close;

Line 2: Mime header has False defined so the header isn't closed
Line 3: Defines the file name
Line 4: Closes off the header, important because you left it open on line 2

Many years ago I had a bit of software from a magazine cover disk that allowed you to share your mouse and keyboard between multiple machines across a network. It was unfortunately a limited trial and I have not used it for ages.

Prompted by a friend's tweet to day I tried to find this software again, but instead I found a piece of software called Synergy2 which does the same thing and by the looks of it a bit more with clipboard changing, nice. Plus it's open source, free!

If anyone has had any experience of this software then leave your experiences of it bellow.