About Tactical-Tech

Tactical-Tech: Tech-Notes

Adobe Forms: Distributing forms and Consolidating the Responses

09 February 2013

A little while ago, I was tasked to create a class T shirt for a class that I am in. We (as a class) didn't have much established in way of espirt de corps, so sort of had to make something up. Now I didn't want to be the sole arbiter on the design, so I came up with a couple basic designs and ideas and wanted to let the class choose out of them and have their own input. 

The way I decided the best way to get their input was by using Adobe Professional to create a survey form with the various options for a T Shirt and use Range/Approval voting to figure out which design was the one we would go with. Because I was using Range/approval voting, I needed to import the responses into Excel to average the votes. Long story. In any case, I didn't want to go through each response and put the responses into a spreadsheet manually, and I was in luck because Adobe Professional could do all that work for me. Check out the video to see how.

Click here for the basics of using Adobe Livecycle to create a form


GSLaPS- Generic Site Logon Powershell Script

08 February 2013

Once upon a time I created a logon script that allowed the user to choose the building and the office within that building, and based on the selection, it would map network drives, map printers, copy files, update registry settings, set favorites and homepages to a value specified for the office. The logon script wasn't actually a single logon script; it was actually about 15 different files. Some of them were HTA (which gave the user a drop down with their choices) others were VBS (which filtered who it would run for and actually executed the mappings). The problem was with all this is if something changed, it would usually require an update of 3 or 4 files and it wasn't an easy maintainance task to be passed down to just any random nugg. 

Well, about a week ago I dove head first into powershell and decided that I could remake my HTA based script through powershell. And I could do it in only 2 (or 3) easy to manage files.  I call it GSLaPS, or the Generic Site Logon Powershell Script. I don't know what the 'a' stands for, make something up.

See More...

ESX install onto M65 Problem

21 January 2013

This is probably not a problem that is going to effect much more than .00001% of anyone in the IT community, but it did affect me and successfully killed about 30 hours of my life in troubleshooting. Lucky me. These are just some quick technotes mainly consisting of workarounds rather than real solutions.

Task: Install ESX 3.5 on a Dell M65, 32 bit laptop.

Problem 1: ESX Image will not install initially due to the following error:

Installation Operation Failed!
(ommited)
Unable to find a supported device to write the VMWare ESX Server 3i 3.5.0 image to.
(The rest ommited)

See More...

Expandable Multi-Shapes in Visio with Hesco Barriers

06 January 2013
Hesco

Hesco barriers are steel baskets with fabric in them that we fill with dirt overseas to create thick, protective walls. They are a very common feature on any site, and it would be nice to have a shape that distinctly looks like a Hesco barrier on the camps site diagram. Today I'm going to show you how to make that. Because its an individual cell that is usually never alone, I'm going to make a continuous shape or a multiple shape to accomplish this task.

What that means is that as I expand the individual Hesco, it becomes two side by side, then three, four, etc. eventually to make a full length Hesco wall. If you ever worked with Visio floor plans, you may recall a shape called Multi-Urinal or Multi-sink that has this ability. In abstract, what we are going to do is create a bunch of identical shapes, uniquely ID each one of them, and use formulas to determine their placement. We will also use a formula to hide/ unhide each shape in the group depending on how wide the group is expanded out to.

See More...

Free Visio Stencils

24 December 2012
Visio Stencils

Merry Christmas everyone! This Christmas, I give you the greatest gift of all! Free Visio stencils! These stencils are custom made for the Army IT guy and are primarily used in floor plans, site physical layouts, and I even have some stuff for rack diagrams. Take a look below, feel free to download and redistribute what you want.

 
See More...