About David Freeman

http://www.tismy.com/

'tis my site, 'tis my ideas...

Posts by David Freeman:

Apr 8 2009

The Build Disc – Part 5b (Extras – Office 2003)

Office 2003A fully standardised install only takes us so far.  At some point you have to cater to the stuff that doesn’t fit in with the standardised stuff.  This article is about the extra bits that help Office 2003.

What do I install?  Pretty much just the file format converters to allow Office 2003 to read files created with Office 2007.

(As an aside, the Office viewers normally only open Office 2003 files but if you install them and then install the converter, they will also read Office 2007 files.)

I’ve worked out an unattended install but for only one install it’s not really all that relevant.

For what it’s worth, this is the unattended install command:

Office2003-FileFormatConverters.exe /quiet /passive /norestart

This article is part of a series dealing with my standard system build.  It starts with this article and the post you’re reading now is directly related to this one.

By David • Build Disc, Unattended Installs • • Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Apr 7 2009

The Build Disc – Part 5a (Extras)

copyA standard install is all very well but you reach a point, at least at the home user/small business level, where standardization falls down.  Not every computer is going to have the same version of MS Office installed (or even have Office), some computers will not already have Acrobat Reader (or have an older version pre-installed).

Having already dealt with service packs, Windows/Microsoft Updates and standard utilities, now it’s time to come up with a good way of handling these extra items.  I’ve set this up with our typical customers in mind and it handles the stuff we usually need.  Obviously once you get to this level there is almost infinite scope for how you might handle things.

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By David • Build Disc • • Tags: , , , , , ,

Apr 7 2009

New photos added to Flickr

imageI’ve been adding some new photos to my flickr account today.

After recently getting a new scanner that can handle slides (more about that in another article) I’ve started scanning all my old slides (I have thousands).

To start with, I’m working through the photos I took during my time working in Antarctica.  Don’t worry, I’m not going to inflict the whole collection on anyone, I’m just picking out a selection that I like.

imageUnfortunately, the years haven’t been exceedingly kind to my slides.  It’s about 20 years since I took many of these photos.  In some cases, they were then ‘home developed’ in the dark room that was available to Antarctic expeditioners on the bases.  I guess they’ve actually survived pretty well but colours are starting to shift.  Either that, or my memory of how the colours are supposed to have looked has shifted I guess.

Anyway, you can see the latest additions here (with this blog wrapped around them) or go directly to my flickr page here.

Enjoy.

By David • Antarctica • • Tags: , ,

Apr 6 2009

Holidays with Dogs

imageLast Christmas my wife, Meredith, and I decided to go away over Christmas.  Normally, we’d leave our dog with someone to be looked after but this time it wasn’t really a good option.  Time to find somewhere “pet friendly” to stay.

One of the first things I learned is that “pet friendly” seems to be a loose translation for “we don’t mind if you bring your dog along but it isn’t allowed inside anything (house, shed, carport, etc) and we don’t have any fences anywhere“.  Needless to say this wasn’t our idea of pet friendly. More →

By David • Personal • • Tags: , , , ,

Apr 6 2009

The Build Disc – Part 4b (wrap-up)

Next ButtonOver the past week or so I’ve posted separate articles on each of the standard utilities that comprise the unattended installs portion of my standard build disc. Now I’m going to build on the starting point of unattended installs and talk about how to implement these installs as a component of the overall standard build.

The benefit of using unattended installs is that all of these tools get installed with no interaction required on my part.  Just set it going and come back when its done.  How did I do this?  Largely be combining each silent install into a single batch file that does the whole install process.

Unfortunately, it’s not just a matter of doing a cut and paste on each item.  In order to do this properly I need to work out which operating system I’m dealing with.  For example, there’s no point trying to install Sidebar Gadgets under Windows XP.

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By David • Build Disc, Unattended Installs • • Tags: , , , , , ,

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