Tag: tutorial

Tip: how to make Outlook reconnect faster to an Exchange server

I have a problem.

In our company we use MS Exchange as a mail server and we’re away from the company network we can connect to Exchange via a special VPN software. This software disconnects pretty often. When I reconnect it takes quite a while for Outlook to figure out there a working connection. It does eventually but I have to wait for that to happen since I want to make sure a mail is being sent correctly.

I found out that setting “Work offline” on and off quickly makes Outlook connect a lot faster:

outlook work offline mode

There’s this problem though – it’s tedious to go click on the menu and then on the menu item so many times per day. So a solution:

  1. Right click somewhere on the toolbar –> Customize:
    outlook 2007 customize toolbar
  2. Make a new toolbar:
    outlook 2007 new toolbar
  3. Then the most unnatural step – drag the menu item from the File menu to the new toolbar:
    outlook 2007 add a button to a toolbar
  4. Press Ctrl while dragging, this way the button will be copied, not moved.
  5. That’s pretty much it. Now pressing the button quickly is very easy:
    outlook 2007 the new toolbar on place

iReport 3.0.0 on Mac OS. How to make it work?

iReport is a gui for designing jrxml (the actual reports) files for JasperReports. It is supposed to work on any platform.

We’re using 3.0 instead of 3.5 because 3.5 is based on Netbeans.

I’m trying to work with it on Mac OS (it was extremely slow in the virtual machine, something to do with java I guess).

First:

chmod u+x iReport.sh

…because it’s not executable.

But then it gave me a weird error:

comp:iReport-3.0.0 user$ ./iReport.sh
-bash: ./iReport.sh: /bin/bash^M: bad interpreter: No such file or directory

Google said it’s because of the problem with newline in different platforms. In linux it’s LF (\n)(line feed). In windows it’s CRLF (\r\n) (carriage return, line feed).

So this ^M character appearing in the error is actually the left-out CR.

How to fix it? Wikipedia says:

tr -d '\r' < inputfile > outputfile

This works. But then the next error. iReport.sh calls bin/startup.sh.

The same thing for it.

That’s it. Why was the shell script in a dos format only god can tell.

Note that iReport on a Mac should be in a place whose path does not involve spaces. Here’s a solution for that too.