Newspaper clipping management

I was recently asked to advise on the best process for scanning and cataloguing an extensive catalogue of newspaper clippings for future reference and research.

After a consultancy period and an examination of the company's needs and initial budgets I have implemented a simple system utilising a process of scanning images directly into Adobe Lightroom and using the image processing and cataloguing capabilities of Lightroom to maintain the collection.

Further development has been planned to provide a bespoke system with optical character recognition to convert the scanned images into fully searchable text.

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Take website screenshot using ASP.NET

Utilising a hidden web browser control it is possible to take a screenshot of any website. The code shown below is based on an article at plentyofcode.com (sorry the site now appears to be offline May 2012) but I have translated it from VB.NET to C# and will work in .NET so theoretically for any Windows or ASP.NET web project.
using System; using System.Drawing; using System.Drawing.Imaging; using System.Windows.Forms; using System.Diagnostics; namespace WebsiteScreenshot { public class GetImage { private int s_Height; private int s_Width; private int f_Height; private int f_Width; private string myURL; public int ScreenHeight { get { return s_Height; } set { s_Height = value; } } public int ScreenWidth { get { return s_Width; } set { s_Width = value; } } public int ImageWidth { get { return f_Width; } set { f_Width = value; } } public int ImageHeight { get { return f_Height; } set { f_Height = value; } } public string Website …

Ad hoc access to OLE DB provider has been denied

Using post SP2 SQL 7 (+ 2000 etc) attempting to access an OLEDB data source using OPENROWSET can produce the slightly spurious error:

Ad hoc access to OLE DB provider 'MSDASQL' has been denied. You must access this provider through a linked server.

In usual Microsoft style the message doesn't really mean what it says. From SQL 7 SP2 onwards MS by default blocked ad hoc query access with OLEDB. As the message suggests you could setup a linked server but that can be a real pain. Alternatively if you need ad hoc access server wide you could turn on ad hoc access for the SQL server you are using, explained in MS speak here:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=266008

Ah, but it's not that simple. A little more witchcraft is required. The following registry settings can be used to enable ad hoc access:

REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\Providers] "DisallowAdhocAccess"=dword:00000000

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\Pr…

Compress and de-compress strings in C#

A collection of resources on compressing and encrypting strings in C#.
Microsoft documentation on the System.IO.Compression.GZipStream class:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.io.compression.gzipstream.aspx
Helpful example class utilising GZip:
http://www.csharphelp.com/2007/09/compress-and-decompress-strings-in-c/
The GZipStream class is predominantly used for file compression but can be used efficiently for compressing strings of 300-400 characters or more. Below 300 characters there isn’t any measurable gain from the compression and for particularly short strings the compressed version may in fact be larger.
Class provided by C Sharp Help:
using System.IO.Compression;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;
public static string Compress(string text)
{
    byte[] buffer = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(text);
    MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream();
    using (GZipStream zip = new GZipStream(ms, CompressionMode.Compress, true))��…

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