Categories
Automation IT

How to sync your Office 365 (work) calendar with Google Nest

Recently I thought it would be really helpful to be able to ask my Google Nest/Assistant what my meetings are tomorrow before I go to bed, or otherwise what my next meeting is during the day. I couldn’t find any solutions to this beyond enabling public and free access to my work calendar via the Internet, or otherwise to manually export and import calendar items on a regular basis.

Categories
IT

How to integrate Microsoft Azure Active Directory with your local Active Directory

I have recently been involved with a project whereby we wanted to use Microsoft Azure to host an application, and for users of this application to be able to login using their local Windows login details and for their permissions to be synced with Active Directory. To achieve this we identified that we could make […]

Categories
IT Security

What the hell actually is FIPS 140-2?

If, like me, you’ve poured through different resources trying to really understand FIPS 140-2 and what is required to achieve this standard then this article should hopefully give you the answers and links to more information.

Categories
IT Programming

How to use the Twitter Search API using Python (or other language)

Due to my experience with the Twitter API through my implementation of ThinkTwit, I’ve had a few questions lately on how to implement the Twitter (Search) API in Python so rather than answer people individually I figured it would be best to share with everyone on my blog.

Categories
IT

My experience of the CITP assessment process

I’ve recently been through, and unfortunately failed, the BCS CITP assessment process. For those that don’t know the BCS is the Chartered Institute for IT and the Chartered IT Professional status is equivalent to the chartered status in accounting, but for IT. There are a number of benefits that CITP status gives you, but mostly […]

Categories
IT Wordpress

How to add a Twitter feed to WordPress blog

You may or may not know that I’m the developer of a Twitter plugin for WordPress, called ThinkTwit – this very easily allows you to add your tweets to your blog, which can make it very easy for someone to see your thoughts in one place and is also a great marketing tool to have […]

Categories
IT Programming Wordpress

ThinkTwit Update 1.4.0 – implements API v1.1 to prevent ThinkTwit breaking post June 10th

Everyone using ThinkTwit absolutely HAS to upgrade to this new version or else ThinkTwit will stop working from 10th June 2013!

Categories
IT Programming

How to open a new tab in an existing Internet Explorer instance in C#

A problem that I recently came across is when opening a new Internet Explorer instance in C# the user was being required to login to a site that they had already logged in to. It was pretty clear that this was because the existing session was not being used as a new IE process was […]

Categories
IT Programming

How to save to PDF in C# using Word 2003 or 2007 without SP 2 (using Pechkin)

I’ve spent a significant amount of time lately on trying to solve this issue and came across many, many barriers, so I thought I’d share with you my findings and the solution that I used. Whilst Word 2007 SP2 (or Word 2007 using the Save As PDF Add-in) and above natively support saving documents as […]

Categories
IT Programming

How to force open Internet Explorer 32-bit or 64-bit in C#

On a project I was recently working on it was necessary to open a URL in Internet Explorer (a requirement of it to work correctly, unfortunately) and we had a few “bugs” which seemed to randomly occurred. It turned out this was due to Process.Start(“iexplore.exe”) loading 32-bit IE whereas it seems we required 64-bit.