The Mistake

I have made many reports. It began with Crystal Reports (because it was free, bundled with Visual Studio 2008), then Jasper Reports (because Crystal Report no longer bundled with Visual Studio 2010), and then finally Telerik Reporting (because integrating Jasper Reports to ASP.NET is such a whack-job, I still don’t dare to share my code, even it’s already 5 years passed).

I always thought that I made the best reports in the world 😀 But recently I realized that my reports are ugly. Just look at below example:

Ugly right? Do you agree that the signature boxes should be shifted all the way down to the bottom of the page?

Let’s look how I structured my report:

Apparently I put the signature boxes inside Report Footer Section.

Q: Why didn’t you put the box within Page Footer Section?
A: Because I anticipate that the report might spread to more than 1 page. I don’t want every page to have the signature boxes.
Q: Don’t you know that you can show/hide the Page Footer Section (or any section) based on certain condition?
A: *Gasp* Really? Teach me how please!

The Correction

First, let’s move all the signature boxes from Report Footer Section to Page Footer Section.

Next, we need to make the page footer only to appear on the last page. We do this through ConditionalFormatting

Add a new rule “If PageNumber is not equal to PageCount, hide the section”

Now my report is less ugly 😀

Works as expected when the report spread to two pages.

I hope it helps, cheers!

If you are familiar with HTML, I believe you should have used the <a /> tag before. In my own personal experience, I frequently use it for hyperlink to other pages, to launch email application and use it as a button.

<a href="other_page.html" target="_blank">Normal Link</a>


<a href="mailto:myemail@sodeve.net?subject=Product%20Enquiry">Contact Us</a>

<!-- This is how I create button in Bootstrap & Metronic theme -->
<a href="#" id="btnPrint" class="btn blue">Print</a>

Did you know that there are other protocols that we can use in HREF? Here’s what I found out recently.

1. Call Phone Number

We can create a hyperlink which will open the dialer to call a number. When the visitor click this hyperlink, it will automatically open up the phone program.

<a href="tel:64197576">Call 64197576</a>

Here’s what happen on my Android phone when I clicked above hyperlink.

2. Send SMS

With this hyperlink, we can send SMS to a phone number.

<a href="sms:80264444?body=test%20sms%20by%20url">SMS Me</a>

SMS Me
Here’s what happen when I clicked above hyperlink.

3. Call Skype Number

For Skype, we can configure to either use the phone number, or using the Skype name. We can also specifiy that we want to chat instead of calling. Here’s how:

<a href="skype:+6285714053333?call">Call Number with Skype</a>

<a href="skype:skype_name?call">Call Skype User</a>

<a href="skype:skype_name?chat">Chat with a Skype User</a>

What I don’t like with Skype is that will immediately call the number/contact. Who knows if the visitor is accidentally clicking the link, when the intended action was scrolling the page.

4. Launch Map

Before the explosion of smartphone, showing locations in a website means embedding the map in the page. In smartphone screen, this is not advisable. The small screen-estate would not enough for the embedded map. So what we should is creating a hyperlink which will auto launch the map application.

<a href="maps:q=11%20Bedok%20North%20Ave%204">11 Bedok North Ave 4</a>

<!-- Should works everywhere -->
<a href="geo:1.334586, 103.950130">11 Bedok North Ave 4</a>

MAPS: 11 Bedok North Ave 4
GEO: 11 Bedok North Ave 4

Only GEO works in my Android phone.

That’s all folks. I hope it helps, cheers!

Source: Wikipedia

Long time ago, I build an Ubuntu Linux virtual machine which was projected to be a reverse proxy server. It was my personal project which my boss gave the green light. Due to the urgency of other projects, I had to postpone it.

Now I decided to revisit this project because soon, we’re going to open up one of our intranet application to the public. Since I felt the machine quite out-dated, I decide to update it

$ sudo apt-get update

Sadly it didn’t work.

Hmm weird.. But I can ping 8.8.8.8 (Google public DNS)

So it means I don’t have DNS which will resolve the domain name to IP address. Thus I need to edit /etc/resolv.conf

sudo nano /etc/resolv.conf

Then added the following lines:

nameserver 8.8.8.8 #Google DNS
nameserver 8.8.4.4 #Google DNS
nameserver 208.67.222.222 #Open DNS
nameserver 208.67.220.220 #Open DNS

That’s it. No reboot required.