Author: jaywll

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Prevent Forwarding of Outlook Meetings

Posted on by jaywll

The ability to quickly and easily forward an Outlook meeting
to another recipient is an essential feature. Maybe you canā€™t make it and you
need to send a delegate. Maybe you identify from the invite that bringing along
a colleague whoā€™s a subject matter expert would be beneficial. There are
probably many other scenarios.

As a meeting organizer though, itā€™s possible that you donā€™t
want people to be able to forward your meetings. Perhaps the location you have
booked is of a limited size. Perhaps the meeting content is sensitive and
discussion restricted to a particular group. There are probably many other
scenarios for wanting to keep tight control over the recipient list too.

Well, good news! Iā€™ve recently discovered this is possible,
and with just a few lines of VBA you can create meetings that have the
ā€œforwardā€ button disabled. If a recipient wants to extend the invite to someone
else, they have to come back to you and ask that you do it for them.

Itā€™s worth pointing out right at the top that this technique
only works in the Microsoft Outlook desktop client. You have to be using it,
and so do the meeting recipients. If your recipients also have their
email/calendar available to them on another client (including mobile devices
and webmail) then
they can use the other client to
forward the meeting.

Itā€™s also worth pointing out that full credit for this goes
to user GranEYb
on Microsoftā€™s TechNet
forums. I have merely tidied up his/her instructions, and turned them into
a quick screencast. The instructions are for Outlook 2013. I know the code also
works in Outlook 2010. I havenā€™t tested it with other versions. YMMV.

Screencast

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuABYCg9iEw?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=https://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=540&h=404]

Instructions

First, enable developer tools in Outlook:

  1. Open Outlook 2013
  2. Click File
    -> Options -> Customize Ribbon
  3. In the right-hand pane, place a checkmark next
    to the Developer group and click OK

Open Visual Basic for Applications and write the code:

  1. Navigate to the Developer tab on the ribbon, and
    select Visual Basic
  2. In the Visual Basic for Applications window,
    click Insert -> Module
  3. Copy the code from below, and choose File -> Save, or click the Save
    icon
  4. Close the Visual Basic for Applications window

The code:

Sub DisableForwarding()
    ActiveInspector.CurrentItem.Actions("Forward").Enabled = False
    MsgBox "Forwarding of this item has been disabled"
End Sub

Sub EnableForwarding()
    ActiveInspector.CurrentItem.Actions("Forward").Enabled = True
    MsgBox "Forwarding of this item has been enabled"
End Sub

Create the
buttons in Outlook:

  1. Open
    Outlook calendar
  2. Click
    New Appointment
  3. Click
    File -> Options -> Customize
    Ribbon
  4. In
    the right-hand pane, select the Appointment tab and click New Group
  5. Select
    the New Group (Custom) item and click Rename
  6. In
    the Display Name box, enter Forward
    Control    . Click OK
  7. In
    the left-hand pane, select the Choose Commands From: dropdown and select Macros
  8. Select
    Project1.DisableForwarding and click the Add
    >>     button between the panes
  9. Select
    Project1.EnableForwarding and click the Add
    >>     button between the panes
  10. In
    the right-hand pane, select Project1.DisableFowarding and click Rename
  11. In
    the Display Name box, enter Disable
    Forwarding    . Click OK
  12. In
    the right-hand pane, select Project1.EnableForwarding and click Rename
  13. In
    the Display Name box, enter Enable
    Forwarding    . Click OK
  14. Click
    OK at the bottom of the Outlook
    Options window

All done!
If you wish, you can now hide the developer tab that we enabled with the first
three steps.

To use the
tool, create a new meeting invite as you normally would, but before hitting the
send button hit the Disable Forwarding button first. Recipients of your invite
will find that the Forward button is disabled.

image

Meetings do
not have forwarding disabled by default, but if you need to re-enable
forwarding for any reason then the Enable Forwarding button is your friend.

Enjoy!

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Shrapnel

Late Night Links – Sunday May 10th, 2015

Posted on by jaywll

Itā€™s late night links time again! Yay!!

And weā€™re all done for another week! Until next time.

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Blog
Posted on by jaywll

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rodL7zcINJo?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=375]

Just a couple of days ago I wrote a little bit about how cloud servers are such a commodity item now, easily created and destroyed.

Today I wanted a server to test out a new tool, but I didnā€™t want to risk there being any impact to any of my existing production servers. So I created a new one on Vultr. From the time I started to the time I had a running server was just over a minute, and I recorded a screencast.

When I was done testing a couple of hours later I destroyed the server. Total cost to me for this exercise was about $0.02, or it would have been were it not for the fact that Vultr gave me a $5 account credit when I signed up.

Itā€™s hardly riveting viewing, but itā€™s nevertheless amazing in its own way.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
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Blog

Server Commoditization

Posted on by jaywll

Iā€™ve had a personal website of one description or another
for a long time now. For much of that time, the site was hosted by renting
space on someone elseā€™s large server ā€“ so called ā€œshared hosting.ā€

The theoretical problem with this model was that the
serverā€™s resources were shared between all its users, and if one user chewed
through a whole lot of them then that left fewer available for everyone else.
Iā€™m not sure I ever actually experienced this (although Iā€™m sure it really was
an issue for web hosting companies to contend with), but the problem I did come
across was that to protect against this kind of thing hosts often put policies
and configuration options in place that were very restrictive. Related to this
is the fact that server configuration options apply to everyone with space on
that server, and theyā€™re not for individual users to control. A problem if you
want to do anything that deviates even slightly from the common-case.

The alternative to shared webhosting would have been to rent
an entire server. This was ā€“ and still is ā€“ an expensive undertaking. It also
was ā€“ and still is ā€“ far more power than I need in order to host my website.
Sure, itā€™s possible to build a lower-powered (cheaper) server, but the act and
cost of putting it in a datacentre to open it up to wider world mean that itā€™s
probably not a worthwhile exercise to do all that with low-cost hardware.

What seems to me like not very long ago, virtualization
technology took off and created a market for virtual private servers (VPSs).
This allowed server owners to divide their hardware up between users, but in
contrast to shared hosting each user gets something thatā€™s functionally
indistinguishable from a real hardware computer. They can configure it however
they wish, and it comes with a guaranteed chunk of resources: heavy usage of
one of the virtual machines hosted on the server does not negatively impact the
performance of any of the others.

This is the model under which my website is currently
hosted. Iā€™ve chosen a low-powered VPS because thatā€™s all I need, but recently
as my site has started to see more traffic it occasionally sees spikes in
incoming traffic that tax its limited memory and processing resources. I use CloudFlare as a service to balance this
out, mitigate threats, easily implement end-user caching policies and generally
improve speeds (particularly for those users that a geographically far away
from the server), but once my server resources are maxed thereā€™s nothing I can
do about it: my host has divided the server up into VPSā€™s of a predefined size,
and doesnā€™t allow me to grow or shrink the server along with my needs.

The new paradigm is an evolution of this. Instead of
dividing each bare-metal server up into predefined VPS chunks, each server is a
pool of resources within which VPSs of various sizes are automatically
provisioned according to customer requirements. Behind the scenes, technology
has grown to make this easier, especially when you scale the story up to more
than one bare-metal server. A pool of physical servers can also pool resources.
If a VPS hosted on one physical server needs to grow beyond the remaining
available resources of its host, it can be invisibly moved to another host
while itā€™s still running and then its resources expanded.

This new paradigm is the one I plan to move to. Led by the
likes of Amazon and Google and now followed in the marketplace
by lower-cost providers like DigitalOcean
and Vultr (likely to be my
provider of choice), servers have really become commodity items that can be
created and destroyed at will. You used to rent servers/hosting by the month or
year, now itā€™s by the minute or hour. Itā€™s common for hosting companies to
provide an API that lets you automate the processes involved ā€“ if my server
detects that itā€™s seeing a lot of traffic and is running low on resources it
could ā€“ with the right script implemented ā€“ autonomously decide to grow itself,
or maybe spin up a sibling to carry half the load. When things settle down it
can shrink itself back down or destroy any additional servers it created.

What a wonderful world we live in!

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Blog

TorrentApp

Posted on by jaywll

I have a small app on my computer that I wrote myself. Itā€™s
small and simple, and itā€™s the default application for opening BitTorrent files on our computers. When I
download one of these files the app takes the file and moves it to a folder on
the server. This folder is watched by my torrent
client of choice which runs on the server and immediately starts the
download when it sees the file.

The app then pops up a notification to the user to ask if
they want to be directed to the deluge web interface to see the download
progress.

I rewrote the app about a year ago. The original version was
written in RealStudio but the
location of the watched folder and the URL for Delugeā€™s web interface were
hard-coded in: a reasonable design decision given it was just a small app for
only my use one, but still a poor one ā€“ when a change I made to my network
configuration required me to adjust these variables I no longer had a copy of
RealStudio available.

I wrote a new version in Visual
Basic 2010 Express, and this time I did a little extra work to take the
configuration variables out of the source code and put them into an .ini file.

Why am I telling you all this?

Well, not that I think youā€™d need the app, but I have today
made the source code
(and the compiled executable, for good measure) publicly available on my brand
new GitLab account!

Iā€™ve been using Git for a while (and Iā€™ve written about it once
or twice
before), but I really havenā€™t been taking advantage of its featureset.

Iā€™m working on something right now thatā€™s big and complex
and I value having version control and branches to work with. I already have
Git installed on my server (both my home server and my public webserver), but
Iā€™ve downloaded a windows Git client
to compliment that setup and opened a GitLab account to use as an external
repository and a means to eventually make a finished product public.

Why have I chosen GitLab over the more ubiquitous GitHub? GitHub makes you pay to host a private
repository, and I want somewhere where I can both host code thatā€™s a work in
progress (and not ready for public distribution) and distribute completed code
thatā€™s ready for download, public review and maybe even improvement by the
wider community. GitLab gives me free private repositories for
partially-completed things that I can later make public once Iā€™m ready to.

Iā€™ve already created a couple of public repositories, mostly
to test the platform out, and TorrentApp is one of them.

So use it if itā€™s a tool that might be useful to you,
improve upon it if you have the expertise, and send me a merge request so I
can incorporate your changes into the code!

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Shrapnel

Late Night Links – Sunday May 3rd, 2015

Posted on by jaywll

The bad news is that the weekend is nearly over and we all have to go to work tomorrow, but fear not, friends, for this is a happy side effect of this predicament: itā€™s late night links time again!

And thatā€™s it for another week, folks! Have a good one, Iā€™ll see you soon.

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