Auto BCC emails to anyone in Salesforce

This is a bit of a different post today. Relevant if you use Salesforce to send out emails (which I do often in my day to day job). It also has some other great uses too – auto filling text fields, checkboxes / radio buttons on websites.

What you’ll need to get it working is to either be using Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox as your browser. Grab the extension or addon called “Autofill” by thdoan. Here is a direct link to the Chrome version:
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nlmmgnhgdeffjkdckmikfpnddkbbfkkk. Once that is installed in your browser, you’ll need to figure out the “id” of the text field that you want auto filled. In my case I wanted to automatically fill out an email address field in my Salesforce emails. I started a new email, then right-clicked the page to select “Get Page Source”. After some searching through the source of the page, I managed to find an “id” of value “p5” for the BCC email address textfield. To help, I just searched the source for “bcc” to start with to get to that section of the source. Once you have the id of the control or field you want to autofill, it is quite easy to set up the rest.

Open the extension / addon settings, select the button for a new rule (the little plus sign). In the new rule “Type” dropdown, select “Text” for a text field. The name will be your “id” you have located. So for my BCC field, I entered a name of “p5”. The “value” will be the text I want to populate this field automatically. So I entered the email address as the value. You can leave the “site” field blank if you want, but this restricts the rule to whatever you specify here. In my case I entered eu1.salesforce.com so that this rule would only ever apply to URLs I am working with that work on this domain / site. This is quite useful, as if I had to ever come across another site with a text field id value of “p5” it would suddenly populate with the email address I specified as a value – so in my case it is useful to specify a site. You can also use Regular Expressions in this field for more flexibility. Once you are done, just click “Save” at the bottom.

The next time you load up a page with that textfield id, autofill should work its magic and fill it in with you. You don’t even need to click the field. There are tons of other uses that this addon / extension can provide, so have a look at the default options that are provided to get some ideas.

VM Clone using vCenter failed at about 90%

Just experienced this issue myself cloning a VM to another LUN / Datastore on a slightly older vSphere 4.0 update 1 environment. A quick google of the error message “Cannot clone VM-NAME1: Number of virtual devices exceeds the maximum for a given controller.” pointed me to VMware KB Article: 1016221 which clearly states that this is an issue when you select the “Edit virtual hardware (experimental) checkbox in the clone settings wizard.

Here is what the Tasks and Events section reports (blanked out the VM name and a host IP if you notice the missing parts).

To work around this, just make sure you don’t tick the “Edit virtual hardware (experimental) checkbox when you clone the VM. Edit the hardware after your clone has complete in the usual way. Apparently this occurs on both vCenter 4.0 and 4.0 update 1. Just another reason to move to vSphere 4.1 if you are still on 4.0!

Now reading: Cocos2d for iPhone 0.99 Beginner’s Guide

I was recently offered a copy of Pablo Ruiz’s “Cocos2d for iPhone 0.99 Beginner’s Guide” eBook to read through and provide comments / feedback on – needless to say I was quite excited to get stuck in, however I am still on holiday in South Africa so for now I am just downloading the eBook and will save it for when I am back in the UK.

I actually can’t wait to have a read through. cocos2d is by far the most fun I have had programming with, and I’m sure this book will be a valuable asset.

You can grab a copy over at PacketPub if you are interested in learning about programming with (imo) the best 2D gaming engine for iOS. At the moment it is going on special for around £25.00 which is not bad at all for a guide encompassing a lot of what cocos2d has to offer.

My first iOS game released on the App Store – Cosmosis

So I finally got my first game (and app) released on the App Store the other day. It is a 2D Space shooter called Cosmosis. Here is a feature / gameplay video and a link to the official App Store page. Check it out if you are into iOS games. It is compatible with the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad!

The Official Game Page

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnJCuaCOJzo

Here are a couple of screenshots:

Cosmosis - Gameplay screenshot
Cosmosis - Gameplay screenshot 2

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cosmosis/id404662019?mt=8

Backup Exec 2010 – Restore window hangs on devices tab

Just a quick post today. This is not necessarily a software issue, but I did come across it the other day whilst trying out the latest version of Backup Exec. Admittedly, it was my fault the restore window was freezing.

What I was doing was testing out various restores of backup jobs that had been done on two different types of devices – one device being a standard B2D (Backup to Disk) and one device being the newer Deduplication type device. I had previously removed the Deduplication device and deleted the Deduplication storage folder on the Backup Exec Media server, so every time I chose to restore from a backup set that was previously done on the deduplication storage the restore window would freeze, and I would have to kill the BE GUI.

After this happened a few times to me I realised that I was trying to reference a job done on deduplication storage, which I had previously deleted. Duh! So just in case you come across a hanging devices tab when trying to restore, check that it is not trying to reference a device that has previously been removed. Ideally, the software would have handled this problem and displayed an error to the effect of “Device not found” instead of freezing the entire GUI and leaving the CPU stuck on 100% utilisation each time it happened.