May 2011 ~ LazyExchangeAdmin

"MD5? What the hell is that?!"

My friend Charlie and I talked about MD5 the other day. He called me saying that he downloaded this program, a small utility for whatever it is that he was working on. He was able to finish the download and all but each time he tried to run the file he gets a message saying that the program is not valid or corrupted. So I asked him to download a new copy but the same thing happened. So I asked if he already checked the MD5 hash to see if the file is intact after download and all he could say was "MD5? what the hell is that?!". So I gave him a quick lesson on MD5 and in the end, he was only interested in how he could get the file correctly running.. just wasted my time explaining when I could have just accessed his computer remotely and checked on it myself.

For the benefit of those "would-be-future-Charlie", MD5 sum or hash or checksum is; when we look at it using a simple analogy is like the file's fingerprint. Yes, you know how every person's fingerprints are unique? You basically get the idea now right?
The MD5 hash values are provided by the publisher of the file along with the file itself when it was made available for download. The purpose of this is for the recipient (person downloading the file) to be able to validate that the file is not altered in any way and is still intact. there are instances wherein right after downloading the file it gets infected, or the download did not correctly finish, thus Charlie's problem.

Now the question is how do we check if the MD5 sums are correct?

I use two different tools for this.
md5sums (command line tool) http://tinyurl.com/md5sums
winMD5sum (GUI tool) http://tinyurl.com/winMD5sum

You can watch this video on how to use these two files to validate MD5 values.

Here's one using Linux/Ubuntu

Excel 2007 to DBF Conversion

Beginning MS Excel 2007, Microsoft dropped it's support for saving Excel files to DBF format among other file types available prior to this version. I don't suppose all users need to utilize this feature all the time but those who do have their reasons. They might be working with the census department, or just having fun converting spreadsheets to DBF and opening them with their favorite DB Editor like Access or FoxPro etc..

But there are still ways to convert your spreadsheet to the beloved DBF format should you really need to and I'll show you ways that I know how.

Import / Export Procedure

For this example, I created a spreadsheet file filled with random numbers named Random.xlsxThis is obviously a spreadsheet but for this procedure, we will open it with MS Access. Yes, MS Access will be used to import and ultimately export to DBF.

Using OpenOffice

Let's take the same file but this time we will use OpenOffice. OpenOffice is capable of reading MS Office files with great accuracy. And the good part is, it can save your file directly to dBase format.

Now there are commercial programs that can perform the same job but I don't like to use those when I have an alternative and I don't have to pay just for this purpose. That's about it.

I don't know if this will help many people, but hey, I have to post something right?

:D

Update:
I found this post which shows how to use VBScript to convert from Excel to DBF.
http://nerds-central.blogspot.com/2007/12/write-dbf-file-from-excel-2007-with.html