We had a Power Point Presentation file given us a few days ago with an embedded flash file which we needed to extract to use on the website.

We couldn't find any way to do this. We could drag and drop the swf onto another presentation, we could even drag the object onto the desktop. This created a scrap file which was rather annoying.

However, this led me to the discovery of the NeverShowExt registry key. I managed to rename the scrap to a have a .swf extension, but still no cookie.

So I started digging around the scrap to see if I could find the swf object inside and after reading an introduction to SWF I found what I was looking for.

Now I just wanted to extract this binary data from the scrap file, and I wanted to do it the hard way!

So I wrote a small amount of code to look through a file and extract the goodies. The main part of the code was to take a byte array and copy that into my SWF struct - using the System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal class.

After a bit of messing around the code runs like a dream. The final executable takes 2 parameters the first is the file containing the SWF and the second is the file to write the SWF.

View the code

In theory this could be used to extract many forms of embedded binary data.

I've just finished listening to John Humphrys grilling a representative of a catholic magazine over the role of religion in the EU. He had the guy on the ropes towards the end of the show and came in with a second killer question.

Then as the interviewee was stumbling to find an explanaition to John's answer there was a moment of divine intervention. Somehow a advert for a Clive Anderson show was played which totally threw everyone and bought enough time for the interview to be drawn to a close.

I'll bet the almighty gets a special prayer today :)

Part of the company I work for is being closed down and as such system passwords have been changed and certain key accounts locked out.

For some reason I've been called in to sort out some of the mess. Even though I've never seen Microsoft DNS Server let alone configured it, I found myself thrown in at the deepend last night and having to add some domains to the server. Sadly when it came to restarting the server the server failed due to Error 9609: DNS zone already exists.

It took me ages to work out what was going on. In the end I found a file call boot in the %SYSTEMROOT%\dns\ folder, it turned out that there was a duplicate line in this file. I removed the line and restarted the server and bob's your uncle the service started up again.

Monday was even more eventful when I had to work out why Exchange 5.5 wasn't working, although this was more due to the accounts that the various services ran under.

The only other service configuration I've done in the past has always been on Linux - and so far I've had more success with that than the MS services.

Yet more trouble with windows update - I switched my machine on last night and was presented with a screen similar to the startup screen telling me not to touch anything until the windows update had completed. The update process was on step 1 of 3. I left the machine for 5 minutes and nothing had happened.

So, impatiently, I reset the machine and booted to my desktop where I checked for any security updates. There were 3 updates to install. I installed them from the desktop and they all installed within a minute.

So what was different between the updates? Well this is what I think:

One of the updates was the GDI+ dectection tool. When this particular update is installs it pops up a EULA and another message box. I think that what happened is that this update tried to popup the EULA and message box when installing in the startup screen, with no desktop for the message box to display on I obviously couldn't click or read the EULA and so the application hung.

This used to be an issue when COM servers were young - sometimes a server process would hang unexpectedly and it turns out that a debug message was being displayed via a message box. Again the message box wouldn't have a desktop to display on and thus the process would hang.

I experienced my first taste of Japanese food on the weekend. What an experience it was! I was a little wary of trying out everything, being unsure of eating raw fish. But I conquering my fears and ordered a Tenkaichi Bento.

This was basically a tray containing tasters of the most popular choices off the menu:

• Tuna - which was gorgeous, I don't think it'll ever taste as good cooked.
• Salmon - this was lovely, but not the same intense flavour as the tuna
• Belly pork - accompanied with a dip was lovely
• Teriaki chicken - as you'd expect was just like chicken

They were the main parts of the bento. In addition there were a few peices of sushi, and some green paste which had a kick like mule that had been marinated in mustard. Needless to say the meal was absolutely fantastic.

I love these online trading games - I've been playing celebdaq for years, and I've just found Polidex.co.uk. Celebdaq is celebrity based, whereas polidex allows you to buy and sell MPs.

It seems that the price of an MP varies depending on the share purchasing activity of that MP, naturally at the moment the leaders are the big prices, I've sunk my initial cash into Hilary Benn.

Yesterday I noticed that the left hand navigation on my gmail account had a link to an ATOM feed. It seems that the feed gives you some information about the number of unread emails in my account.

Today, it's gone!

Two weekends ago we visited the Abergavenny food festival which was absolutely fantastic we tried some great cheeses, drank some really good beer, had a chat with a man about fly agaric mushrooms, Watched a victorian picnic where I was told why I love toasted cheese.

Eventually we walked away with a bag of garlic, a jar of honey, a feeling of wellbeing, and a tonne of apples. We could have brought away much more but for lack of hands and money.

We saw Hero last night which was as the tagline said a beautiful film. The filmatography was astounding. I was a little disappointed that Bonnie Tyler didn't make an appearence in the film credits though

In addition to all that we've also completed the first room in our house. We now have some carpet to walk on!

I've just found this great bookmarklet which gives you a easy way to see how deeply nested a webpage is. The darker the page the better.