Welcome to my homepage! My name is Ashleigh Gordon, and I live in Melbourne, Australia. If you want to send me and email, drop me a line at:

So, what have you come to look at?

Software

Free .NET Barcode Control This is a free barcode control done in C# for the .NET platform, complete with source.
Free Barcode Report Generator for MS Access This is a royalty free barcode report generator, written in/for MS Access 2000. I found these on the web, and put them together. I based my .NET control off this code.
Free MS Access Password Recover Utility This is a free MS Access password recover utility for the .NET platform. Handy for when you forget the password, or when someone leaves a company without writing down the password. Source also available.
Free Simple Image Resize Utility A free utility for making image files larger or smaller. Designed to be simple to use, just pick the file and you're away.
GOCR Frontend for Windows A frontend for GOCR (an optical character recognition program). Also has a tuturial on how to build Gocr in Windows.

Computer Tips and Tricks

I've run into a few fairly annoying bugs and obscure error messages, so hopefully these tips help somebody out.

Getting an iPod Shuffle to Work
The iPod shuffle charges it's battery off the PC, so the USB port must supply enough power to it for it to be recognised. Some PC motherboards do not supply the standard amount of power though, so if you can't recognise the shuffle as being plugged in at all, you may need to buy a USB2 adapter card for your PC. Also, make sure that Windows XP has service pack 2 installed.

Computer will no longer boot and the message "NTLDR Missing" comes up.
I've seen this a few times. Under Windows 2000 and XP, this message can come up after the BIOS has been reset and re-flashed. It's very annoying, as most times you have no idea it's a BIOS problem. Booting from the rescue CD or even re-installing XP doesn't solve this problem. To fix this problem, go into your BIOS settings and set the hard drive mode to one of the three options. Keep trying different ones until the system boots. The problem comes from the way BIOS detects the hard drive mode, if it's a different mode from when XP was installed, then the computer doesn't boot and gives a rather cryptic error message. The three possible modes are LBA, Large and CHS. There may be other variations such as extended or standard CHS, so you just have to try all the possibilities.

When installing Windows you get the following message "\i386\ntkrnlmp.exe could not be loaded error code 4"
This is Windows complaining that it can't access the file ntkrnlmp.exe from the install CD. This could be caused by several things. To check if it's the CD or the CDROM drive, copy the folder i386 to a hard drive. If you can copy it without any problems then it's not the CD itself. It could be the CDROM in the computer, or bad RAM or a bad motherboard. To test the motherboard and RAM, you can use Memtest86 which is a free memory tester. If you get errors running this test utility, then you either need a new motherboard or new RAM. It may also be possible that you BIOS settings are not correct, or that you have overclocked the motherboard too much. Reset the BIOS to defaults and run the tests again, if they still fail, you most probably have faulty hardware.

Taking a screenshot of a video
If you try an take a screenshot of a video in Windows, even if it's paused, you'll find that it doesn't work properly. To take a screenshot, you need to disable video acceleration. To do this in Windows Media Player, go to Tools-Options->Performance and set Video Accel to none. You should now be able to take screenshots of videos.