PowerBi - Unable to open report - only 20 items can be opened at one time.

 

If you see this error:

You need to click on the ellipsis button and close open items:

Running PdfPlumber in an AWS Lambda Function

 Here are the steps that I have documented for running PDFPlumber inside an AWS Lambda function. PDFPlumber is really good at extracting content (especially structured content) from a PDF. It can do this without the use of any GenAI models, but the downside is that it cant handle varying content very well. But if you have PDFs that have the same format and have well structured tables, then this tool can do a very good job at extracting that information.

mypublicnotes/AWS/Lambda/pdfplumber.md at master · rajrao/mypublicnotes

Infinite Campus stopped working on my phone (ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT)

My kid goes to a school that uses Infinite Campus and I suddenly started getting an error where I was unable to log into the site.

I tried different browsers, clearing cookies and nothing seemed to help.

The error:

This site can’t be reached campus.dcsdk12.org took too long to respond.

Try: Checking the connection

ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT

In the Android app, I got a much less helpful error message about something going wrong with the connection. The odd thing was that the site and app was working for everyone else in my family.

Finally I was able to figure out that the issue was that I was on a VPN. Once I disabled the VPN, I was able to successfully use the site and app. Lucky for me, my VPN allows me to add apps to an exception list. Adding campus Infinity to the exception list in my VPN app fixed the connection issue for me.

SVGs, Floor plans in PowerBi

We had a business requirement to show charts with regions. For the first use case we had to show body injury data and what we had was an SVG that had all the body injury locations.

We looked at a lot of solutions:

1. Storing the SVG data in a table/measure and displaying it.

This did not work, as the SVG data I could only get to display in a table visual and that would be very small for our use case. Additionally we wanted to be able to pick locations and display regions with color coding.

2. Using the ShapeMap.

I tried to convert the SVG vector to TopoJson, but nothing seemed to be able to convert the SVG to a good TopoJson. I even tried to trace the SVG into a vector file using QGIS and then convert it to a TopoJson file. But it always ended up looking like a "Picaso Painting"

See: powerbi - Power BI - Shape map rendering issues with TopoJSON - Stack Overflow

3. Custom Visual:

There are a few different custom visuals available and we were investigating Synoptic Panel from Okviz). This would probably work, but if you had a lot of shapes, regions, then it would cost a per user license.

Final Solution:

The final solution actually turned out to be the easiest (the only requirement is that you need to have Visio online).

Here are the details: Add Visio Visuals to Power BI reports - Microsoft Support

And here is what it can look like:

One reason that this is a really good solution is that if you have a drawing that might frequently change (example floor map), then all you have to do is edit the visio diagram in Visio Online and if you open up the PowerBi dashboard, the changes immediately show up.

How we did it: Its simple, create a new visio diagram and insert the SVG. As long as your SVG was made up of different parts, the svg will come in as a vector. You will have to ungroup your vector and you can make changes. For PowerBi to be able to color the image, the transparency for each part needs to be set to 0%. One thing I could not figure out is, how Power Bi determined as the page to use for the visual. It seemed like which one was the last one being edited would be picked. This felt dangerous, as if someone edited the diagram, it could impact the dashboard. So, we went with the option of a separate visio file for each diagram we wanted to include in PowerBi.

We will be investigating this option more, but I wanted to put this out there as a potential solution.

More info:

Custom Shape Maps in Power BI – Driven BI Data

Use Shape Maps in Power BI Desktop (Preview) - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

PowerBi + Aws Athena + Dataflow Error: Incorrect number of arguments

 A dataflow that I had suddenly stopped work.

The error was 

Encountered user gateway exception: '<ccon>ODBC: ERROR [HY000] Incorrect number of arguments: </ccon>

After a lot of troubleshooting, I figured out it was being caused by some steps I had added to add additional columns. Most likely, those steps were being query-folded to the database and it was not working.

I solved it by adding a call to Table.StopFolding right before I added the steps.

Table.StopFolding - Table Function | Power Query M

AWS Lambda error: Sandbox.Timedout 3.00 Seconds

In a AWS lambda, we suddenly started seeing this error:

 {

  "errorType": "Sandbox.Timedout",

  "errorMessage": "RequestId: xxxxxx-xxxx-xxx-xxxxxxxxxxx Error: Task timed out after 3.00 seconds"

}

The "Sandbox.Timeout" threw me and I could not figure out where it was coming from.

Turned out, the error was being thrown by the AWS Lambda Infrastructure, because it was configured to run for only 3 seconds. This is done via the Configuration tab and editing the "General Configuration" and increasing the timeout setting.

PowerBI + PostGreSql + AWS-RDS

 I was getting an error when trying to connect using the PostGreSQL connector in PowerBi.

    The remote certificate is invalid according to the validation procedure

The basic solution is informed by this AWS post: Set up SSL/TLS client connections to Amazon RDS for SQL Server and Amazon RDS for Oracle | AWS Database Blog, but I found it didnt work exactly the way in that post (PEM file didnt work).

Luckily for us, AWS now provides a PKCS7 file. So, go to Using SSL/TLS to encrypt a connection to a DB instance or cluster - Amazon Relational Database Service and download the bundle appropriate for your AWS Region. (You can use the global bundle, but the problem with that is you will have to hit approve in the Import Wizard many times (approximately 3 for every zone)). So, using your region's cert bundle will lessen the number of clicks.

Once downloaded, you will have to open your Windows Certificate Manager (Windows >> Run >> CertMgr.msc).

In the CertMgr, click on "Trusted Root Certification Authorities" >> Certificates and then Import.

In the Import Wizard, you will have to find the P7B file you downloaded from AWS and import it. Approve the next few steps. You should now be able to connect to PostgreSql running AWS-RDS.

These steps should also work for connecting SQL Server to PostgreSql in AWS.

Microsoft Forms: Difference between a Form and a Quiz

 In Microsoft Forms you can create a "Form" or a "Quiz". But what is the difference between the two?

In a quiz, you can specify the correct answer and the points for the answer, if correct.

Where for a Form, you cannot provide the correct answer, nor can you assign the question a score.

Also, with a quiz, you can do some cool things like enter equations for Math questions:

A quiz also has some additional settings that allow you to show answers, etc:

Select Blinds Ac 114 remote pairing/copy code to new remote

Select Blinds Ac 114 remote pairing/copy code to new remote

Works for AC114-06B and 02B remotes.

Paired remote: the one that currently is programmed and working 

New remote: the one you wish to program

Steps:

1. Select the channel on the paired remote that you wish to copy to new remote

2. Select the channel on the new remote 

3. Press stop button once on paired remote and then press and hold until the blinds jog up and down once

4. Quickly on the new remote press up button. Blinds should jog to let you know the code got copied.

Manual: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mcOqt3M_EZQjjxoddzVfIvbzJvrlqGQ3/view?usp=drivesdk

Windows 11 - Enabling Hibernate

 If Hibernate is not available as an option, the following 2 commands run from PowerShell should enable it:

1. powercfg /hibernate on

2. powercfg /h /type full

The above commands need to be run from a Administrator Powershell window.

In Windows 11, you can then go to: Start >> Type: Control Panel >> Control Panel >> Power Options >> Choose what the power buttons do.