John 3:30

He Must Increase, I Must Decrease

Technical

Windows 10 Icon Removal and PERSONAL.XLSB Movement

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I had a rather productive afternoon on my computer. If anyone needs help with these items, please contact me and I’ll help you. Long story short, here is what I accomplished:

  1. I can’t stand the Windows 10 upgrade icon in the system tray (lower right). I had removed it before by uninstalling and hiding a windows update, but apparently windows packaged it again with a new update. So I wrote a batch file which I have start on system startup to kill the GWX.exe process which appears.
  2. I had a number of personal macros I wrote a while back which got lost when my computer crashed (I know, I know). So I figure out how to edit the registry to change the location of the PERSONAL.XLSB file where personal macros are stored. I was able to put it in a folder which is backed up to the cloud.

If anyone wants help accomplishing these tasks, let me know by contacting me <<– (click the link).

Use Dropbox to Protect and Share Your Files and Access Anywhere

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A neighbor brought to me a common problem the other day. Another neighbor of ours was working on a document for school, is convinced she saved it numerous times – yet now she cannot find it.

There could be a few reasons this happens. One possible reason is that she never really saved her changes. That is HARD to fix, (although there are things which you could do to safeguard people against that).

But there is a free product out there (you can pay for upgraded or business versions) called Dropbox which solves many common needs.

  1. Have you ever saved a file and then computer crashes and you can’t find it?
  2. Have you ever saved a file and then you’re at a friend’s house and want to open it, but cannot because your laptop is at home?
  3. Do you ever want to share large files or a number of files (vacation pix, for example) with a friend or family member? — Kinda hard to do over email!
  4. Do you ever collaborate with others on a project? Do you recall emailing a document, then it gets emailed back, but by then you’ve modified it again?

Dropbox resolves all these issues. Here’s how it works.

When you sign up for a Dropbox account, Dropbox gives you a chunk of space on one of their computers. You can actually use is online and just upload files to their server if you like. But the read power is in the desktop application. When you download Dropbox to your PC and connect it to your account, what Dropbox will do it automatically upload any changes you make to that folder to their central server. Dropbox will also download any changes to that folder to your PC and any other PC which is connected to an account sharing that folder!

For example, in my Dropbox, I have a folder called Church. In this folder, I maintain all of the powerpoint documents which we use to display lyrics and sermon notes at my church. All I do is create a document and save it on my computer. Then I walk away. While my computer is connected to the internet, Dropbox uploads the file to their central server.

Now, when I get to church I have a few options. One option is that I can go to the Dropbox website, log in and download my file. I can do this anywhere I have internet access. But what we did is we signed up for a Dropbox account on the church computer and so actually when I get to church (assuming the computer is connected and on) the file is already downloaded onto the church computer where I run the powerpoint. Pretty easy!

I’m able to move and modify files between folders on my Android phone, as well. And if one is changed or accidentally deleted? Dropbox keeps a history of versions of each file, so just find a deleted file or a preferred version.

Any questions? Leave a comment and we can discuss ways to use Dropbox or setup. By the way, if you are interested, please click one of the Dropbox links in this post. For using my referral link, we each get an additional 500MB space. Trust me, once you start using it, you will need it!

A Little Fun for Today

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As an I.T. professional, I get some, um, shall I say random questions from time to time. This one came this morning on my IM. (Instant Messenger)

  • Coworker: STUPID QUESTION TIME- is there a way top make my keyboard silent?
  • Me: Tap it three times on the left, then three times on the right, then say “silent, silent, or I’ll get violent” real loud so all the other people in Finance can hear you. If that doesn’t work, let me know and I’ll come and see if I can do anything.
  • Coworker: VERY FUNNY
  • Me: it won’t work if you don’t believe in it

Hope you enjoyed that as much as I did.

Steve Jobs’ Final Wish

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I don’t know a lot about Steve Jobs. I watched Pirates of Silicon Valley and have bought a few iPods. I had never met the man: so how do I propose to know his last wish?

First we must review Luke 16:27-28.

27 And he said, ‘Then I beg you, father, to send him to my father’s house— 28 for I have five brothers—so that he may warn them, lest they also come into this place of torment.’

I believe that Steve Jobs’ final wish is that God’s law and gospel be proclaimed to those he loved the most in this world. Whether Steve Jobs is currently suffering the condemnation of God or worshiping the Creator now because he is in Christ Jesus – I trust his hope is that others will know who the One True God is. So where is Steve now?

I don’t know for sure. God knows each man’s heart; I do not. But what I do know is that if he was never born-again, if he never repented of his sin against God and trusted Jesus Christ as the only provision for the basis of forgiveness of those sins, then he is suffering the just punishment for his life of enmity with God – and so will you, without Christ. It is also possible that due to the mercy and grace of Christ, that Steve was covered by His sacrifice and is currently enjoying communion with his Savior. Enemies of the gospel of grace will call me callous for even using a recently deceased person as an example; and I am sure some Christians will find my take on the eternity of Jobs too weak, since he never publicly professed Christ and, in fact, professed a false religion (Buddhism, if my research is correct).

I cannot help Steve Jobs anymore. I cannot pray him into Heaven (a false doctrine of Catholicism called purgatory), and I cannot preach to him or plead with him to repent and believe the gospel. Josh Harris sent him the gospel a while back. I suppose Steve died with knowledge of how to be saved and we can all live with the hope that God had mercy on him late in life. What we cannot say is that anything we know about him indicated regeneration. We cannot just arbitrarily assume that Steve was “probably a Christian” because it makes us feel better, or because we lack the courage to allow people to believe that we think Jobs’ hellbound life remained uninterrupted by God’s grace. For we know the truth is that EVERY man and woman is hellbound. Every man and woman has fallen short of God’s standard and is accountable to God for their own sin. The question is not “Where is Steve Jobs?” The question is – “Have you been born again?” John 3:3-7.

I am sure many will think it is wrong to even refer to Jobs so soon after his death, especially concerning eternal matters. I, of course, would disagree. Assuming this dissension would come from people outside Christiany, the criticism is unwarranted, irrelevant and inarguable. There will be no convincing non-Christians of Christian things with clever arguments or sound logic. These folks simply deny the foundation of Christian beliefs (God’s Word), and, thus, can prove or disprove anything they want, arbitrarily. But let’s look at the Christian response: Are you a Christian who thinks there should be some waiting period before we discuss the gospel after someone dies? Or maybe you think the person’s name should never be used? I’d ask you this: how many people are you ok with perishing to eternal torment while you wait for the right time to begin discussing spiritual matters? Because you do not know, (as Jobs did not), who will be next, or when? What arrogance you have to believe that your non-believing family and friends and coworkers have even another breath in them.

So please, share the gospel NOW. Be gentle and meek, patient and humble – yet bold and confident in the power (Romans 1:16). Refer to the gospel not as your message to humanity, but rather the message of the Bible. Make sure your hearers understand that if they disagree with you, they are actually disagreeing with the Bible. And don’t take it too personally when they reject you and sling accusations at you, for if you properly share it – if you accurately express the message of condemnation of sins and hope in Christ’s righteousness instead of self-righteousness – your earthly existence ought not be too much better than the life of Jesus and John the Baptist.

Dear brothers and sisters, I beg you and command you in the name of Christ: “Go ye therefore.” You may impact someone for Christ who impacts someone for Christ who Steve Jobs desperately wants saved. You will certainly be showing your gratitude for what Christ did for you.

Avoid ORA-00054: resource busy and acquire with NOWAIT specified on Truncate

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If you are on an 11g database, you can ignore this post and just use the new ddl_lock_timeout parameter to accomplish what this post explains.

“alter session set ddl_lock_timeout=60” – will effectively allow ddl statements to all wait 60 seconds before encountering the error.

If you are on 10g or lower, here is an option:

If you are an Oracle programmer, then you’ve probably encountered the ORA-00054: resource busy and acquire with NOWAIT specified exception when attempting to truncate a table. When this happens during the day, you can usually just wait a few minutes (or go and commit your other open sessions…), but what about when you are truncating tables as part of a script which runs overnight? Are you tired of being woken up so you can simply rerun the script?

Well check out this script, then! It is a very simple PL/SQL procedure which accepts 1 or 2 arguments.

TABLE_NAME: string containing the table to truncate (include the schema prefix as well).
MAX_WAIT: number which is the maximum amount of minutes you would want to wait (you can ignore this parm and it will default to 10)

The script does the following:

1. Check if it has been running for more than the max wait time – if so, exit with a custom exception.
2. Truncate the table sent as a parameter
2a. If successful – EXIT.
2b. If truncate fails due to ORA-00054 exception, repeat steps 1 & 2 (this is a good place to put dbms_lock.sleep if you desire).
2b. If truncate fails for any other reason, simply pass the exception onto the calling program.

So instead of getting an error when a resource is busy – your code will wait for it to become available, then truncate it as soon as possible. And since you are executing procedures, you can easily use dbms_scheduler to allow your truncates to run concurrently. If you have enough of them, this will be a real time saver. But be careful because if you are doing a truncate and load you will want to have something that checks that the jobs are completed before beginning your load.

Please see the code below:

CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE truncate_tbl(table_name IN VARCHAR2, max_wait IN NUMBER DEFAULT 10)
AS
   ld_start_time   DATE;
BEGIN
   ld_start_time   := SYSDATE;

  <>
   LOOP
      IF (SYSDATE - ld_start_time) < (max_wait/60/24) THEN
         BEGIN
           <>
            EXECUTE IMMEDIATE('TRUNCATE TABLE ' || table_name);

            EXIT truncate_loop;
         EXCEPTION
            WHEN OTHERS THEN
               IF SQLCODE = -54 THEN
                  NULL;
               ELSE
                  RAISE;
               END IF;
         END actual_code;
      ELSE
         RAISE_APPLICATION_ERROR(-20101, max_wait||' Minutes waited for table to be available from NOWAIT status.');
      END IF;
   END LOOP truncate_loop;
END truncate_tbl;

Then you can call it simple with

declare
begin
  truncate_tbl('SCHEMA.TABLE_NAME');
end;
/

If this article doesn’t help you, consider dropping me a note with your concern. I have thousands of lines of code for hundreds of Oracle problems I’ve faced and would publish ones that people told me would be helpful.

How to see your Oracle text output in something other than the browser!

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Updated November 8, 2013 – I have verified this on Windows 7 Enterprise Edition.

Have you ever wanted to see your Oracle output or log files open in your custom text editor instead of an IE window? I use Notepad++ (FREE) for text editing. Every time I open an output file or log file which is text it opens in IE.

This is undesirable for a couple of reasons: (I’m sure you can name more)

  1. This means I have SEVERAL IE (Internet Explorer) windows open for each log I am viewing.
  2. I cannot use the advanced features of my desktop application, I’m stuck with CTRL+F in IE, etc.

If you are in my boat, I have the cure for your woes.

Click Start -> Run -> then type “regedit” in the run box and press {ENTER}

You may be prompted to allow access to the application. Click “Yes,” if so.

Navigate to the object HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.txt\Content Type. It should have a value of ‘text/plain’. Go ahead and DELETE this object.

Now when you open text files in your browser, including when you click View Log or View Output from the Oracle Concurrent Request screen, text files open properly in your default OS application for text as long as you are using the Viewer: Text profile option set to “Browser” in your site.

Whatever your preferred text editor is, Notepad++, Ultraedit, Textpad, you can use it to view logs, compare files quickly and save them easily in a tabbed application.