DECEMBER 21, 2011 > Last day of autumn

FEATURED CONTENT

What's New at Experts Exchange
From the Central Coast and beyond

Nata's Corner
NTSB flop and a list of lists

Editor's Choice Articless
Five from some of EE's best

Tip From The Mods
EE V10 sooner than you think

Xmas Guide Four, Five & Six
Continued from our last issue

Kudos
A fix for an irksome IE8 issue

In Brief
Things you might have missed

Milestones
Who did what through Dec. 17

WHAT'S NEW AT E-E

The Inbox: mtrout made our year last week when she used the Contact Us link to send a note to the Customer Service department, who passed it along: "I did not want to make it a question (do not want to abuse the resource), but I would like to contact you and if you could on my behalf please extend my Wishes of a Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and Happy Holidays to you and your staff who has helped me endlessly this year. Thank you again."

WhackAMod replied for all of us: "On behalf of the Admins, Moderators, Zone Advisors, Page Editors, and Experts, I would like to thank you for your holiday wishes and we're all just happy we were able to help you. Peace."

EE and the Arts: Experts Exchange is sponsoring (by buying the playbill advertisement at left) the student production "Seussical" March 8-11, featuring the daughter of Site Admin modus_operandi, who will undoubtedly be happy to sell you tickets. The image is from the second of EE's series of web ads that hasn't been released yet.

Have you forgotten someone? The Experts Exchange store is still taking orders in case there's someone who you should have gotten something for but didn't. As might be expected, all of the merchandise is top shelf quality; EE has done a great job of finding goodies that you will use and enjoy showing off -- even the snow globes. Mugs sent to your humble editor will be greatly appreciated.

And on the off chance you'll run into someone who has forgotten, there is a Santa Claus.

Customer Service contest: If you have a reason to deal with the CS department, you can win one of the very nice EE polo shirts just for filling out the survey after your experience. The contest runs through the end of the month, so post about your experience today! And from those of us on this side of the firewall, our best wishes to Dani, Molly, Cat, Melissa, MJ, Cassie and Chelsea -- you folks make life so much easier!

Podcasts: If you missed our last podcast, featuring Ted Bouskill talking about games for the holidays. This week, we'll be bringing in Senior Administrator Eric Peterson; that conversation could go anywhere. Take a listen Friday at our Soundcloud site.

Webinar: Our next webinar is scheduled for January 19 from 11 am to noon, Pacific time, and will feature Mike Dillon, the CTO of Quest, who will be following up his June presentation on disaster recovery with one titled "Keeping Your Business IT Secure in 2012". Another [former] Quest employee, Roger Mendoza, has his own way of creating presentations.

Certified, customized and cool: If you haven't grabbed one already, be sure to nab your very own certified Expert Badge and show off your skills on your personal blog or website. All the cool kids are doing it!

Editor's Choice Articles

Use Excel's hidden data store to share data across VBA projects
By scott

Have you ever wanted to pass data from a VBA project running in one Excel workbook to a VBA project in another workbook? Sure, the code in one workbook can write data into another workbook, but wouldn't it be nice if you had a place to store inter-workbook data that was hidden from view? And that persisted even if all workbooks were closed?

For example, I have a spreadsheet macro that is only allowed to run if the user's PC contains a special license key -- the macro validates the license whenever a workbook is opened. However, there is a noticeable delay while checking the license so I don't really want to do it more than once, even if the user opens multiple copies of my spreadsheet. Can I set a "valid license exists" flag so all workbooks can see it when they are opened? Even better, can I preserve the setting of the valid license flag even if the user closes all workbooks but leaves Excel running? The answer is yes...
Read more...

Malware Fighting -- Best Practices
Sub-Titled: "My Way" (with apologies to Francis Albert Sinatra)
By younghv

Let me start by stating emphatically that I am one of those Experts who prefer doing things "My Way".

It's kind of a no-brainer. "The following procedure works for me, so here is what I recommend that you do...".

I believe that recommending methods that work for you (me) is exactly what Experts-Exchange is all about and it is the rule that I follow when posting advice.

When attempting to help one of our Members with a malware problem we need to be extremely cautious that any "My Way" advice is also consistent with the known best practices.
Read more...

How to use Access Control Lists in Oracle
By sdstuber

So, you upgraded to a shiny new 11g database and all of a sudden every program that used UTL_MAIL, UTL_SMTP, UTL_TCP, UTL_HTTP or any other network service starts failing. ORA-24247: network access denied by access control list (ACL) keeps showing up in your error logs. What is going on?

[Oracle]11g introduced a new security measure called Access Control Lists (ACL) and by default, all network access is blocked! An ACL, as the name implies, is simply a list of who can access what, and with which privileges. The "who" part is called the principal of an ACL and can be a user, a role or PUBLIC. The "what" is a host and range of ports. The "which" is a either or both of CONNECT or RESOLVE. Connect, as it sounds, allows you to connect to a host and send/receive data. Resolve allows you to look up hostnames given ip addresses or vice versa with the UTL_INADDR package.
Read more...

Delimited list as parameter: what are the options?
By angelIII

Earlier or later, every sql developer will be confronted with queries like this:

But with the issue that the list should be a parameter at some point (either in the sql procedure itself, or the programming language that calls the sql). And to take the MS SQL Server syntax as example, the following does not return an error, but simply does not work:

It will return the one matching employee record if you pass 1 single ssn value to the procedure. As soon as you pass several items in the list, you will get:
0 records returned.
Read more...

Do you Double-click on Combo Boxes?
By harfang

I do... Ever since I discovered the short-cut in Access 2.0, notably in the property sheets, I double click on all sorts of combo boxes -- or their labels -- to select the next item in the list.

This was a smart interface choice by the Access development team: you almost never need to double-click on a word in a combo box to select it, for example, and the feature is especially useful for combo boxes with short lists: "Yes/no", "not indexed / indexed (with duplicates) / indexed (without duplicates)", etc. It speeds up design and avoids having to create check boxes for properties that are really just flags.
Read more...

Analyse This -- A Database Optimization Procedure
By mwvisa1

As a database administrator, you may need to audit your table(s) to determine whether the data types are optimal for your real-world data needs. This Article is intended to be a resource for such a task.

The other day, I was involved in a question by wasifg on MySQLQuestions.com (a MySQL dedicated site offered by the owners of EE, so usernames and passwords from EE can be utilized there for any interested). The gist of the question is to determine:

An auditing tool that compares the schema definition with the data present in a table (e.g., a column is defined as VARCHAR(255), but the maximum data value is only 100 characters in size).

My original suggestion, not having previously played with the procedure analyse extension, was to query the INFORMATION_SCHEMA to build a dynamic SQL query. This gets the job done of course, but MySQL has a potentially better way, at least one already intended for this purpose; therefore, this Article will act as a resource for my old way and the new way discovered using procedure analyse.
Read more...