04 Jan 2018
2017 has passed into history and so I’m taking my annual look back at what’s been getting the page hits on thoughtasylum.com and a personal look at the past year.
Read More22 Dec 2017
Something I find I need to do quite regularly is take a snap shot of a folder. For the purposes of saving space (and often for passing on the folder to someone else) I like to compress the folder into a ZIP archive and prefix the current time stamp to the file name.
This little activity was perfect for a bit of automation and so I created a little script in XYplorer (my Windows file manager of choice) to make this as easy as clicking a button.
Read More30 Nov 2017
Recently I was using an Excel spreadsheet to prepare some data and I had a constraint to work to in the number of lines of data the target system could display. Unfortunately rather than rows of data in Excel this was to match against rows of data in a single Excel cell. So the question is, how can you count the number of rows in an Excel cell?
Read More10 Oct 2017
I’ve been on Twitter a while now, but since starting in my current business role I’ve had a separate account for my work posts. I’ve been posting non-work things to @sylumer and work items to @SAP_Stephen. However last month I changed my work Twitter account and in this post I’m going to talk a little about the reason and approach.
Read More24 Sep 2017
TextExpander is a fantastic tool that fundamentally allows you to enter a string of characters and trigger a response that can replace the text with different content (e.g. plain text, formatted text, an image). On some platforms it can do even more, triggering scripts; though generally the intent is to then return and output some content.
Read More08 Sep 2017
Every quarter SAP update their SuccessFactors product line and here is my review for the updates to the Jam (collaboration) module and the platform’s mobile functionality.
Read More03 Sep 2017
Every quarter SAP update their SuccessFactors product line and here is my review for the updates to the reporting functionality.
Read More02 Sep 2017
Every quarter SAP update their SuccessFactors product line and here is my review for the updates to the platform and underlying technologies.
Read More01 Sep 2017
Every quarter SAP update their SuccessFactors product line and here is my review for the updates to the Employee Central Service Centre module.
Read More19 Aug 2017
Recently I was working on processing a file of data and in order to deduplicate and sort it, I decided to employ Windows’ PowerShell scripting functionality. It’s a very powerful tool-set and perfectly suited to what I needed to do, but I ran afoul of a small detail that caused me some confusion at first but that I resolved in the end. Just in case anyone else comes upon such an issue I thought it might be useful to write up the problem and the simple solution.
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