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30 May 2017
Every quarter SAP releases a set of updates for its SuccessFactors suite of products. With each release my colleagues and I examine the updates and analyse what is important and the impact it has for SuccessFactors customers. Be it change, enhancement or deprecation we’re on it. For the Q2 2017 release I picked up the analysis for the SuccessFactors service desk solution - Employee Central Service Centre
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29 Apr 2017
In my work I often find myself building spreadsheets to carry out calculations, manage sophisticated processes and capture information. These spreadsheets can often extend to covering many worksheets and as a result it can be awkwardly slow to navigate to particular worksheets just by paging back and forth with the navigation buttons.
In this post I’m going to illustrate a couple of useful techniques to help you navigate around.
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28 Mar 2017
XYplorer is my preferred file manager on Windows. It contains a large number of features that are just too enticing for someone like me to pass up so it came as little bit of a surprise to me when in its tab based interface I couldn’t find a way to quickly duplicate a tab. However XYplorer is a scriptable file manager so it was a pretty easy to create a solution.
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05 Mar 2017
Around a year ago Smile released their new version of TextExpander. This new version created quite a bit of ‘heated debate’ in the Mac community and whilst many eschewed the update I chose not to. I’m glad I did and I thought others might find it interesting to get some idea of why that’s the case.
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19 Feb 2017
I’ve spent quite a bit of time helping out others on Twitter with their use of the Workflow app on iOS. In doing this I’ve fairly frequently come across people who are having notable issues that come down to it being a bug in the application. I’m often surprised that people seem to think that the best place to report a bug is via Twitter with a few vague sentences of description. To that end I figured I’d put together a quick overview of how I think I’d want the issues reported if I were one of the Workflow developers; which just to be clear, I’m not.
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09 Jan 2017
Working with data and configuration files is a part of my day job and this presents me with many opportunities to automate the things I need to do with them. Recently I had a need to check a large set of XML files to make sure there were no obvious errors in them and the approach I settled on was to integrate a command line tool into XYplorer - my Windows file manager of choice.
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06 Jan 2017
Another year ends and so it’s time to take my regular look back at what’s been particularly popular on thoughtasylum.com over this period and to also reflect on what I’ve been doing.
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19 Dec 2016
It’s the little things that really irritate me. I’ve just got one of those personalities I guess. I can’t help myself - if there’s an itch I always have to find a way to scratch it. One of these itches for me is copying and pasting text out of PDFs and getting unwanted line breaks in the resulting plain text. I decided to address this irritation with a little bit of text manipulation.
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04 Nov 2016
As part of my day job I work with lots of files and one of the common activities I need to carry out is to compare the contents of those files to find omissions and inconsistencies. Fortunately most of the files I need to compare are pure text based files (e.g. XML, XSL, LOG, TXT, INI) and there are plenty of tools available to help work with those files. To work with files in general on Windows I make use of the XYplorer file manager and fortunately for me it is pretty easy to integrate my comparison tool of choice into it.
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28 Oct 2016
A month or two ago I had a bit of a problem with Windows Explorer and Google Drive that was rather painful. I lost a day of work to putting right an issue that simply shouldn’t have occurred and to be honest I’m quite glad it happened to me and not one of my colleagues as I imagine that for many of them things would have ended a lot worse. It was at this point that I began looking at alternatives to Windows Explorer.
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