View Two Sheets Side-by-Side in the Same Excel File

 From "View Two Sheets Side-by-Side in the Same Excel File"

https://youtu.be/Hx6aFo7okCc

Connecting or Ending another RDP session in Windows 2012

From "Connecting or Ending another RDP session in Windows 2012"

https://justworks.ca/blog/connecting-or-ending-another-rdp-session-in-windows-2012#:~:text=Simply%20bring%20up%20Task%20Manager,to%20or%20end%20the%20session.&text=Simple%2C%20but%20non%2Dobvious. 

"Simply bring up Task Manager, click More Details to switch to the "Actually Useful" mode, and then click the Users Tab.  All current sessions will be displayed, along with a list of their processes.  Right click on any session to connect to or end the session."

How to Pin Any Folder to the Start Menu in Windows 10

 Thanks to https://winaero.com/blog/pin-folder-taskbar-windows-10/ for showing me how to pin a folder to the Windows 10 start menu. 

The picture below shows "Pin to taskbar". In my case, it showed "Pin to Start". It will let me open this directory in Windows Explorer quickly. 

Daylight Savings, Outlook Recurring Meetings, and Arizona

I do not remember creating recurring Outlook meeting across time zones. I have colleagues that invite me to meetings that are not in my time zone. The interesting thing is that when daylight savings changes, all the meetings created by those in time zones that observe daylight savings shift one hour for me. 

It got me thinking that if I create a recurring meeting using the Arizona time zone, the meeting will shift for those that are in time zones that do observe daylight savings. 

When I went to make my meeting recurring, I saw this dialog. 

It defaulted to the Arizona time zone since that is where I am. Here are two rules:

   1) If I create a recurring meeting when daylight savings is off, I need to use the the Mountain Time (US & Canada) time zone so that the meeting will shift to a new time (relative to AZ) when daylight savings starts. 

2) If I create a recurring meeting when daylight savings is on, I need to use the the Pacific Time (US & Canada) time zone so that the meeting will shift to a new time (relative to AZ) when daylight savings stops. 

Following these rules should make it so the meeting does not shift for my work mates that are in time zones that do observe daylight savings. The rule can also be stated as: Use the time zone that matches the AZ time zone at the time you create the recurring meeting. 

I tried looking this issue up on the Internet, and did not find this strategy. I have found that this strategy does work for those sane state of Arizona who do not shift their time. 

Creating Entity Relationship Diagrams

Here is what I did to create an Entity Relationship diagram for a project at work.

Prepare for the solution at this Stack Overflow article

- Download SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) for Visual Studio

- Modify Visual Studio by adding or removing workloads and components

Follow the steps listed in the answer at the SO article. 

- Open Visual Studio

- Create a project or open an existing project (must be Visual Basic, Visual C# project, or Console Application)

- Right-click the project and choose Add -> New Item…

- Under Visual C# Items select “Data”

- Select the template “ADO.NET Entity Data Model”

- Give it a name and click “Add”

- Select “Generate from database” or “Empty model”

- If “Generate from database” selected enter connection info, choose the database objects and done!

The model is stored as a “.edmx” file. 

- In the visual representation of the edmx file in Visual Studio, arrange the entities so that the relationships are easy to follow.

- Right click in the edmx file and choose Diagram -> Export as image. Save the image. 

Pets vs Cattle

This refers to the pets versus cattle analogy for IT
https://youtu.be/Ox_Wm6XQnxI

The analogy concisely describes a major paradigm shift in our industry that we have been implementing with BAM2.
http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/the-history-of-pets-vs-cattle/

An elevator pitch for “Pets vs Cattle” from “The History of Pets vs Cattle and How to Use the Analogy Properly”

In the old way of doing things, we treat our servers like pets, for example Bob the mail server. If Bob goes down, it’s all hands on deck. The CEO can’t get his email and it’s the end of the world. In the new way, servers are numbered, like cattle in a herd. For example, www001 to www100. When one server goes down, it’s taken out back, shot, and replaced on the line.

-

More articles on Pets vs Cattle

"4 Reasons Why “Pets Versus Cattle” Still Matters in Cloud Security" https://nightfall.ai/resources/pets-vs-cattle/

This slide is taken from a presentation given by Gavin McCance at CERN in 2012. Though, The Register identifies Microsoft’s Bill Baker as the original source of this analogy.

"Pets Vs. Cattle" https://blog.engineyard.com/pets-vs-cattle

Setting Beyond Compare as the default diff tool in Sourcetree

When you right click on a file that has changed in the Unstaged file panel of Sourcetree, you have an "External Diff" option. This post indicates that Sourcetree uses "whatever you have configured in your .gitconfig already as your default diff tool"

You can set Beyond Compare as your default diff tool by following the instructions posted here.

Diff
At a Windows command prompt, enter the commands:
  git config --global diff.tool bc
  git config --global difftool.bc.path "c:/Program Files (x86)/Beyond Compare 4/bcomp.exe"

Note: For Git versions older than 2.2 (git --version) replace "bc" with "bc3" in the above instructions.

3-way Merge 

At a Windows command prompt, enter the commands:
  git config --global merge.tool bc
  git config --global mergetool.bc.path "c:/Program Files (x86)/Beyond Compare 4/bcomp.exe"

Note: For Git versions older than 2.2.0 (git --version) replace "bc" with "bc3" in the above instructions.

Launching Diffs and Merges

File Diff:
  git difftool filename.ext

Folder Diff:
  git difftool --dir-diff

3-way Merge:
  git mergetool filename.txt

Advanced Settings

To disable the "Launch 'bc3' [Y/n]?" prompt, run the command:
  git config --global difftool.prompt false

Git's default settings retain merge files with *.orig extensions after a successful merge.  To disable this safety feature and automatically delete *.orig files after a merge, run the command:
  git config --global mergetool.keepBackup false

Running the following command will open your .gitconfig file in an editor.
git config --edit --global

You will be able to see what the command did to edit your .gitconfig file.