If you see an error message like the one below, which was produced by Microsoft
Excel for Mac 2016 on a Mac OS X system, even though you don't have the file
open currently, then you will need to delete the lock file, which
should be in the same directory as the spreadsheet.
This file is locked for editing.
Locked by: John Doe
Filename: SGRS_2017.xlsm
You can open the file as read-only.
The lock file will have the same name as the workbook you were trying
to open, but the file name will have ~$ prepended to it. To
delete the file you will need to "escape" the meaning of the dollar sign
by putting an escape character, i.e., a backslash character, immediately
before the dollar sign. I.e., use ~\$ as shown below:
$ ls -alg **SGRS_2017.xlsm
-rw-rw-r--@ 1 ABC\Domain Users 761327 Sep 13 15:57 SGRS_2017.xlsm
-rw-rw-r--@ 1 ABC\Domain Users 171 Sep 18 22:46 ~$SGRS_2017.xlsm
$ rm ~$SGRS_2017.xlsm
rm: ~.xlsm: No such file or directory
$ rm ~\$SGRS_2017.xlsm
$
Once the lock file has been deleted, you should be able to open the
file without the warning message that it is locked for editing.
You can obtain the version of the
Microsoft Edge browser on a Windows system using the
Get-AppXPackage cmdlet with
Get-AppXPackage -Name Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge.
A user reported her Windows 10 Professional system was running slowly. On
September 14, 2017, I checked the system with
SUPERAntispyware, which reported
that it found the Ask Toolbar. It reported the following items associated with
the toolbar:
If you have a list in a
Python script and wish to add new items to the list, you can
use listname.append(newitem) where listname is
the name of the list and newitem is the item you wish to add to the list.
If you wish to add new items to the list only if they don't already
exist in the list, you can avoid adding an existing entry to the list
by checking if the entry is already in the list as shown below:
filenameList = []
if filename not in filenameList:
filenameList.append(filename)
If you wish to know the length of a list, i.e., how many items are
on the list, you can use print len(listname) where
listname is the name of your list.
You can backup a
table in a MySQL or MariaDB database by using the
mysqldump backup tool included with both database
management systems. To backup a specific table you can use the command
mysqldump database_nametable_name where
database_name is the name of the database that contains the table and
table_name is the name of the particular table you wish to backup. E.g.:
mysqldump -u ptolemy -p Planets Mars > Mars.sql
In the above case, if I have a database named Planets with
a table within it named Mars, I could backup just that one table
from the database with the command above. The -u option to the
command allows you to specify a MySQL/MariaDB username that has access to
the database and the -p option will prompt you for the password
associated with that username. The Mars.sql file will then
contain all of the
Structured Query
Language (SQL) commands needed to recreate the table structure and the
data in the table. E.g., it will contain insert SQL commands that will insert entries in the table.
I have a Python script,
filetype.py, that takes a file name as a parameter. I use the script
to identify if a file with a .bin extension is actually a
Microsoft Visio or
PowerPoint file. I run the script on an
OS X system
from a Terminal
window where I have a Bash shell prompt. E.g.:
$ ~/Documents/bin/filetype.py oleObject1.bin
Microsoft Office PowerPoint
$
But I often want to have it check all of the .bin files in a directory. You
can loop through all files in a directory or a set of files using a Bash
for loop.
E.g., to check all of the .bin files in a directory I could use the
for-loop below:
$ ls *
oleObject1.bin oleObject3.bin oleObject5.bin
oleObject2.bin oleObject4.bin oleObject6.bin
$ for f in *.bin; do ~/Documents/bin/filetype.py $f; done
Microsoft Office PowerPoint
Microsoft Office PowerPoint
Microsoft Office PowerPoint
Microsoft Visio
Microsoft Visio
oleObject6.bin: CDF V2 Document, No summary info
$
Someone who uses
GoDaddy for her email reported to me today that she couldn't
send email. I logged into her account from another system and was able to
send email to myself. When I notified her that I had been able to send email
from her acount to myself, she sent an email to me, but reported it was
still stating "loading" when she hit the send button. So tonight I logged into
her system and opened the Firefox browser, since she uses that browser to
send and receive email. When I clicked on Compose, I saw a "Loading..."
message in the body of the email that wouldn't go away unless I clicked on
the Plain Text tab to switch from "Rich Text", which allows one to
format text in the message with bolding, font colors, etc., to "Plain Text".
But when I switched back to "Rich Text", I had problems typing my email
address in the "To" field with only one letter appearing in the "To" field
no matter how many letters I typed.
