Drag and Drop quits working in Windows 7

I don't use applications that require drag and drop functionality too much. I would say that most of my drag and drop activities occur when I'm working with SSIS and I'm creating packages to move data around.

From time to time I lose the ability to drag and drop...anything.  I can't copy files from one place to another. I can't even move messages from my Outlook Inbox to another folder.  My solution up until about 5 minutes ago was to reboot and I would get my drag and drop capability back.  I found a forum post from someone named Prophet Zarquon. I'm going to slightly modify his posted suggestion.

1)  Find any icon/file (create a blank file if you want to on your desktop).
2)  Because I'm no expert on keystroke combinations I wasn't sure what clicking while holding escape did, I created a blank text file on my desktop. Click and HOLD the icon with the Left mouse button.
3)  Press Esc while holding down the Left mouse button.

Here's the link to the forum post (as of 11-24-2014) I found if you care to see backup on this information.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-files/suddenly-cant-drag-or-drop-files-anymore-in/10278f8c-08bb-4630-8a79-15e4a1ac0701

I decided this was post worthy in case the above link ever disappears and in case I forget the keystroke sequence again I can refer back to this post.

Showing date as MM/DD/YYYY in PL/SQL

Up until now, I've always left the date format for pulling data out of a clinic system as YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS when working with Toad for Oracle.  I don't always change the format but I'm finding that I'm having to change it more and more often after exporting to Excel to MM/DD/YYYY because the time of day isn't needed.


I tried to make it work on my own using the TO_DATE() function but kept getting the error...


ORA-01843: not a valid month


I'm believe it has to do with the leading zero at the beginning of most months.  Instead of using TO_DATE(table.field, 'MM/DD/YYYY') I found out that I should use TO_CHAR(table.field, 'MM/DD/YYYY').


What a simple fix. I was trying to make it harder than it was with the different combinations I was trying.


Yes I know this is kids stuff but when you have never had to convert a date format and it all of the sudden it would take a few manual steps away if you did, it's handy to document it somewhere.

I work with an application called Toad for Oracle. All I use it for are custom reports and to copy 12 tables out of our database once a month for a project I'm working on. I have on occasion used it to trace the SQL taking place behind the scenes on different canned reports.

After playing around with the export settings, the fastest way to get data out of these tables thus far has been to export to MS Access files.  I would save them locally and then after completing that task, I move them to a server on the network.

This server on the network is my playground so to speak.  It has MS SQL 2012 installed along with all the SQL suite of tools. This is where I'm going to develop a database to de-normalize the data for the purposes of custom reporting. The database that I'm pulling this from was designed in a very bad way. If you try and use the SUM() function on one of the fields containing money amounts, it could take 18 hours to finish.

Anyway, after logging into this server (my login is a domain admin and I have admin rights on this server), I tried opening up one of the MS Access files and I got the following error...

The version of Access used to save this database cannot be detected. this problem cannot be corrected because the database is read-only. Click OK, and after the database closes, make a backup copy of the database. Then open the database with read/write permission.

These files are *.accdb files and I believe Toad for Oracle exports into a 2007 format. The files are on the local E:\ drive. I'm using Access 2013 on that server.  Googling that error pointed me to forum posts that explained issues that were somewhat similar but not completely. They talked about not having the rights to the directory the files are located in but I knew that couldn't be right since I have admin rights and I use the same login to transfer the files as I am trying to open the files.

Just for kicks, I copied the file from one directory to another and I was finally able to open the file.

SPE install on Windows 7

Let me preface this post by saying I'm new to Python and the only languages I've worked with in the past are C++ and Java from classes I took in school.  I've never done any programming except for the classes that I attended 13 years ago.  I've studied a few languages since then but for very brief periods of time.

I googled for about 15 minutes or so (that's about my limit on searching for a resolution to a problem I think should be somewhat easy to fix) on why I couldn't get Stani's Python Editor to launch after installing it on my Windows 7 laptop.

The only website I could find that talked about installing SPE stated that if it didn't launch after installing Python and wxPython, they weren't sure what to suggest.

I installed Python 2.7 and 3.2 (32 bit edition) along with installing the latest version of wxPython (as of today 3-17-2012).  I installed 3.2 just to have access to the latest version.  After unzipping SPE, I double clicked on SPE.py and nothing happened except a cmd window that opened and closed really quick.  I opened up a command prompt, navigated to the SPE folder and typed in SPE.py.  I got the message....

.
.
File "C:\_spe\SPE.py", line 22
print 'You need to upgrade wxPython to v%s (or higher) to run SPE.'%MIN_WX_VERSION

SyntaxError: invalid syntax
.
.

I added C:\Python27\ to my environment variables PATH within Windows but I still got the message.

I created a shortcut with the path "C:\Python27\pythonw.exe C:\_SPE\SPE.py" and that opens up SPE just fine.  To me, that's a work around.  I should be able to call SPE.py from a command prompt or double clicking on it and SPE should open.

Any suggestions on making it work they way it should?  Aren't all .py files just source text files anyway?  I thought maybe Python 2.7 was too new of a version for SPE until my manual short cut worked.  The SPE file I downloaded was SPE-0.8.4.c-wx2.6.1.0-no_setup.zip.

Background (purpose)...

As you'll notice I'm going to be dabbling into a few various topics and didn't think trying to create a blog for each topic would work for me.

The whole purpose in why I created this blog is to post information I used to work through personal and work technical issues.  There are times where I google for answers to problems I've had and had to use information from multiple websites.  Some information I couldn't really find at all but had to try my own ideas out and ended up figuring out a solution on my own.  I plan to make this blog somewhat of a personal technical journal so that I can refer back to.  I'll also leave my posts open for comments because I know I may post incorrect or maybe not-so-correct information and I'd love feed back in that scenario.  I promise to try and post as accurate information as I know it to be.

Again, I'll welcome any and all feedback as long as your nice about it.  =)