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What is a LEADER?

  I believe all of us have a “leader” within ourselves. It’s just a matter of knowing and improving on those leadership traits. If you know how to lead yourself, you can lead others as well. During last session with my team, I raised the topic about leader and leadership qualities. We had a good discussion on that. However, I couldn’t go into more details around it, due to lack of time. So, thought to share my views here.   Since my childhood, I have been learning and studying a lot on this topic. I grew up seeing the red flag with a tiger in the centre – the flag of Forward Bloc party founded by Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose. He inspires me a lot. My close friends think that there is a rebel within me too. But, let’s not discuss that now J . Fortunately, I did my schooling from Sainik School, which also provided me an environment where one has to come across this subject everyday.   Well, talking about the leaders, everyone has someone as their favourite leader. If we clos...
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Attractive Reports from SQLPLUS

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Hi Everyone, On last Friday, I finished working on automating the generation and mailing of a report. Got to learn few interesting way of generating reports directly from SQLPLUS without any extra effort and would like to share that with you. SPOOL ON/OFF is a common functionality in SQLPLUS to write the output of query into a file. Following lines will send the output to C:\test.txt file. SQL> SPOOL C:\test.txt SQL> select * from employee; ---- assuming that employee is an existing table. SQL> SPOOL OFF Now, we might be interested in creating output report in excel format. Simplest way will be: SQL> SET COLSEP ‘,’ SQL> SPOOL C:\test.csv    --- filename with “.csv” as extension SQL> select * from employee; ---- assuming that employee is an existing table. SQL> SPOOL OFF Open test.csv in excel and you are there. But, what if we need output in HTML format????? ………………Well, there is a way to do this as well in SQLPLUS. See below: SQL > SET MARKUP HT...
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Scheduling E-mailer

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While authoring a script recently on Windows XP, which was to be executed by windows scheduler, I used a tool called “Blat” (already in use in one of the application in our group) which helps in sending email. On command line, the syntax would be like the one below:   C:\> blat –to <To Email Adress> -from <From Email Adress> -server <SMTP Server Name> -body “<body text>” –subject “<Subject>”   For further details, refer to http://www.blat.net   On Windows XP, I had to write a ".bat" file and schedule it in Scheduled Tasks option. However, on Windows 7, there are in-built option for scheduling of sending emails.   1. Go to Control Panel -> Scheduled Task -> Create Basic Task 2. Specify the Trigger i.e. when to run the task (Date, time, recurrence etc.) 3. In Action, there are 3 options:          Start a Program    // Will execute any program  ...
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Sequence.nextval can really deceive you !!

Yes, they really can. Yesterday, I noticed that one of the sequence number (pol_no_seq) in our IH application was giving different set of results when accessed (pol_no_seq.nextval) from two different machines. When I shared this observation with colleagues, the feedback was something like "It does not make sense" and frankly speaking, even I thought the same :-) But, how could I ignore what I actually saw with my own eyes ? I was really puzzled. Given below is the explanation of what and why it happenned, based on my findings from some forums: Definition of pol_no_seq : CREATED 25-JAN-07 LAST_DDL_TIME 25-JAN-07 SEQUENCE_OWNER INSURANCE SEQUENCE_NAME POL_NO_SEQ MIN_VALUE 1 MAX_VALUE 1000000000000000000000000000 INCREMENT_BY 1 CYCLE_FLAG N ORDER_FLAG N CACHE_SIZE 200 LAST_NUMBER 2802765 Results : Machine A : pol_no_seq.nextval->28000146 Machine A : pol_no_seq.nextval->28000147 Machine B : pol_no_seq.nextval->28000412 Machine ...
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Things could be very simple in Java !!!!!

So many times, I have seen that there are many ways of achieving a result in java. Most often, we tend to use clasess/methods provided by JDK which is infact a good practise but sometimes, it is actually quite simpler without using them. Hey, what if we have a task of developing a small java program to list the names of all files in a particular directory. It looks like the simplest way of achieveing this would be : Using File.list() or File.listFiles() after confirming that current file is a directory. However, there could be another simpler way which does not use utility methods of File class: public class dirList { public static void main(String args[]) { for (int i=0; i<args.length;i++) { System.out.println(args[i]); } } } Now, compile and run this program dirList from the particualr directory whose listing is to be done. The argument to be passed is asterisk (*) .. i.e. java dirList * This would give us desired result. Actually, * in...
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