Information Technology Contributions
I've been a proud member of the Calgary Unix Users Group for over 30 years. We are all Unix-using, Unix-managing professional IT analysts and developers, and the group exists to promote the only real, serious operating system, the one that runs the Internet...and should be used by everybody.
Calgary Unix Users Group Lectures
"My Cord-Cutting Adventure"
March 23, 2020 virtual lecture on how I shut down our TV cable contract and went with over-the-air TV reception, digitized into MPEG files by a commercial product, stored on my Unix machine.
It goes into how digital TV works, practical problems, copyright issues, and some (lame) humour about how bad TV has been over the years. It's a large expansion of my shorter blog post from a year before. That version is all you really need if casually interested in Over-The-Air TV options.
Article on Canada's Resilience in a Cyberwar (March-May 2022)
I was piqued by an overly-frightening article about "cyberwar", and how we might wake up with the house dark, and the radio stations silent. I spent a month finding out the true situation, which got me back into contact with old friends who run some of Calgary's most important server rooms.
"How Resilient Are Our Vital Services in a Cyberwar?"
On the other hand, my career made me an Excel programming guru, and I have some Excel wizardry to give away.
Free Software: TableTools
I helped out a friend recently with cleaning up an Excel workbook of sparse, unformatted data, for upload into a database. I developed a bunch of tools for cleaning data columns, "quoting" them so that they can be uploaded as SQL strings, formatting them.
The group of tools can be commanded from one dialogue called SQLtools. That link is to documentation for how to use it, and download it.
Used in full, SQLtools will take a worksheet of data, and turn it into valid SQL INSERT statements, with all numeric formats clean, all text data quoted, and internal quotes doubled. It will also look at your data, and "AI" (well, several clever IF statements) will guess at an Oracle CREATE TABLE statement that will create a table with right data types and data-widths to hold your spreadsheet.
Free Software: TableWare
This is another Excel add-in that saves many steps in loading SQL queries from large databases (like Oracle, anything you can get an ODBC hook into) into Excel Pivot Tables. It has some craftier code for allowing the spreadsheet to become a report, where you can store the SQL in the spreadsheet, have part of the SQL statement be a variable (i.e. "Select * from InfoTable where serial_number=A4" where A4 is a spreadsheet cell reference you can change to any serial number you want a report upon), and be able to refresh the pivot table with dynamic SQL.
Other tools in TableWare just make Pivot Tables easier to copy, delete, flip around the graph axes. It was just handy for analysing tabular masses of data.
Information and Download Page for TableWare