You must wait longer to change your password

It turns out that if I am not administrator I can't use chage, but this is still a cool command to remember for my own systems:

http://www.techroot.be/linux/linux-password-changing-problem.html

Excel Copy and paste only unique values

I forget how to do this and have to look it up frequently!

The key is to open the Advanced Filter Dialog, then click the option for "Unique Records Only", select "Copy to another location", and then figure out how to enter the ranges for the source and target areas of the spreadsheet. In Excel 2010 Advanced is an option for Filter over on the Data tab.

Interestingly, I just noticed that a few spaces over on the Data tab, there's an option for "Remove Duplicates" which looks like it would do the same thing. I should try that sometime.

Here's a link with the top hint:

http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/excel-questions/1684-copy-column-paste-only-unique-values.html

Mold Treatment

Here are some nice links from my mold treatment search. What I found out was that for most porous surfaces, bleach or surface treatments are not sufficiently effective due to not being able to penetrate to where the mold has burrowed. Oddly, essential oils seem to be a way to get around this.

Link 1:

http://www.ehow.com/facts_5657405_wood-mold-treatment.html

Excel 2010 highlight which value is different

This turns out to not be possible to do with a formula, but there is a button on the "ribbon" labelled "Conditional Formatting" which does this (once). This button allows formatting by equal to, ranges, and even not-equal to although that is not one of the first options provided.

Here's the terse StackOverflow answer that broke this open for me initiallly:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5194286/highlight-cells-in-a-row-where-the-value-of-a-particular-cell-is-different-to-th

Here it is for an earliere version of Excel:

http://www.timeatlas.com/5_minute_tips/general/how_to_use_conditional_formatting_to_highlight_data

IE9 Turn off ActiveX Filtering

For some reason, it seems that last week's mandatory update to IE9 has broken my access to most of the online tools that I have to use for work. The culprit, as far as I have been able to tell, has been either the addition of ActiveX filtering to IE9 or the changing of my settings for it. Since I am not allowed access to the security settings for IE, I had to find a workaround, and it turns out that whenever IE9 gets to a site that has ActiveX, it presents a button next to the usual buttons on the top right corner that allows ActiveX to be temporarily enabled. Efforts to find a way to simply turn it back on continuously using registry editing have so far not been successful.

My last google for this did reveal that I have access to several security settings options through the "gear" icon in the top right corner. From: http://www.aboutfortunate.com/Technology-Blog.aspx?entid=39

Excel count cells

In a formula, how to get the count of cells in a range:

COUNTA([range])

If you want the count on non-blank cells, use this:

COUNT([range])

A reference:

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/counting-cells-in-excel-2010-with-count-counta-and.html

Delete blank lines with sed

Use this:

sed '/^ *$/d'

Not sure that I understand why this works. ^ is beginning of line, $ is end of line. Why would " *" match only blank lines?

Found here: http://www.unix.com/shell-programming-scripting/22666-delete-blank-lines-sed.html