SAP GUI sessions 101 (updated)

The SAP GUI is the first application I start in the morning and the last one I close at the end of the day. Most of the time I use multiple sessions on multiple systems. Last week @pverstraeten saw me closing all these sessions one-by-one and showed me how to do this the right/fast way: Just type /nex in the transaction field. Thanks!

Update (11-2010): I added two fast shortcuts. TFTT @ron_nooren and @jurjen_heeck!

I listed the ‘session commands’ below:

/o Display list of all sessions

/o + transaction Open transaction in new session (/orsa1)

/n End transaction and go back to SAP Easy Access user menu

/n + transaction Open transaction in same session (/nrsa1)

/i Close current session

/i + number of transaction Close specific sessions (/i3)

/nend Close all sessions with prompt

/nex Close all sessions without a prompt

CTRL + (plus key) Open new session

CTRL / (forward slash) Put cursor in command field

Make your Playstation 3 region free HTG

For the past weeks my girlfriend and I have been on holiday in the USA and Canada which was – of course –  awesome. With the cheap dollar/euro conversion and enough luggage space left we decided to do some serious media shopping: DVD’s, Blu-rays (Lost 6 is superb!) and some PS3 games (Playstation Move is fun!). Back home we started using these with our Playstation 3 console. Blu-rays and games worked fine, but the DVD’s refused to play due to a wrong region code. Damn, I totally forgot about this and I just threw away my old region free DVD player a few days earlier. Nice. Blu-rays and PS3-games are by the way always region free.

A quick Google search learned me that I wasn’t the only one with this problem. Sadly, the region code for the PS3 can not be changed. Bummer. The only workaround given was to make a copy of every DVD to a blank DVD and use the copy. Since I didn’t feel much for that (too much work) I found a better way to view your wrong-region DVD’s.

Go to this site and download the PS3 Media Server. This nice piece of software enables you to stream all kinds of media from your Mac/Windows/Linux computer to your PS3. Not only the usual AVI, MPEG or MP4 files, but it also works with DVD’s! Just insert the DVD into your Mac or PC and browse to the files in the VIDEO_TS folder with your PS3. Easy and it works! Okay, you don’t get a DVD menu but who cares, you can finally watch the content.

If your PS3 is connected to your network by Wifi you should lower the video quality settings because PS3′s Wifi is too slow (max 54 MBit/s) to receive all data in real-time, which will make the video playback stuttering. In the ‘Transcoding Settings’-tab I set the maximum bandwidth to 14 and chose keyint=25:vqmax=7:vqmin=2 /* Medium quality for HD Wifi Transcoding as the video quality setting. This setup seems to work fine.

5 reasons I like Spotify

Going paperless in 2010 part 2

As I wrote earlier on this blog 2010 will be the year that I am ditching paper media. Unfortunately I have to wait a while for the QUE or the Apple iSlate to be available for purchase later this year. In the meantime I already started my next ‘going paperless’ project.

In the first week of this year I needed a new paper binder for our home administration. Looking at a bookshelf filled with binders for the last 10 years of administration I realized that this doesn’t quite fit with my ‘less paper’-goals for 2010 (duh). And how can I quickly find a document that was filed over a year ago? Okay, I have a sorting system for the docs I put in those binders, but that is kinda mehh. I should be able to search through my docs by tags, just like I search for an old e-mail and find it within a few seconds.

Besides the search problem there is another issue with my current administration. The last 2+ years I receive more and more invoices and other interesting/important documents by e-mail. Also when I buy software, the serial keys are always distributed by e-mail. So my home administration is stored in more than one place, which of course tilts me as a BI consultant.

To improve this situation I had to create some kind of HPW for home administration. (more…)

Easy Lifehack: Shared calendars

It’s almost 2010 and I still see people manually adding ‘standard’ calendar events to their iCal, Outlook or whatever calendar app they use. For example the yearly (school) holidays, but even more frustrating the numerous matches of their favorite sports team! With the upcoming FIFA World Cup in South Africa I expect to see a lot of this unnecessary data entry work being carried out in the next few months.

Let’s end this now and start using ‘shared calendars’. A shared calendar means that you publish your calendar from your calendar app to the web so others can read (not write to!) your calendar. The best thing is that the calendar ‘receivers’ are able to get all the updates automatically.

To get started with these shared calendars, have a look at iCalShare and MarkThisDate. Choose your calendar, click ‘Add to Calendar’ and pick your calendar app from the list. On my Mac iCal opens and asks me if I want to subscribe to this calendar. According to this article subscribing a calendar to Outlook seems to work in the same way. Nice!

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