Excel: sort text as a date

You'd think that setting the format of an excel cell to date is sufficient to have excel treat it as such,
but alas that's not the case.
The easiest way to do this (better than the microsoft support tips) is on superuser: abuse data>text to columns, to let excel parse and store as a date.

Windows: software to add (updated)

Current list of software I'm running:

• MS Office
• Firefox, with extensions
• AdBlock Plus
• IE Tab V2
• Quickjava (disable all kinds of web page content) 
• SearchWP 
• Print Pages to PDF
• User Agent Switcher
• FreeCommander XE: multi pane tabbed file manager
• better search than explorer 
• great folder synchronisation
• WebDAV does not work
• GreenShot screencapture tool
• IntelliJ IDEA (€), Netbeans, Eclipse (for the Memory Analyzer Tool)
• TortoiseSVN
• Google Drive
• Enterprise Architect UML modeling (€)
• 7-zip archiver
• notepad++
• winscp, putty
• Paint.Net 
• Foxit PDF reader, for its easy editing and annotations. Free with commercial addons.
•  select rectangular text regions
• Contains a PDF printer, allowing you to print portions of a document to a pdf file (losing selectable text)
• Free version contains an advertisement bar which you can disable in file > preferences > general, application startup panel 
• Often hangs when shutting down windows
• WinHTTrack offline browser
• Cygwin Unix tools
• Postman
• WS tester

Umlet: hide toolbox pane

You can resize the right pane containing the Umlet toolbox, but the minimum width will still take up some space. This is annoying when you want to view diagrams side by side, by firing another instance of the program.
There is a hidden feature to help you out here: doulble clicking the border separating the toolpane from the canvas hides the pane entirely. Double clicking the right canvas border again, makes the toolbox sidebar reappear.

Cygwin ssh: Could not create directory '/home/myuser/.ssh'.

When first running ssh from cygwin 2.5.2, the .ssh directory to store trusted host keys could not be created.
ssh still works OK, but each time it prompts you to accept the host you are connecting to:

Could not create directory '/home/myuser/.ssh'.
The authenticity of host 'myserver (168.250.1.174)' can't be established.
ECDSA key fingerprint is SHA256:eSpqYAq2c7k843RfqpbpvK9F118XsKCArBdBheRN8c0.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?

Reason is that ssh does not find your home directory. Easiest solution is to point it to your windows home directory. To do this, add this line to your_cygwin_install_dir\etc\nsswitch.conf file:

db_home: /%H

Oracle Virtual box extensions install fails with VERR_ACCESS_DENIED due to McAfee

Installing Virtual Box 5.1.2 extensions on windows 10 failed with this error:

VBoxExtPackHelperApp.exe: error: Failed to rename the temporary directory to the final one: VERR_ACCESS_DENIED ('D:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\ExtensionPacks\Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-_-inst-4288' -> 'D:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\ExtensionPacks\Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack')

After seeing several people on the net pointing to the antivirus, I disabled the McAfee real time virus scanning that came for 1 year with my Dell PC:

1. Right click System Tray McAffee LiveSafeIcon
2. Change Settings > Real Time Scanning
3. Turn off
1. Leave In 15 minutes

Then I reran the extensions installer and all went well.

Oracle SQLDeveloper connection fails / TNS listener not starting

I had a problem today connecting to my Oracle express database from SQL Developer on Windows 10 with the error: The network adapter could not establish the connection.
Connection did work from SQL*PLUS (Run SQL Command line).
The OracleXETNSListener service was stopped in my services and restarting it did not work.
Turns out the problem was that I changed my computer name yesterday and the service does not use localhost, but the computername.
To solve this I changed the hostname in these files:
%ORACLE_HOME%\app\oracle\product\11.2.0\server\network\ADMIN\listener.ora
%ORACLE_HOME%\app\oracle\product\11.2.0\server\network\ADMIN\tnsnames.ora
Stopped/started the database and everything's fine.

Saw these alternate solutions (did not test):
solution 1: Add the old hostname to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts
solution 2:

SQL> alter system set LOCAL_LISTENER='(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=TCP)(HOST=localhost)(PORT=1521))' scope=both;
SQL> alter system register;

SAP Hybris 6.1 released

Highlights:

• Customer lists in assisted service module
• Pick-Up In-Store Customers:
• Current In-Store Customers:
• My Recent Customer Session
• B2C Accelerator: Save multiple carts for later 
• Backoffice Solr search supported 
• YAAS cloud: SAP hybris customer profiling
• google analytics like events
• order, account, session, product... events
• API for mining the collected data