Preferred:

String x = JComboBox.getSelectedItem().toString();

or

String x = String.valueOf(JComboBox.getSelectedItem());

The second method protects against null values as well.

Avoid using casting:

String x = (String)JComboBox.getSelectedItem();

This would work fine if the item is indeed a string, but will fail if it can (also) be any other data type. To be safe, use either of the first two methods.

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By default, it is not possible to specify passwords (the SecureString type) directly as a plain-text cmdlet parameter because it is unsecure to do so (and they are right). But sometimes, there's no other way to run a cmdlet without specifying the password as plain text as a cmdlet parameter. Luckily, there's an easy workaround by performing a conversion from plain text and store the password in a SecureString object.

$pw = ConvertTo-SecureString -String "your-pw" -AsPlainText -Force

You can then use the $pw object to specify the password in a cmdlet.

For example: resetting the password of an AD account:

Set-ADAccountPassword -Identity my-account -NewPassword $pw

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If, when attempting to start SQL Server instance, you get an error 1814, this means there's a problem with the tempdb database. Either it can't be created because the disk or volume is not accessible for writing (i.e. a security permission problem), or the volume on which the tempdb resides does not have enough space available. If the latter is the problem, you'll need at least 2 MB of free space for tempdb to be created.

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Cisco AnyConnect VPN client may fail on Windows 7 for no apparent reason with the following error:

Error

Unable to establish VPN

A possible reason may be that Internet Connection Sharing has been enabled on one or more network interfaces (e.g. used for making a hotspot out of your laptop). Try disabling ICS, then try connecting again.

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You can retrieve a list of stored procedures in a SQL Server database through T-SQL by querying the built-in information_schema partition.

SELECT * 
FROM db_name.information_schema.routines 
WHERE routine_type = 'PROCEDURE'

Replace db_name with the name of the database you wish to retrieve the list of stored procedures. You can adjust the WHERE-clause even more to get a more narrow list.

You can also do this with the master database which will return all (system and non-system) stored procedures.

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You can hide user accounts from the Windows Welcome (log on) screen through the registry. This works with Vista and all later versions.

1. Start up regedit.
2. Navigate to the key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
3. Under Winlogon, create a new key called SpecialAccounts
4. Under SpecialAccounts, create another key called UserList.
5. Under UserList, create a DWORD value for each account:
   • Name: the full account name (including spaces)
   • Type: DWORD (32-bit)
   • Value:
     • 0: hides the account
     • 1: shows the account

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This is a Perl script I wrote and used for the migration of a linux DHCP server (running dhcpd to a Windows DHCP server. The script looks in the dhcpd.conf configuration file for fixed reservations and exports these to a CSV for processing and importing in another server.

Usage is simple, as it takes its input from STDIN and outputs to STDOUT.

cat /etc/dhcpd.conf | perl export-dhcpd-reservations.pl > output.csv

The script is very simple and can probably do with a lot of improvements, but it's a start for anyone willing to develop it further. It is licensed as GPLv3.

Probably MSSQL 101, but this is how to quickly retrieve the structure of a table:

EXEC sp_help tbl_name
GO

tbl_name is the name of the table.

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A look at the throughput graph clearly showed a drop to almost zero around 12:20 UTC+2:

A temporary outage on the AMS-IX internet backbone caused an extended outage of internet traffic across Netherlands.

Quote

Dear Tech-L subscribers,

Today Wednesday 13/05/2015 at 12:20 UTC+2 an installation engineer working on the PE under maintenance in EQUINIX AM3, while testing one of the newly installed 100GE modules, accidentally placed a loop on the ISP peering VLAN.

DETAILS:

The loop caused a high CPU on all backbone and customer modules resulting in many BGP sessions dropping.
The incident lasted 10 minutes.
BGP sessions are restoring.

The situation has normalized again.