How to de-restrict a Ducati 659

Ducati released a LAMS approved Monster for the Australia-NZ market a few years back by making small adjustments to the existing Monster 696. But shorter piston strokes, a lower compression ratio and revised cam timing were insufficient to meet the 150kW per tonne requirement. A restrictor plate has been added to the throttle housing to prevent the 45mm diameter butterfly feeding both cylinders from opening fully. The plate physically blocks the throttle from moving more than 30-40% and while this does not prevent the rider from accessing most of the torque available, there is a significant power increase to be had if this stop is removed. Removing the plate is easy to do and easy to reverse, with no damage and no indication that it has been altered.

The plate, labelled ZDM-R32 and located on the right hand side of the throttle housing, is held in place by means of a long threaded bolt that passes all the way through the housing. This can be unbolted from the left side of the bike using an 8mm socket and ratchet extension.

Once the bolt has been undone you can move the plate to the side and this will immediately de-restrict the throttle. The locking bolt can be kept in place with a new lock nut. Of course, this will affect the fuelling set up of your Monster and you will need to talk to your Ducati mechanic about the best way to handle this.

NOTE that modifying the motorbike in this manner will negate your factory warranty (if your bike is less that 2 years old) and your bike will no longer be LAMS approved. It should only be done after you have passed your restricted examination and you are riding on a full licence. However, it is a simple process to reverse by putting the plate back in the original position.

Data Loader Java Heap Space Error

Exporting or inserting attachments using Apex Data Loader via the command line will often fail with an 'out of memory' error due to a lack of java heap space. This can fixed by expanding the heap size in the process.bat file in the bin folder using the -Xms and -Xmx switches:

..\_jvm\bin\java.exe -cp ..\DataLoader.jar -Xms32m -Xmx128m -Dsalesforce.config.dir=%1 com.salesforce.dataloader.process.ProcessRunner %PROCESS_OPTION%

When not specified, the heap size defaults to 1MB but will increase to 16MB as needed. The above code increases the allotted memory to 32MB and allows for expansion to 128MB if needed.

See this article by Brett Spell for more on setting heap sizes. Thanks also to Anna478 and Demand Chain Sysytems.

How to query a stored procedure in SQL

If you have ever needed to query an existing stored procedure in an ad-hoc SQL query then probably the most common method is to create a temp table (or table variable), execute the sp, and insert the result set into the temp table (see stack overflow article here). But this involves manually specifying the columns, and if your result set has more than a few columns it can be tedious and off-putting.

Fortunately there is another solution that allows a direct query of a stored procedure's result set without having to build temp tables (thanks to Erland Sommarskog for the info).

OPENQUERY allows you to query a stored procedure in the same way you query a base table, similar to querying a query in MS Access, and even allows joins between different sps.

For example, if I have two stored procs on my local server, PaymentUpsert and MilestoneUpsert, I can run the following select statement using OPENQUERY:

SELECT p.Status__c
,m.Status__c
FROM OPENQUERY(LT010, 'EXEC StagingArea.dbo.PaymentUpsert') AS p
JOIN OPENQUERY(LT010, 'EXEC StagingArea.dbo.MilestoneUpsert') AS m
ON p.[Milestone__r:External_Id__c] = m.External_Id__c
WHERE p.Status__c = 'Completed';


If you get an error telling you that your server instance is not configured for data access then you can run the following query to allow access:

EXEC sp_serveroption 'LocalServerName', 'DATA ACCESS', TRUE;

Be aware that setting your local server data access to true may have security implications for you and your network. See data acess article on technet and also article on openquery.

Change Facebook profile picture without notifying everyone

If you want to change your profile picture on Facebook without announcing it to the world then you need to set the privacy on the chosen picture to "Only Me".

Selecting a private photo as your profile picture will not be announced as an activity and you can change as often as you like without annoying your friends with constant updates.

Note this does not work for cover photos which are always public by default.

Case sensitive VLOOKUP search in MS Excel

VLOOKUP is not case sensitive and when searching for 15 character Salesforce Ids, you must force Excel to match on exact case. The simplest way to return an exact case-sensitive match is by using an IF(EXACT... formula, but this will return #N/A if the first ID found is not an exact match.

The best way to enforce a case sensitive search in Excel is to use the INDEX / MATCH combo as follows.

Solar azimuth - how the sun moves across the sky

The solar azimuth angle is the angular measurement of the sun in a clockwise direction from north. When building a house it is important to think about the solar azimuth because it affects which sides of the house receive morning or afternoon sunlight at various times of the year. Most homes are built with north-facing windows to optimise the low winter sun elevation, but few homes are built with the summer azimuth angles in mind.

Reference external java beans with absolute path

I run a bunch of batch file exports from Salesforce calling Data Loader from the command line, with multiple process-conf.xml files defining various tasks. Originally I stored the SFDC credentials in each bean, then shifted the credentials to variables, still within the same xml file, using java.lang.String classes with constructor-arg properties: