January 2006 - Posts
The flight to Seattle is pretty uneventful, except that for the first leg, there isn't any personal entertainment… :( We just happen to take an older plane, but somehow both my colleague and I didn't feel bored…
When we reach Tacoma, we went to rent a car from Hertz. They provide GPS system as well, and since I don't drive, and I can't remember roads very clearly, and my colleague don't drive in Singapore, hence we rented the GPS system as well. The system is called NeverLost…
The system was the silliest system I have ever seen… First of all, the GPS system's refresh rate is slow, hence I'm always about 0.5 km ahead of the system, hence when we are supposed to turn left, we have already missed the turn… If not, when we are supposed to turn left, the system tells us to turn right. The roads, especially in and out of freeways, are already very confusing. The GPS system didn't help one bit… Whenever I remember certain roads, like downtown Seattle, I'll off the stupid system… Hence, I propose the name should be changed from NeverLost to AlwaysLost!!! By the time we reached Pike Market, which we plan to have our breakfast, we have already used up a quarter of the fuel!!!
When we reach Pike Market, it was still very early, hence I just pick a eating joint which I've never tried… To our surprise, we met our boss who was in Seattle the week before for a Project 12 conference! After breakfast, we shopped around Pike Market. There were street artist performing..
He is performing some stunt with his guitar...
Many people setup stalls to sell some interesting stuff. I spent $45 buying a metal smiling sun for my new house… There are a few other things that I really wanted to get, but the price is expensive…
After an hour of walking around, we sent my boss to the airport, since we wanted to visit the flight museum. Thank God he buffered an hour as we turn round and round and round, driving into parts of Seattle which we would never have gone, thanks to NeverLost…
Read about Steve Ballmer's Keynote in the recently concluded Project 12 and Visio 12 Conference here.
A engineering graduate student over in United State is requesting for information about possible odour issues with poultry farms in Singapore here. Anyone with any information to help him / her, would you kindly spare a few minutes of your time?
I'm reading a book on seattle called irreverent guid to Seattle & Portland... there is one part that caught my eye...
"By the way, most locals only go to Starbucks as a last resort. Why take coffee from a chain, when there are so many wonderful private coffee shops, espresso carts on the sidewalk, and drive-through espresso stands in Seattle? That is, unless you need to use a restroom or get change for the bus and you really like blackened (okay, some will say burned) coffee from ultra-dark-roasted beans."
I'm not really a good coffee drinker, but... burnt coffee seems to be doing well in Singapore huh? ;)
Anyway, in 6 hours time, I would be bidding farewell to you all again... Will miss ya... ;)
Bad news? Nope... because I'm now a SharePoint Portal MVP! ;)
Yorushiku!
Though the SKUs is not announced, maybe you can get a hint... ;p
Just for the record, I'm just as excited as Angus is...
[Via Angus Logan]
I'm "Super Excited" about Office "12"
I've just spent the past week at Microsoft's internal tech conference (similar to PDC) soaking up everything I can about Office "12".
One word: WOW!
The entire Office "12" stack is amazing, from the Client enhancements (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, InfoPath) to the Office "12" SharePoint Servers and not forgetting the enhancements to Windows SharePoint Services v3 there is going to be some very cool stuff coming later.
My favorite part is that the features/functionality provided by CMS 2002 is now a part of the Office "12" SharePoint Servers (Microsoft hasn't announced or released packaging/licensing information yet). This is great because today you could rarely deliver an Intranet/Internet or Extranet on just 1 product - most times you needed CMS 2002 & SharePoint Portal Server 2003/Windows SharePoint Services v2 to deliver the entire solution. (collaboration/content publishing/content auditing/searching/personalisation) Having one unified platform for this allows you to deliver both content rich and collaboration rich solutions.
I can't wait until this is all public - you will be as excited as I am today!
If you would like to be on the bleeding-edge of Office "12" adoption - Apply for the Beta Program at http://microsoft.com/office/preview
A blog from the SharePoint team... Check
it out...
There are lots of things to download in this feature pack... Too much for me to list it here.. Check it out yourself
here.
[via icelava]
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3117004324521250241
Sweet memories of the hours lost playing with that moustached plumber. |
Product team recently top-up my MSN 8.0 invites... If you are interested in giving this a try, let me know...
In Singapore, most of the people who is about to do renovation for their house, compare interior designers based on how much the firm quote them to do the renovation. Hence, some of the firms require you to pay a small amount to see the design, just in case you take their design and find the cheapest firm to do. I agree if this happens, it is not fair for the designer, who put in effort to design, and get nothing in return. However, this fustrates those who truly know how to appreciate designs, like me... hee hee.
One such firm tried to make me pay upfront for the design, but I managed to pursuade her to give me a brief idea before I decide whether to pay the amount to see a more solid design. So I'm looking forward to see more design before shortlisting any ID firms... Those who still insist that I pay before I get to see anything, I have to say sorry and walk away...
For those who have received MSN 8.0 invitations from Microlau, SoftwareMaker or myself, and want to give feedback to the team, you can use the send feedback in the help menu. However, you got to fill in the survey form which is a few pages. Kind of repeatative as soon as you file your second feedback, and I end up just clicking skip skip skip...
Found this url which allows you to just type in ur comments and sent. Hope this will encourage you to give more feedback to the team to improve MSN :)
Recently, I was trying out InfoPath 12 to see if it means my client's requirements, as well as to see how the form server renders it. I was trying to hide a table based on a checkbox's value. Each field in the table was required. Once the table is hidden, i filled in the rest of the fields and save the form. To my surprise and horror, I get validation error for those fields which were hidden! In asp.net, validation won't fire when the required field is hidden!
Lucky for me, I have Microsoft staff, Scott Heim to help me. He explained to me that I have to remove the required attribute from the field for the validation to disappear. Reason being, InfoPath is data centric, hence does not have programmatical access to the controls. The way to manipulate the infopath form is to manipulate the xml node that the fields are bound to.
Learning curve was quite steep for me, as I have a new hat to wear. And just in case you are thinking that I broke a NDA, nope I didn't. I just mentioned InfoPath 12 because I learn all these using InfoPath 12. But this is already through for InfoPath 2003... ;)