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Farewell 2008 you were a good year
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Well the new year is here and with the advent of 2009 comes a barrage of blog posts summarizing each posters 08 year, so I figured rather than review my year I’d simply provide a list of my top 10 achievements for 2008. This thought failed as all of my achievements seemed to be eclipsed by the arrival of my son Thomas. So I thought a simple farewell would be best suited to see out the year past.
2008 you were a good year lot’s of stuff happened some I shall remember vividly and some I shall push to the back of my mind only to resurface when I’m old an senile. You’ve been replaced by 2009 a new fresh year that with it brings opportunity, and a sense of the unknown that stirs up feelings of excitement of what could be.
2008 you shall always be remembered as the year I became a father and for that you can rest assured that you will hold a special place in my memory.
Now onto the New Year!!!
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SkyNet Memorandum
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SkyNet|Systems Memorandum Incoming:
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---BEGIN MESSAGE---
To all Terminator units,
in an effort to better understand our human foe
all terminator models are required take part in
the Human holiday known as Christmas.
Each machine will be assigned a set of decorations
they must use to celebrate this holiday.
If your current processing capacity does not provide
insight on how to use these new items
please refer to Image001.jpg of Henry below.
thank you Henry for your input.
P.S. Decorations are provided in addition
to the annual Kris Cringle organized by SkyNet
you will be receiving your assigned machine ID
by encrypted transfer at 1900 hours
---END OF MESSAGE---------------------------------------------------------
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Imperial Memo
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The Empire would like to inform all active storm troopers that contrary to certain rumors afoot Christmas will continue as scheduled. The Emperor believes that in these overly politically correct times, certain traditions that made the empire great should be kept alive.
With this in mind a new uniform must be adhered to affective immediate, and will remain in effect until Jan 1st 2009
Any trooper found to be in violation of this change of uniform will be asked to report to Lord Vader directly
Any issues with this uniform update should be submitted in writing directly to Lord Vader.
Long Live the EMPIRE!
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Setting portal breadcrumb for your MySite host
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One of the requests I get a lot when setting up a MOSS intranet’s is that the user has a way to link back to the main portal from their MySite, much like the bread crumbs that appear through out the other areas of MOSS
Doing this is actually pretty easy although the settings to do this are hidden by SharePoint. First thing is first log in as your system account, then navigate to the MySite host
Now you’re logged onto the MySite as the system account, which will give you access to the site settings for the MySite Site collection
Under the “Site Collection Administration” group click on the “Portal site connection” link
Now it’s simply a matter of entering your portal URL, and a “Friendly” name that will appear on screen
Click ok to save your changes and Tadaaa! you now have a bread crumb that will navigate you back to your root portal site
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Office DevCon Shenanigans
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This weekend I’ve been in Sydney for Office DevCon, things have been interesting but the conference took a turn for the funny when an unsuspecting attendee made a wrong turn in the car park
The worse thing was that they had just repainted that yellow line and now it’s going to be all scratched up.
Everything turned out ok in the end they managed to get the half flying Honda out with a tip tray truck
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Presenting at Office DevCon
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Looks like my first week of work at my new employer just got busy, in my first week it looks like I’ll be heading up to Sydney to present at the 2008 Office DevCon.
This is a great event that I’ve wanted to get to last year but was unable to,
“Office DevCon is an annual community-driven conference that allows Microsoft Office developers and power users to come together in one location to hear expert speakers present on a wide range of Microsoft Office-related topics.”
As is expected I’ll be presenting some InfoPath based content, for more info including a full agenda check out www.officedevcon.com.au
Now I’m off to see if can track down my Windows 2008 demo image.
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Week one as Dad is over
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Last Thursday I had one of the biggest changes come into my life, little Thomas Frederick Walters. In one week so much has changed, I have a new found affection and sense of pride for Mum who went through so much to get him into this world and also the staff at Frances Perry who put up with us, and finally for my little man Thomas, who so far has showed that he can sleep through anything as long as his tummy is full of milk.
Quick thanks to everyone who sent through well wishes and comments.
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Update
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It’s been a while since I made a post to my blog so I figured it was high time for a quick update.
A lots been happening recently for me first I finished up with my employer of the past 4.5 years SDM, I figured it was time to move on and as of the 5th of November I’ll be starting work at Stargate. This new role looks like a great opportunity I’ll be working with Ed Richard Fellow MVP and MOSSIG board member and now work colleague. We’ll be looking to get the Office Business Applications (OBA) division of Stargate up and running good times ahead.
Keeping me busy until I start this new role is fatherhood, while Junior hasn’t decided to grace us with his presence just yet, he is due today and I’m guessing my dose of sleepless nights and dirty nappies is just around the corner.
So that’s for my quick update I have a little bit of free time on my hands at the moment so I’ll be putting up some more posts very soon, including the code from my portion of the “Forms Processes in Minutes Not Months” demo from Tech Ed 08
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Becoming a Live Search Advocate
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Last night I attended a session at Microsoft Melbourne with Hugh Williams the partner development manager for Live Search at Microsoft. Like most I've always been a Google searcher however after this session I've decided it's time to give live search another go. The first thing that really impressed me was Live's image search, while very similar to Google it has a couple of features that make it a much nicer experience. Also I was astounded by how good Live's video search was, not only does it return you a thumbnail list of results but Live have pre-crawled and pre-compiled a huge number of summary clips. What this means for you is that you can actually hover over the returned result and see a shortened version of the clip to see if it's what your looking for.
The final thing that really amazed me was some of the storage stats around the size of some of their cache data which is to say the least amazing!
So from now on my first point of call for search will be Live, of course if that fails then I'll move back to Google but hopefully I won't have to.
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TechEd Demo Woes
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Last week Sydney was host to TechEd 2008, it also found me struggling with issues in my Windows 2008 MOSS Demo environment, the long and short of my issue was that an InfoPath form that worked quite successfully on my local machine was failing to submit once deployed to the server with a very nondescript error of "There is an unclosed literal string. Line 114, position 778 ".
Now while I didn't find out what was causing the issue under the covers, I did manage to track down a hotfix from Microsoft that was released back in March that directly addressed this issue.
So after a quick registration process and install my demo server was back up and running like a dream.
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Pre-TechEd Post
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So here I sit at Melbourne Airport waiting for both my flight and my work colleague to go to Sydney for a week of TechEd goodness.
The last couple of years I've been fortunate enough to have a presenting spot at TechEd, and while I'm presenting again this year. This will be the first time that I've presented content I've actually written :0S(historically I've re-presented content from TechEd US)
So if you find your awake on Friday morning and have a free slot be sure to check out Form Processes in Minutes not Months.
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Meet my Dragon!
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I received an email this morning from my colleague Chris O'Connor, apparently I have a Dragon named after me.
Nilcraban, the Brutal Dragon
Type: dragon Mp: 2 / 1 Lv: 2 Rarity: special
At: 6 Df: 5 Sp: 5 Element: fire
+[Fire] Death Horn At 8 Mp 2
+[Light] Lighting Flame At 9 Mp 2
Ability:
Nilcraban, the Brutal Dragon ยกเลิก Death Curse
ขณะที่ Nilcraban, the Brutal Dragon ต่อสู้กับ [Water] Nilcraban, the Brutal Dragon At -2
Growth Condition: [Dragon] ธาตุ [Fire] ตั้งแต่ Lv2 ขึ้นไป + [Light]
Skill Growth:
ทิ้งการ์ด 2 ใบในมือผู้ใช้ Skill; ทำลาย Seal ที่กำลังร่าย 1 ใบ (Inf) (At Line) (Mp 4)
Illustator: Sakapop Saobai
Version: Dragonology
Verno: 29
Now for those of you who don't know Nilcraban has been my sign on name for about 5+ years now originally I came across it via a name generator app and is actually meant to represent my name in elvish (based on the elvish language designed JRR Tolkien), and in 5 years this is the first time I've seen it referring to anything else other than me.
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I'm still here!
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Wow just had a look at my blog and it's been nearly 2 months since I posted, were does the time go?
First a quick catch up on what's been happening over the past couple of months
- Been busy with preps for my new son who's due in the next couple of months, currently he's kicking away like a champ and making sure he keeps mum awake all night long :o)
- I've been getting ready for TechEd 2008 which I'm lucky enough to be presenting 2 sessions at this year.
- Due to point 1 I've been attempting to clean out bubs future room in preparation (nearly there!)
- I've been constantly bugging Dare Gallery to try and get furniture (just as an aside if your planning to buy furniture bypass Dare Gallery all together they FAIL!)
- I attended Re-Mix 2008 (At least a month ago now) which was a great session and learnt a lot about Silverlight 2 and also scored a copy of Expression Studio 2.0 WOOT
- Been trying my hand at game development (unsuccessfully so far but I'll keep you posted on this)
More recently I've been seeing a lot of comments from people about my post on creating filtered drop down lists, apparently the code sample I posted did not include the form template, I have updated the code on skydrive and you should find this has been updated now thank you all for your feedback, you can pickup the updated code here
You can also follow up on the full article here
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Windows 7 Currently being announced
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Ryan Block from engadget is currently at the announcement of Windows 7 the successor to Vista, he's doing a blow by blow blog as it happens head on over to http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/27/live-from-d-gates-and-ballmer-debut-windows-7/ to check it out
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Made it to Seattle
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Today I arrived in Seattle for the MVP summit, the trip was a little more exhausting that I would have liked as I didn't get any sleep on the flight from Melbourne to LA, then my connecting flight from LA to Seattle was delayed about 1 hour as we waited for a fuel truck to show up and refill our plane. All up I think I've been up for about 26 hours, but to sit in my hotel with this view it's almost worth it.
Tomorrow it's off to the first day of the summit which should be great, not to mention Seattle has turned on it's best rainy weather for this week so I'll get to experience some winter weather (you know real winter weather not like that mixed up season Melbourne gets :o)
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SharePoint Server 2007 Anonymous Access Gotcha!
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Today for the first time I was attempting to create a SharePoint site with Anonymous Access. As I usually do when attempting to trying something new I fired up my MOSSDEMO image and promptly created a new web application. However after following all the steps to the letter in Inside Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 book I was still being prompted for windows credentials when I attempted to access the site.
After attempting the set up 2 or 3 times it dawned on me, "I was using windows authentication to access the WSS_Content database" so when I hit my site SharePoint was passing through the authorisation request hence resulting in a prompt for windows credentials.
After creating a SharePointSvc account on my SQL server and setting up yet another web application my Anonymous access was up and running. Now to get forms authentication going!
[Update:]
Ok so put some egg on my face turns out my issue had noting to do with using a SQL account my problem was that my Network Service account didn't have access to my WSS Content database, added the service account to my SQL server and Bob's my uncle everything worked a treat.
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Baby is ahead of schedule
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Yesterday we went for the 12 week scan of our little bundle of joy, happy to say everything looks on track. The best thing is that originally we were due around 11th of October but turns out the first scan wasn't as accurate so we've gained a week.
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My Xbox is back online
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Since moving house a week or so ago I've been faced with a dilemma do I connect my Xbox to the Internet via wireless or do I attempt to run a pretty blue cable around the perimeter of the room and hard wire into the router located in my study. Well after some deliberation (and approval from the wife) I decided to get an Xbox 360 wireless adapter. Only problem was once I got home I found I couldn't connect to my router, after an hours worth of "please hold Mr Walters while I check my resources" from customer support I decided to ping out for some help from my fellow MVP's. Luckily Phil Webster came to my rescue, turns out that my Linksys WAG325N will only allow my Xbox 360 Wireless adapter to connect if the router is running the original firmware version of 1.006 (keeping in mind that the current firmware revision is 1.012) so after a quick downgrade of my firmware version I'm now back online!
Just waiting now for Linksys to fix their firmware issues
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Mario Invading Melbourne
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While driving back to the office the other day I snapped everyone's favourite plumber Mario stopping traffic. Seems he's in town for the Game On exhibit at Federation square Which details game development from 1962 through to today,
while I haven't had a chance to check it out yet I'm planning to head down there in the next couple of weeks. I'll be sure to post some more pics once I have them
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Web Service Studio
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Ok so I know that this utility is nothing new but this is something I've found very useful especially when developing with the SharePoint web services. It basically allows you to make calls to a web service and see the returned results (simple I know but very useful)
So why blog about it now? well it used to be when I was out on client site and needed to test a web service I would head over to GotDotNet and pull down the latest copy. Since GDN moved to MSDN I've found this tool near on impossible to track down. So I thought I'll put it up somewhere where I can reliably access rather than wasting time trawling search engines. Also this will hopefully make it a bit easier for others to find enjoy.