Scott Hanselman

I downloaded and installed Office 2007 Beta 2 and I'm on freaking Mars. I'm totally lost. Everything's changed, it's like someone broke into my office and moved everything.

Good stuff:

• Office 2003 Hot keys and Menu keys work - I typed Alt-T|O to get to Tools|Options and got a nice tool-top letting me know that I was on the right track. (see image)
• One you accept that everything's be moved, you can find most stuff in two clicks. For example, I always want to select cells in Excel then "Zoom to Selection." Now I click View and there's a big "Zoom to Selection" button.
• Hotkeys Galore - Just press Alt and you'll get subtle, but obvious overlaid hotkeys on all the actionable things. Now you can more easily string together Hotkey Streetfighter Combos like "Alt-V,Z,T" enter for "Zoom to Text Width" in Word. (see image)
• Awesome tooltips - Giant help for nearly every thing you could hover over.
• Live Preview - Finally something for my Pentium 4 with 2 gigs of RAM to do. This rocks.
• New Outlook - The new Outlook is better in a number of subtle ways.
• Calendar - Much softer, easier to look at and better use of space.
• The To-Do Bar is brilliant, showing me what's coming up no matter where I am.
• Much better category support (see image)
• RSS Support in Outlook ala Newsgator -

Weird stuff:

• The installer said it would uninstall Office 2003, and it didn't. I ended up in a weird side-by-side place where I could run everything but Outlook 2003. So, I ran the Office 2003 uninstaller. Mistake #1. That boogered up Office 2007 - however, when I ran 2007 again, the MSI installer repaired all of Office 2007's stuff automatically (albeit slowly) and I was back in business.
• The new Office Button - I'm used to double-clicking on the upper left corner of the window and closing the application.
• Good luck with your Outlook Add-ins, nearly all mine totally freaked out and are now disabled.
• Right click on the Status Bar in any application and tell me what the checkboxes on the left mean versus the "On|Off" on the right. Now ask your non-technical spouse. (see image)
• Word Documents that have extensive existing styles don't get those styles respected in the "Quick Style Set" ribbon bar. Instead a default set of themed styles are suggested. This could cause one with a rich existing set of styles to shoot themselves in the foot. They could fill the "Quick Style Gallery" with lots of manual right-clicking though then save the "set." It'd have been nice to have a better way to specify existing styles en masse as a set.
• The mini-toolbar that pops up as you select text is great for simple docs, but promotes bad habits (not using styles) in larger documents.

Very weird stuff:

• Outlook 2007 Beta 2 registers itself as a system-wide handler for the feed:// protocol, a 'protocol' that the IE7/RSS Team disagrees with and has decided against supporting. I'll post about this oddity separately.

All in all stability of Beta 2 is iffy (I've crashed 6 times in 60 minutes and got a "not implemented" dialog four times) but I'm VERY excited about the possibilties of this new User Interface style and what it means for the future.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I've blogged before about my love for the Logitech io2 pen and there's an article on their SDK on Coding4Fun.

The Logitech Software is slick and their SDK is fantastic, but I've always thought something was missing. Writing on blank paper, taking notes and such is neat, but what if...

Recently we sold our Condo and Mike, my very cool Real Estate agent, used his Tablet PC for all the paperwork. He showed up at the condo with no actual paper, just a Toshiba Tablet and a bunch of TIFs. All of us, buyer and seller, did all the work via email and tablet. (Mike's very progressive.)

How does this relate to the io2 pen?

There's a company called Talario that has a product called XPaper. For the technical, here's how it works:

• You want a form filled out, signed, etc, with ink. You also want to send PDFs around and archive the papers digitally without scanning.
• You get some Anoto-enabled paper from Talario. This paper is uniquely numbered like a guid or ip address. Each page is unique to the stack. The paper includes the Anoto dot pattern that the io2 pen can see.
• You print from any program to the "XPaper printer" on your PC. This is a 'fake printer' that will ask you via a dialog box what number your stack of paper started with. Then it just routes to your physical printer driver while saving a digital copy on the computer for later.
• You get a print out on this special paper of your document.
• You write on it with the io2 pen, whatever. Mike could have brought the pen and the paper to the meeting.
• Later he docks the pen with his computer and the digital ink from his pen is reunited with the digital copy saved earlier and turned into a PDF that includes both the original document and the digital ink lined up perfectly.

You print, ink, then dock and you get digital ink versions of your printouts. It works very well and is written entirely in .NET.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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"A Repair Install is not foolproof and should not be considered the cure-all fix for non-boot situations." says an XP Repair FAQ. This is true.

If you've got a spot on your carpet, should you rip up the floor and lay new carpet?

I updated the wife's computer's network drivers yesterday and got this lovely error on reboot:

Blah blah Systemroot/system32/config/Software is either missing, corrupt or has an error.

You'd think they'd know if it were missing or not. ;) I thought seriously about doing reinstall/repair install, but then thought there might be a simpler, less drastic solution.

I held down F8 and tried "Last Known Good Configuration" and that didn't work. I also couldn't get into the system via Safe Mode, but I could get into the Recovery Console. The Last Known Good and Safe Mode not working (via my gut) told me that there was probably a disk corruption error around the area of the registry file, rather than a corrupt hive.

From within the console I changed directories down to system32/config and saw that SOFTWARE (the Registry Hive) was in fact there, and was of a reasonable size for this simple machine (about 26 megs). I ran chkdsk /p (it's /p, not /f, inside the Recovery Console) and it found and fixed errors. Rebooted and was were back in business.

(Had this not worked, the next step would have been a purchase of ERD Commander)

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Here's a clever service from the makers of 43 Folders (a favorite getting things done site), it's http://www.thanksno.com.

It's a friendly one page site that you would send to that friend, family member, or co-worker who sends you chain letters, jokes, pictures, videos, or other crap.

I think it's a pretty clever idea. I'm not sure what Miss Manners would think about it, but it feels reasonable from a netiquette point of view.

I seem to remember a number of other "one page sites" that were basically brochures presenting one point of view or the other.

Here's the few I remember:

• Web Standards - A tasteful (used to be) page that you could redirect your users to, gently prodding them to download a decent browser. (A recent "standards-based redesign" now causes retinal damage. Be warned.)
• Feed Icons - One page and a lot of images promoting the new standard icon for representing feeds. DasBlog uses these now.
• Common Errors in English - I'm stretching here, as this is an index into many pages, but this is (to me) the definitive colloquial english site, highlighting common errors. I've sent this link to a few well meaning writers. I've also sent the link to myself at least a dozen times.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I'm going to be posting a number of book reviews this week as I used a chunk of the weekend while Z slept to catch up on my reading. Some'll be technical, some not.

I've just finished a haunting book called kindred by the amazing and prolific Octavia Butler. This is the 25th anniversary edition from 2004 - this book was written in 1979.

The premise is that Dana, a modern Black woman, is called back to the early 19th century to save the life of a white ancestor. In the present her husband is White and at one point is pulled back with her. The dynamics of their relationship change dramatically as it is assumed that she is a recently enslaved freewoman from the North travelling with her owner (in fact her husband.)

Their relationship is tested as they are forced to live dramatically different lives. Most painfully to watch is how quickly and believably they slip into their expected roles, that of slave and slave owner. As an interracial couple they've typically swept awareness of their differing ethnicities under the rug, but those differences and associated race memories are pulled to the forefront when the extraordinary circumstances drag on.

There are sadly few books to compare this to, although the language has similar texture to that found in The Intuitionist. (Another racial allegory that I recommend, using science fiction and alternate reality to explore difficult questions.)

I would suggest this book to nearly anyone, but especially young people over 15-16 of any race, as long as a parent, mentor or book group that is well-versed in the time period can help some of the deeper nuances. I really would have enjoyed teaching this book at the high-school level either for Social Studies, History or English Literature. I took a number of Black Studies classes in college, did some teaching/tutoring, and looked into the PSU Black Studies major when computers found me. Perhaps one day I will teach again.

This is a fantastically powerful book and well worth the read. My next Octavia Bulter book will be Dawn.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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