Windows 7 on a Dell Mini 9

So I jumped ship off Jaunty yesterday morning with build 7600 (RTM!) of Windows 7.  The install was smooth using a bootable USB drive and isn’t really worth describing in detail here.

In general, nearly everything seems to have worked right off the bat.  Video, sound, network – everything is up and stable.  Immediately I was surprised at how clear the fonts and general rendering are in Win7 (far more clear and precise than in Ubuntu).

A few issues have presented themselves:

• The Synaptics touchpad wasn’t recognized but installing the Vista drivers seemed to do the trick.
• 3 devices are listed as unrecognized in the Device Manager (two “Base System Devices” and one “Unknown device”). Good to see that the help on getting devices working has improved since Win95… :(  This doesn’t seem to have any meaningful impact but I’ll update if/when I figure out what they are.
• I’ve been reading a lot about how fast Win7’s boot times would be but that hasn’t played out.  Where Ubuntu was loading in sub-30 seconds Win7 is at least double that. Interestingly, it does appear that the boot up process is freezing just before showing the login screen but there is nothing in the event log to explain this.
• While Sleep mode generally works, in one case this morning it caused the computer to reboot.  The event viewer – as informative as always – says there was an “unexpected system shutdown”.  Thanks.

What I’ll miss from Ubuntu:

• Gnome Do: a simple, clean application that just helps you do things and gets out of the way.
• Tomboy: absolutely fantastic for taking notes in meetings (which is the primary use of my netbook). I’m switching to OneNote for now but I miss it already.
• Ubuntu Netbook Remix: it really was a nice metaphor for dealing with a cramped space and small screen.  Maximus in particular.  Win7 can be customised to use as much of the screen as possible so it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
• Snappiness.  This isn’t exactly a fair comparison since I’m running Win7 with all of the Aero on.  Of course, if I wasn’t running the Aero chrome I’d be using WinXP so maybe it is fair.  Either way, Ubuntu seemed to just zip along a little more smoothly than Win7 which tends to freeze and hiccup.
• Nerd factor: there’s something that just gets me juiced about Linux.  Win7 is pretty new and running it pre-RTM release date tweaks my inner geek enough to make this worthwhile.

On the other hand, being back in the warm embrace of Windows does carry some benefit.  A simple example is being able to run Firefox 3.5.  It’s been weeks since it was released and it still isn’t available through the core repositories for Ubuntu.  Yes, I know I could hack it in but why the hell should I have to?

Windows Media Player is another thing I’m happy about. I’m not a big fan of it one way or the other but frankly, it just works.  I can play music off my file server.  I don’t have to open configuration files in VI.  Thanks but that’s good enough for me.

Finally, I certainly won’t miss the constant stream of update patches that had unintended consequences without any supporting documentation (support for 802.1X, I’m looking at you).  You can fault Microsoft for many things but their patch release management and documentation is absolutely top notch.

Anyhow, so here we are back in Windows.  I still need to find some webcam software but otherwise I should now be into stable daily use.  I’ll write some further thoughts as I get the chance to test this over the long term going forward.

Page Numbers in SSRS

So I just spent 30 minutes trying to get a page number on the bottom of a report I’m building in SSRS.  30 minutes for a feature that I get in a button-click in virtually every other application that I have installed on my computer.

The adventure starts with this TechNet article that seems to indicate that this is all simple to do:

Adding a Page Number to a Header or Footer

Footers commonly display a page number. To display a page number in the header or footer of a report, create a text box in the footer and add the following expression:

=Globals.PageNumber & " of " & Globals.TotalPages

Ok, let’s do that.  Sounds straightforward enough.  Oh wait… then I get this:

The Value expression for the textbox ‘textbox1’ refers to the global variable PageNumber or TotalPages.  These global variables can be used only in the page header and page footer.

What the hell?  Ok, let’s do some Googling (which reminds me, I love that “To Google” is now a valid part of the English language… what a world).  This lead me to a few different forum and blog posts.  All of these seemed to indicate that I had to write backend code to make this work.  Stupidly, I thought “sure, why not? It seems totally reasonable that I should have to write custom code to get PAGE NUMBERS ON A REPORT”.

I realize I don’t get to write code that often anymore, never mind writing a report.  So I’m a little rusty.  But am I so rusty that I’ve forgotten my core lesson that “if it seems too complicated you probably screwed up”?

Thankfully writing this blog rant reminded me of that fact midway through this and I thought “alright, it’s gotta be me, not the tool”.  Of course, as always, foolishness usually lies with the user of the tool not the tool itself.  Suffice it to say there’s a BIG difference between a table footer and a page footer.  Whoops.

In my defence, adding a page number in Word (or anything like it) is about as simple as can be.  Given that SSRS is meant to simplify the creation of reports, why is it so hard to do trivial tasks?  Ok, I’m exaggerating, it wasn’t that hard.  But it’s always fair to blame the tool, right?

Web 2.0 & SharePoint

Last week, I went with a co-worker to a seminar at Microsoft on social computing with SharePoint. It was an interesting discussion with some very smart people.  A few of the central themes were:

1. There are effectively two hierarchies that exist in every organization: a formal one and an informal one. The formal hierarchy is defined by reporting relationships and is generally well documented. It is also mostly useless. The informal hierarchy is the unwritten relationships that exist between people and forms the basis for how things actually get done. It is the reason why someone who is 4 levels down in the formal hierarchy is actually the most important person in the organization. This hierarchy is terribly served by IT.
2. The tools that we use to collaborate and communicate with all introduce varying levels of social friction that ultimately impair the activity itself.
3. There is an untold amount of tacit knowledge contained in people’s heads and that is flowed in discussions around the water cooler but is not captured or codified. This knowledge tends to disappear when staff leaves or when time erases our memories.

Successful social computing initiatives (i.e. Facebook, Twitter) seem to work because they manage to lower the social friction and distance between people.  And while the average person is using these tools more and more in their personal lives there is a great vacuum in their professional lives because “Corporate IT” has not kept pace.  A great example is the basic fact that the internet looks and works so well and intranets look like high school computer science projects.

SharePoint is a great tool for helping people to collaborate around documents but its “social computing” features (i.e. the My Sites) are still quite primitive.  SharePoint 2010 may bring new tools to the table but ultimately the issues to be resolved are cultural, not technological.

Over the next few months I will be spending considerable effort on attempting to solve some of the social friction problems that exist at my organisation.  How can we collaborate better?  How can we capture tacit information?  How do we capture ideas from the broader community and distil them into action?

Moving to MOSS 2007

Recently my company has undertaken a project with an aim of accomplishing 3 different objectives:

1. Redesign our corporate intranet.
2. Improve office collaboration, document management, and workflow.
3. Implement a new framework for application delivery.

The project began several months ago in an informal way but has recently built up steam and turned into a "real" project. Through a series of events which are beyond the scope of what I'm writing here we've ending up heading down the path to MOSS2007 (or Microsoft Office SharePoint Services for the uninitiated).

What amazes me about the product is the sheer size of it. The documentation alone is jaw dropping. I'm looking at an architecture and planning guide that weighs in at over 600 pages! And that's only part 1 of 2! It's incredible that you can spend years working in and with technology only to be infantilized once again with the latest release of big blob X from company Y every couple of years. Progress... you gotta love it.

Nevertheless, I will say that I do believe in the portal concept. The idea that we have to go to too many places to get the information that we need. The idea that when we go to all these places we often end up being bombarded by far more information than we can process. I'd like to change this, in my small way, by making this project succeed.

So it's off to MOSS we go, where this will stop, nobody knows!