Love OneNote 2007! But not an Outlook Journal replacement.

Sep 242006

Don’t be surprised to hear me say I love OneNote 2007. I was never a big fan of OneNote 2003 because of the fact that ink felt like an afterthought. But I am really digging 2007. Great improvements and it looks and feels a lot more polished.

I never really saw TEO and OneNote as competitors although sometimes the way you see it isn’t the way things really are. You see, people have a finite amount of money they’re willing to spend on their Tablet PC and accessories and they have a finite number of uses for it. Some people may find OneNote to be a suitable organizer for them and some may insist on keeping their stuff in Outlook. In this way, they are competitors.

However, I see it another way. I use TEO and Outlook for things like calendar, tasks, contacts, etc which is what it was designed for. I take basic notes attached to the Outlook item itself because it’s easier to find this way and one less step. I also like more structured notes when I’m logging a phone call or meeting. TEO and Outlook Journal give me that.

But where OneNote really shines is when I use it as a bucket for information scraps that could come from anywhere. I’ve been reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done and he emphasizes getting your obligations out of your head and into a system. OneNote works very well for that and new in 2007, it makes it much easier to go from an unstructured note on a page to a tracked Outlook task. Another utility that is indispensible when using OneNote is SnagIt because both the virtual printer and the Send To OneNote IE plugin produce horrible looking pages, IMHO. But SnagIt is always at the top of just about every software workflow I have.

For longer-term projects, Outlook falls apart. But OneNote lets me keep a section called Jobs for example where I can throw any interesting job opportunities (yeah, more on that later). I have a section called Houses where I am storing information that I come across related to buying a new house, getting a mortgage, property taxes in North Carolina, etc. This would all be very difficult to keep organized in Outlook because it is so unstructured. If I have a specific “to-do“, that gets tracked in Outlook, not OneNote. But OneNote is great for those “maybe somedays“ or brainstorms.

So I definitely see TEO and OneNote as complementary. TEO will never be as full featured for general purpose note-taking as OneNote, but OneNote will never be as structured and organized as Outlook.

Once Bitten, Thrice Shy – A Sad Vista Tale

Sep 162006

Warning – This story does not have a happy ending so don’t read this whole thing if you’re looking for a heartwarming story or a solution to your corrupt Vista installation. I’m just writing this lengthy post so that search engines will index it effectively so that others with similar problems have some type of comfort and don’t waste too much time.

I shouldn’t be going into this much detail here because I am extremely busy reinstalling all my apps AGAIN. You see, in the last 7 days or so, I have had to format and reinstall Vista RC1 3 times. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as easy as installing, finding out it didn’t work, then installing again. No this really sucked. Here’s what happened.

First, on my Tablet PC

As I may have mentioned before, I recently bought a Gateway CX2724 Convertible Notebook (fancy word for Tablet PC without the all the negative press). This was before Vista RC1 so I didn’t bother installing the current CTP because I knew RC1 was right around the corner. I figured I’d set up all my apps and then do an upgrade install. Oh if only I was so lucky. Unfortunately the upgrade option was disabled. Vista didn’t tell me WHY… but I was trying to upgrade XP Tablet to Vista Ultimate which is supposedly supported. I bit the bullet and did the full install. A full install and setup of all my apps is a multi-day process for me. Not exactly a good argument in my anti-Web 2.0 war, but it is what it is.

Next, on my desktop

This was on a different machine so it doesn’t exactly represent a failed install from the previous attempt, but I still consider the previous attempt unnecessary work since I should have been able to do an upgrade.

Anyhow, I did a fresh install on my desktop and everything was working great. I installed all my apps which as I said is a multi-day process. Once this was done, I happily used Vista for a day or two with no issues. Did something that required a reboot, but I don’t remember what it was. I might have just done it for the hell of it, I forget. But the point is, it was nothing serious. The Vista boot screen came up, then a black “desktop” with the Vista build number in the lower right hand corner and a mouse cursor in the center of the screen…. and nothing else. Left this overnight figuring something would “time out” and Vista would be back to the desktop. The next morning, it was in the same state. Several reboots resulted in the same, occasionally one would produce a BSOD for Win32k.sys. Oh boy, I’m screwed. Safe mode, VGA mode, last known good, etc. Nothing fixed it. Tried every system recovery option from the installation cd too.

Tried system restore (had to do this from the installation cd since I couldn’t boot) and after trying several restore points, I finally found one that worked but it was the one right before one of the first apps I installed – SnagIt. Wow what a waste because this returned my system into pretty much a freshly installed state. I figured at this point since I had system restored back so far, it was worth just formatting and reinstalling anyway. So that’s what I did.

Desktop Attempt #2

I assumed the problem before was caused by the SnagIt Virtual Printer since that’s the only “systemey” type thing that SnagIt does that could conceivably cause the system to fail to boot properly. So I figured I would install this last. That way, if it caused the problem again, I could restore to right before it and not undo all my hard work installing everything else. So that’s what I did. After another 2 days of installing and setting up, I took the plunge and installed SnagIt. However, I realized I installed the wrong version so I uninstalled it and installed the correct version. This is the only “weird” thing that occurred. Rebooted and sure enough, got the same black screen. Good! I had reproduced the error. Time to undo it with system restore. Success! I was back into Windows.

So I reinstalled SnagIt this time without the printer driver and rebooted to make sure everything was good and everything was fine. Now, I can’t say 100% that the printer driver was the problem because the other difference is that I did one install this time, not an install-uninstall-install sequence.

So everything is going good, Office Beta 2 Tech Refresh is released, and all my apps are installed including SnagIt which is working fine. This is the point where I should have listened to Vista and did a full system backup! Of course I didn’t have an external drive and I didn’t really feel like feeding it 20 DVD’s so I put it off.

I saw an ad for a Wacom Graphire Tablet on Best Buy’s web site and drove over to buy it. Came home, plugged it in, found that it worked like a mouse, but not like a Tablet PC. Went and got the HID drivers from Wacom’s site and installed. Had to reboot. You already know what comes next. The alternating BSOD and no logon screen issue. Ugh. Get out the Vista install CD and go to System Restore. I try to restore to before the point where I installed the Wacom tablet and after the “finalizing system restore” message I get an error that System Restore didn’t complete because of an unspecified error. OH NO. This is bad because I know from my past experience that system restore was the ONLY thing that got me up and running.

Having now spent over 6 days between my tablet, and the two installs on my desktop, I was determined not to let this install go to shit. I started to do some heavy duty stuff. I’m gonna type it all out in detail so that hopefully it gets indexed well on Google for the next poor sucker this happens to:

  • First I tried to RDP. Hm that’s interesting. RDP isn’t answering at all.
  • I opened my Tablet PC which was working fine and opened the Computer Management console and connected to the desktop. Even though there was no logon screen and it appeared to be hung at boot, all of the system services appeared to be up and running. I didn’t make a list unfortunately, but nothing screamed out at me. (I would later find out that terminal services was not running.)
  • I connected to the file shares to make sure my data was safe (it was).
  • I turned on remote registry and opened up the registry from the tablet. I did a quick eyeball scan of the run keys and the service keys to make sure nothing looked out of wack on the desktop. It looked fine. Also checked in the winlogon key and the LSA key. Everything matched up.

I got the stupid idea that maybe if I removed the password on my one-and-only user account on the desktop, Vista would just bypass the login screen anyway and just log me right in. This was the dumbest thing that I did because when I did this, I kicked in a policy that users without passwords can’t do network logins. So now I couldn’t use computer management remotely, or regedit, or file shares, or anything. Totally totally stupid.

What I did was boot back to the installation media’s recovery console. In Vista, when you boot to the installation media, it actually loads a slimmed down Windows Vista. So it has regedit and a command prompt. The problem with regedit though is that it is editing the mini Vista’s registry, not your installed Vista. So I had to use the Load Hive feature to load up the HKLM sections of the registry that I was interested in. Did some more checking and found nothing obvious that I could fix.

I used the recovery console to rename the Wacom drivers and my graphics drivers (ATI Radeon) because I had noticed in the Vista newsgroups that others were experiencing this and most of them seemed to have Radeon-based video cards. Nothing worked at all. I spent about 8 hours (and 3 Stacker 2′s with Ephedra) trying to get it up and running.

So then in a last ditch effort which I knew was almost certain to screw things up beyond repair, I installed Vista on another partition to have a working installation to access the registry and file system and I would use its drivers in the old installation’s driver directory. While I was booted into the new installation I looked at the event log on the old system (did you know you can do this? Just browse to %SystemRoot%\Windows\system32\winevt\Logs and double click the event log files) to see if I could see anything suspicious.

Well I saw the problem. An event log from source LSM that said something along the lines of “Terminal Services failed to start due to a catastrophic error.” No additional information, no other logs. This explains why RDP wasn’t working earlier when all the other network services were. I’m not sure why terminal services would prevent the logon screen from happening. To experiment, I disabled Terminal Services on the working Vista install and rebooted. No problems with the login screen. Weird. I compared the terminal services registry keys on both the working and non working installations and although I spotted several differences, it was pointless anyway because I couldn’t make changes to the keys, even though they were on a non-active system and I tried to take ownership of the keys. At this point I knew all hope was lost.

So now I’m at it again

Were you expecting a happy ending? No, I gave up and reinstalled Vista again. “But WHY?” you may ask. “Haven’t you taken enough punishment?? Just go back to XP!” Nah I can’t. There’s nothing really revolutionary about Vista. I mean it’s not supposed to be. It’s an operating system. But I’ve gotten used to it and I really like it. And when it’s working, it works really really well. And I should mention that I’ve had no problems on my Tablet PC.

However, I accept and understand that Vista is still highly unstable. Don’t write me saying “I haven’t had a problem, it’s very stable for me.” Being unstable doesn’t necessarily mean it’s guaranteed to cause you problems. But it’s very fragile apparently. And when a problem does occur, it’s nearly impossible to recover from. Vista is like a big St. Bernard. It’ll go for a real long time being happy and licking your face, but if you put a little antifreeze in its bowl, it’s just gonna drop dead. What the fuck? I must be really tired. Who the hell is even reading this far down?

Lessons learned

Needless to say, I went back to Best Buy and returned the Wacom tablet. I’m sure it’s a great device but it doesn’t work right with Vista and I am not interested in waiting around for it to work. I exchanged it for an external hard drive and now I am doing the whole god damned process all over again.

But this time, I am doing a full computer backup after every major install. I’m rebooting after every product that I install. And I’m making sure system restore is catalogging every step of the way. Once I get my system to a “final” state with all my apps and settings the way I like it, I will do another full computer and document backup. I will do incremental backups of my files every day and every week I will back up my system. I promise.

I really hope you’re not here because you’re experiencing this. If so, I really feel for you and get that gun out of your mouth. It’ll be ok.

Spam on Handango Sucks

Sep 052006

This is driving me nuts. TEO, while still relatively new on Handango, would be on the front page when sorted by Best Selling if it wasn’t for a bunch of off-topic and obviously “spam” listings that have bumped it off the first page. (52 nice fonts, betting exchange ebook trading method, language learning, web site conversion secrets, etc…)

I have a feeling whoever is selling these listings (such as “web site conversion secrets”) is buying his own stuff in order to maintain a best seller status. Can something be done about this? It’s dilluting the worth of Handango’s Tablet PC software listing.

SNAG-20060905-191356

Time Zones Suck

Sep 052006

Do you want Time Zone support in System.DateTime? No, you don’t. Trust me. Every now and then I come across a blog posting or article about how Microsoft is investigating ways to extend System.DateTime to meet customer demand for time zone support. Basically, customers are asking Microsoft to make System.DateTime be able to represent a given date/time and UTC offset. This is bad for a number of reasons, but the biggest reason is that time zones SUCK!

Maybe you remember my quest to eliminate all of the evil that time zones have inflicted on me by converting my life to UTC while the world around me continued ignorantly using Eastern Standard Time? Well that didn’t go over too well because interacting with other people was just too difficult. Fortunately, computers don’t have that problem. If you follow these simple rules, you can live a happy pain-free coexistence with DateTime.

  • Never, ever, ever store a DateTime in its local time. By storing all DateTimes in UTC, you guarantee that you can always accurately convert it to any time zone quickly and issues such as daylight savings crossovers and politics won’t cause issues. (Tip, use GETUTCDATE() in MSSQL and DateTime.UtcNow in .NET)
  • Never transfer DateTimes over the network in local time. Always use UTC because you don’t want to get into a situation where your application’s architecture won’t scale geographically because it expects the client and server to be in the same time zone.
  • Only use local times in the user interface when presenting a DateTime to a human or accepting a DateTime as input from a human. When you read the time, assume it is local time zone (unless your UI has a mechanism for specifying the time zone like Outlook finally does) and then promptly convert it to UTC using DateTime.ToUniversalTime() for storage or transport. When you’re displaying a DateTime from the database for a human to read in a report or window, use DateTime.ToLocalTime().
  • Note that I haven’t mentioned the DateTimeKind enumeration. I find this extension to DateTime to be completely unnecessary. If you followed the above rules, then there is no need to tell whether a date is local or utc. Also, DateTimeKind is a total hack and does not protect you from making multiple calls to ToLocalTime() or ToUniversalTime() which will keep offsetting the date. If you follow the rules above, there is no need to protect against this.

So does this mean I think .NET is completely sufficient when it comes to dates and times? Not by a long shot. But I don’t think the DateTime structure itself needs to be modified. In fact, I think it’s the TimeZone class that needs to be enhanced. Here’s what I’d like to see added to TimeZone.

  • static TimeZone[] TimeZone.GetAllTimeZones()
  • static TimeZone TimeZone.FromName(string name)
  • string TimeZone.Rfc822Name { get; }
  • string DateTime.ToRfc822String(TimeZone tz)
  • DateTime DateTime.FromRfc822String(string rfc822String)

Currently, only the local time zone is supported by the TimeZone class. I would like to see all the same time zones in the Windows registry (as seen in the date/time control panel applet) supported. Second in my list is a way to get a TimeZone from a name such as “Eastern Standard Time” or “EST”. This way you could parse out the time zone or UTC offset often found in internet email messages (see RFC 822). Third on my list is basically the reverse of #2, that is, the ability to get the standard name for the time zone. Fourth on the list is the ability to convert a DateTime to a localized time zone for an internet message. But if you follow my recommendations at the beginning of this post, you should be sending all your dates as UTC!! Finally, the ability for DateTime to parse a RFC 822 date header. The return value would always be in UTC, but unlike the current implementation, it wouldn’t ignore the offset. So if the date was: Thu, 31 Aug 2006 06:23:59 -0400, then it would be parsed as a UTC DateTime with the value 8/31/2006 10:23:59.

So anyway, what I’m basically saying is leave DateTime alone and fix TimeZone. :)