The New Facebook To Change Social Network Behavior

After the hype of Google Plus that aims to battle with the most used social networking service worldwide, Facebook is here again launching its new UI design and features that surely will take another leap in the social networking world.

There's the News Feed that kinda scrap out the Most Recent and Top Stories links to give Facebook users their own decisions to mark what is more important news for them.

The ticker that is located on the right side corner of your home page gets you updated with what your friends are doing 24/7 and which you can easily interact on the fly.

And finally the Facebook Timeline that highlights every story you want to share since your existence through a UI rich experience is a winner. Though it hasn't totally rolled up yet since only limited developers can only view each other's timeline, TechCrunch shows how to enable Facebook Timeline right this second.

Meanwhile, I have been so more into Google Plus and Twitter lately, but because of this updates that Facebook is offering, I cannot totally ignore it. For me, it is really cool sharing and keeping in touch with friends now because of more interactions and a lot of fun exploring around.

Philippines Official Gazette Launched

Finally, the criticized government website, Gov.ph, have been renewed and improved using Wordpress Platform. It is recalled that weeks after PNoy took his inauguration, the government website still have former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo on it and was subject to hacking.

Now, as simple and elegant it is, here is a glimpse of the new Gov.ph site..
Besides this Philippines website, there are also other government websites that I used and wished to be improved.

1. SSS - I have experienced a lot of abnormalities on this website even just trying to login. Most of the time, its down or it has system error.
2. DFA - I was trying to find the e-Passport System but link is broken and shows exception.

I just hope they update not only the websites mentioned. There are 302 out of 324 national government agencies that has their own websites. Technology is very helpful because it frees us from a lot of hassles but its also important to do updates all the time especially on the taxes, new policies or any information, so as not to confuse the Filipino users.

Restoring a VSS Server to another server

Easy steps I have taken in restoring an old VSS server to a new VSS server. (Thanks to the wizards :P)

1. Open your Visual SourceSafe Admin and locate your old VSS server.
2. Go to Archive menu tab and click on Archive Projects. A wizard appears asking you to choose the projects to be archived. Name your file (*.ssa) and place the file to a location where you can access later on.
3. Once archiving is successful, open the new VSS server.
4. Go back to Archive menu tab but this time click Restore Projects. A wizard then appears and it will prompt you to locate the *.ssa file you save on Step 2.
5. A dialog box will appear once the restoration is successful.

That's all, folks!!

PMP Time

It's the time of the year where we assess our previous year's work and at the same time provide goals for future tasks and projects.

The way we do it
Rate ourselves to the given criteria from 1-4 (1-Unacceptable 2-Need Improvement 3-Good 4-Outstanding)
Defend why we have come up with that rating
Identify strengths and weaknesses
Plot development plans for the year
Issues and Concerns

I din't really put emphasis on the rating part, actually I just summarized it like all ratings were at the good rating because I believe I've been a good employee to them abiding with company processes and policies, having delivered the tasks and projects and performed my duties and responsibilities.

I was more into the issues and concerns, this is as follows:
(I've raised this not only for my own sake, but also, for the team)

Certification Allowances

We do have allowances for MCP, MCAD, et al. And still we are asking for an additional allowance that includes MCTS certification since we've been developing our projects in .NET framework 2.0.

But a phased-out certifications policy is currently being studied,

Certification that may not be needed over time shall be removed from the tiers table. There shall be no compensations for phased-out certifications and titles.

My stand is that we are still handling projects under 1.1 .NET Framework and ASP classic so we still want the old allowance retained. The point is -- could we make that as an accumulative incentive or should there be other alternatives?

-Reminds me of this line-
"Professionals are not born. They are certified..." And phased-out?!?

Incentives for projects
We are given this because we are developing a project on a tight schedule that would require us to work on weekends or even on holidays. It will be per phase/stage of the project. Hoping the policy would be clear as to when is effective and how will the process be.

Laptops
We've raised this recently for mobility purposes. Since we are having a tight schedule on the project, why not have laptops so that if we needed to work on tough scheds, we could easily work even at home.

========================================
Smart decisions comes in when you're relaxed.

Job Activity

USE msdb ;
GO

EXEC dbo.sp_help_jobactivity
{ [ @job_id = ] job_id | [ @job_name = ] 'job_name' }
[ , [ @session_id = ] session_id ]

GO

==========================================================

To check the status of the sql job depending on the id or job name or session id that you will provide. You should be a member of the sysadmin to be able to execute this stored procedure.

Done.

File Transfer under Admin Account

Now time to transfer my files from old HDD to the new one.

As so you know, my old HDD is on XP and had a few user accounts and of course, the important files I have, was kept in the Administrator account. Little did I know, it would cause me some delay on the process.

Initially my old HDD was set as a slave and when I tried copying the files from the Administrator account, I always receive an error "Access Denied".

So, I immediately set my old HDD as master so that I could boot up and manually configure the user accounts. But it fails, and fails for another try and it always kept me on this options:

Safe Mode
Safe Mode with Networking
Last Known Good Configuration
Start Windows Normally

Now I'm in trouble. I'm left with two other options.
1. Look for some other PCs that would match my hard disk. Or
2. Do some thingy on the folder rights.

I did swear I din't wanna have other accounts anymore but thanks to WinXPTutor's XP Resources for giving me the enlightenment. I never thought things would go such easy. I need not look for someone that has the same match with my old HDD. I just had to do some configurations on the folders need to be transferred/copied. Actually there are a lot of resources from the net about this. Now, I can finally move on. :P

Vector Art By Rye

May napagdiskitahan na naman si Pareng Rye ..

Ang ganda... sana wala na lang yung model.

Ay ako pala yun! hehe..

Tanx Rye, more to come.. :P

You might wanna try this tutorial. Here is a final image from the tutorial.

AJAX ListSearchExtender

I haven't really explored much on AJAX. Hindi naman siya ganun kabago kasi nakagamit na ko sa previous project. Pero syempre minsan, kung ano lang ang kinakailangang gamitin noon ang nasasaklaw ko. Besides, there will always room for everything :D And today, we have unleashed another cool feature about it. Its ListSearchExtender control. This is much the same with the autocomplete, predicting a word or phrase that the user wants to type in without the user actually typing it in completely. The only difference is, the ListSearchExtender lets you search an item in your Listbox and DropdownList too. As you click on your controls (dropdown/listbox), you will be prompted with a message to 'Type a word', something like that. And there you would have easy selection..

Thanks for this, bosing.. takot... This is located on your AjaxControlToolkit tab on the toolbox. You might not have added yet, right click to your toolbox and add a tab and choose items. Browse into your AjaxControlToolkit component. And then, add the items..

More about AJAX

Sequential Workflow for Sharepoint WSS 3.0

Make sure you install WSSWorkflowStarterKitB2.msi first.

Procedures:
1. Click Visual Studio New Project then select WSS Sequential Workflow Project
2. Give the project a name
3. Once the project has been created, double-click the Workflow1.cs file from the Solution Explorer to show the workflow that was automatically created
4. Add Tab from toolbox and choose items to be placed on this box
5. Drag LogToHistoryListActivity and apply changes on properties//From the toolbox drag a CreateTask activity, a OnTaskChanged activity, a Code activity, and a DeleteTask activity in sequence to the design surface
6. Sign a strong key name, to do this:
(a) Right Click Project and Click Properties
(b) Go to Signing Tab then create a new strong name key, you can either password protect it or not
7. Modify the Feature.xml to Deploy the Workflow
8. Go to feature.xml and insert snippet WSS workflow then feature.xml code
(a) Right click on this page and select "Insert Snippet"
(or press Ctrl+K, then X)
(b) Select Snippets->Windows SharePoint Services Workflow->Feature.xml Code -->
Create GUID by going to Tools
(i) Select Tools->Create GUID from the Visual Studio menu.
(ii) Verify that the Create GUID application has the Radio button for Registry Format (ie. {xxxxxxxx-xxxx … xxxx }) selected.
(iii) Click the Copy button in the Create GUID application.
(iv) Switch back to Visual Studio and the Feature.xml file.
(v) Strip the leading and closing braces from the GUID that was pasted in.

9. Then Go to workflow.xml and do the same steps
Addition to procedures:
(i) We need to get the correct assembly name
(ii) Retrieve the full strong name string we need from Lutz Roeder’s .NET Reflector.
(iii) Replace value of CodeBesideAssembly with the version..
===========OR===========
(a) Next open a Visual Studio 2005 command prompt. This can be done by selecting it from the Start menu. The entry is located under Visual Studio 2005->Visual Studio Tools and is named Visual Studio 2005 Command Prompt.
(b) Navigate to the directory where the project DLL is created. In our example I created the solution in C:\Work\Development\grades. The debug DLL is created under bin\debug by default so the command to change to the correct directory is 'CD \work\Development\grades\bin\debug'.
(c) Type the command 'SN –T Grades.DLL.' SN responds with the public key token for the file as shown in Figure 8.
(d) Right-click in the window and select Mark.
(e) Click and drag across the public key token. When you're done let up the mouse and press Enter.
(f) Switch back to Visual Studio and to the workflow.xml tab.
(g) Select the green highlighted publicKeyToken text and then press Ctrl-V to paste the public key token.
(h) One final edit for the CodeBesideAssembly attribute is to change the version number from 1.0.0.0 to 3.0.0.0.
(i) Delete the AssociationUrl, InstantiationUrl, ModificationUrl, and StatusUrl attributes because the Grades project doesn't implement any of these features.
(j) Delete the whole MetaData node and the modification element under it because the Grades workflow doesn't implement a workflow modification either.

Schemas value from Properties box is located here (C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\XML\wss.xsd)
Click Install.bat
The first search and replace is for MyFeature and replace it with what you want to name your feature
The second search and replace is for http://localhost with the name of your server.
Include REM on (stsadm -o activatefeature -filename HelloWorkflow\feature.xml -url http://localhost)

Save all settings..

Right Click on Project Then Properties
Go to build Events Tab
Add the ff to Post-build event command line
cd $(ProjectDir)
Install.bat

Build the project and make sure Install.bat was runned successfully..

You can now activate your workflow. Go to Home site collection features. You should see your deployed Workflow. Click Activate.

SHAREPOINT CONFIGURATION
Go to your Document Library Settings
Under Permissions and Management Section look for your workflow settings
Click Add a workflow and you would see your workflow on the Select a workflow template field. Select it.
Type a unique name
Then you could configure your workflow to start upon newly added document.
Then click OK.

SHAREPOINT WORKFLOW TESTING
Add a new document.
On your document library, you will a new column which matches the association name you provided when you associated the workflow with the list.
It has the status of your workflow.

See also:
DevX
MSDN

Sharepoint Three State Workflow is Disabled

There is a section for WORKFLOW STATES with DROPDOWN menus for this:
- Choice field
- Initial State
- Middle State
- Final State



Problem: This is disabled.

I'm not sure if this is the best solution but I tried this and it worked:
- Create a column on your document library.


- Select column type to Choice (menu to choose from)
- Supply the choices and other information.
- Click OK if done.



Now go on to your workflow settings and check WORKFLOW STATES section should be enabled right now. The choices you have entered previously would appear on these states.



Hope it'd help. :P

Check this post too.