I noticed some interesting, and in my case not desirable behaviour when I was exporting the results from a SharePoint survey to Excel: the order of the questions in Excel differed from the order in SharePoint.

Some further analysis showed the following:
When you export to Excel, the order is determined by the creation time of a question, so the questions that were create first appear before the others. This even happens after you reordered your questions in your survey, which was what I did.

To give an example:
I create a survey with 3 questions in the order 1,2,3:

I then reorder them to 3,1,2:

If I export them now to Excel, the order of the columns however is still 1,2,3:

So in case you need to export to Excel and don't want to reorder your columns there afterwards, make sure you got the order right when you create your survey questions.

I updated my iPhone yesterday to OS 3.0, no problems so far, the whole process went very smooth. First I had to update iTunes to 8.2, afterwards it asked me immediately if I want to update the iPhone. The download took a short while (my internet connection at home has been a bit slow sometimes in the past few weeks), the updating itself was done within a few minutes.

 All settings were kept, all programs that I started so far are running without any problem, and even my open tabs in Safari were still open

I haven't tested most of the new features yet, saw no need to send a MMS yet, e.g.

Since last night 1AM Singapore time, Apple's 3.0 update for the iPhone OS is available. While I haven't updated it yet (I was asleep, and after waking up went to work ), others already tried it successfully.

An overview of the newest features and a guide on how to install the update can be found on Apple's website.

Also, there's an interesting article that explains "How To Use The Best 40 Features of iPhone 3.0".

I discovered that my blog entries could not be found in the various search engines (Google, Microsoft Bing, Yahoo), however the main blog site could be.

In the Lifetype forums (my blog software) I learned that under certain circumstances the person/bot/client/etc accessing a blog entry gets redirected through the error page (error.php), which will send a 404 Error (file not found) first and then redirect to the corresponding correct location (or at least deliver the content).

This means: everyone was able to access the blog entries here without any problem, however in the background they always showed up as non-existant to the browser/other software. Thus, the search engines didn't crawl any further and treated the links to the individual blog entries as dead links.

I changed the URL generation method from custom url to apache mod_rewrite, which basically changes all the individual urls for the blog entries, but the benefit now is that all pages appear now as existant!

So dear search engine bots, please come again and reindex the blog :)

As it can be seen in the Tripit info-box on the left-hand side, I plan to travel quite a lot in the next few months, all possible thanks to budget airlines, and the financial crisis (which resulted in a drop in passenger numbers for most airlines, so that they offer some relatively cheap flights).

The first trip will be 4 days to Haikou (海口) in the Hainan province in Southern China, I'll travel alone. Flight is operated by Tiger Airways.

One month later, in August, I'll go to Taiwan for 10 days, flight in and out will be to/from Taipei (台北) with Singapore Airlines. This time, I'll most likely travel with a few people, definite number not confirmed yet. The current plan is to travel around more or less the whole of Taiwan via car.

The last trip in September is to Guangzhou (广州) in the Guangdong province. Yes, that's the Guangzhou I've already been to in January 2008. The one where I saw my first real panda(s) and hugged the white tiger!
I'll go there with my company's intern. Initially we planned to go for 2 days only, but after we booked the flights with Tiger Airways, they changed the return flight shortly after, so that we will now come back to Singapore on Monday instead of Sunday.

One other trip might still come up, however not for holiday, but for work. That will be to Bangkok, Thailand, but the date isn't confirmed yet.

I was just testing Microsoft's newest search site, Bing. One of the first things people usually are looking for is themselves, and so did I. But the search for 'rene modery' did return one relatively weird search result. The second site Bing suggested is my blog here, however it gave it a weird title:

A rough translation of 'Das Kilo von Rene Zum Abspecken' for all non-German speakers:  "The Kilo Of Rene For Slimming"

What The...? I have no idea how they come to that title?! I never ever wrote about losing weight/slimming, and my recent blog posts were about the swine flu, tax, the iPhone, SharePoint, and Singapore.

Today, I received the letter from the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore (IRAS) with my tax assessment. However, I wasn't expecting them to state that I don't have to pay any tax, they stated for tax payable $0.00

I checked with our HR manager, and we found out that she had transmitted my salary information to IRS under my old Foreign Identification Number (FIN), whereas I filed my taxes under my new (current) one. So basically, IRAS was not aware of any income for my new FIN, only for my old one.

I called IRAS, and luckily the officer was able to help me immediately, they're going to merge my 2 accounts and send me a new letter with the (hopefully) correct tax I have to pay.

The swine flu has reached Singapore, as just reported:

 SINGAPORE has confirmed its first case of Influenza A (H1N1), the Health Ministry said on Wednesday.
The patient is a 22 year-old Singaporean woman who was in New York from May 14 to 24. She arrived back in Singapore from New York on SQ25 on Tuesday at 6.30 am.

She began to develop a cough while onboard. She passed the thermal scanner uneventfully as she did not have fever then. Later in the morning, she consulted a GP who decided to send her to TTSH via a 993 ambulance, given her travel history. She was immediately admitted for testing.

Laboratory confirmation of her infection was made at midnight on Tuesday. The patient is currently being treated at the Communicable Disease Centre at Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH) and is in stable condition.

http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Singapore/Story/STIStory_382278.html

Recently, I wanted to display some small statistics about how often people participated in the discussions in a SharePoint discussion board. I wanted to show the total number of postings in a small web part. The solution for this requires SharePoint Designer, as it makes use of the Data View Web Part.

I'll show the steps to display the list of people who participated in a discussion board and their total number of postings from the beginning:
First, I create a new blank site and add a discussion board:

I open the site in SharePoint Designer and add a Data View Web Part into the right web part zone. In the Data Source Library to the right, I select the discussion board, and then Show Data:

Right now, only the discussion topics are contained in the rows returned, but not all postings. To change this, click on the name of your Data Source, in my case Discussion Board:

In the following dialog, select RecursiveAll under Item and folder scope:

Next, select Created By (if wanted also additional fields), and choose Insert Selected Fields as.... Multiple Item View. The Data View Web Part is now populated with the selected fields.


In the Data View Web Part, select Sort and Group from its menu:

Sort by Created By, and select Show group header and Collapse group by default:

You will get something similar to the left part of the following image:

I then removed the unnecessary parts as seen in the image above, and added a new column for the number of postings. 


Click inside the cell underneath Postings, and in the source code add the following line into it:

<xsl:value-of select="count($nodeset)" />

Next we need to change the query fetching the rows. Find the following line 

<xsl:with-param name="nodeset" select="msxsl:node-set($dvt_Rows)/root//Row[((@Author)=$groupheader0 or ((not(@Author) or @Author='') and $groupheader0=' '))]" />

and replace it with 

      <xsl:with-param name="nodeset" select="msxsl:node-set($dvt_Rows)/root//Row[substring-before(substring-after(string(@Author),'userdisp.aspx?ID='),'&quot;')=substring-before(substring-after(string($groupheader0),'userdisp.aspx?ID='),'&quot;')]" />

That's it, the result will look like this:

The drawback at the moment here is that it doesn't sort by the number of Postings, which I haven't found out (yet) how to do. 

Displaying a textual preview of an wiki's article in SharePoint is quite easy. All one needs to do is create a data view web part with SharePoint Designer (free since April 1) and have it display the field 'Wiki Contents' from the wiki's pages library. Now the contents of this field contain all the HTML markup of the article, which we now need to strip of the tags and also reduce in size.

In order to strip the 'Wiki Contents' of the HTML markup, we need to apply XSLT. In the xsl:stylesheet section of the data view web part, add the following template:

<xsl:template name="strip-tags">
  <xsl:param name="text"/>
  <xsl:choose>
    <xsl:when test="contains($text, '<')">
     <xsl:value-of select="substring-before($text, '<')"/>
     <xsl:call-template name="strip-tags">
      <xsl:with-param name="text" select="substring-after($text, '>')"/>
     </xsl:call-template>
    </xsl:when>
    <xsl:otherwise>
     <xsl:value-of select="$text"/>
    </xsl:otherwise>
  </xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>

Afterwards, find <xsl:value-of select="@WikiField" /> and replace it with the following

<xsl:call-template name="strip-tags">
  <xsl:with-param name="text" select="concat(substring(@WikiField,1,800),
        substring-before(substring(@WikiField,801,850),' '))"/>
</xsl:call-template> <a href="{@LinkFilenameNoMenu}" mce_href="{@LinkFilenameNoMenu}">....(more)</a>

This calls the template above with a part of the wiki article's content (replace 800, 801, and 850 accordingly if you want to show more/less) and adds a link to it add the end. The concetanation here is to avoid having a word cut off by adding text add the end of the first substring until the first space is encountered.

The result looks like this:

HungryGoWhere.com is one of Singapore's most famous food guides. It's community-driven, meaning that users can rate and review restaurants etc., and comment on other people's reviews. The restaurants are categorised according to their offers, and further information like e.g. phone number, address, etc. is provided.
The corresponding iPhone application offers several neat features, that integrate directly with the website.

Start Screen 1




Start Screen 2

 Finding a place to eat can be done through two ways: either searching directly with a keyword, and if wanted, a location, or searching places nearby (the applications makes use of the iPhone's GPS to determine the current location)

Keyword Search



Places nearby

Results are listed with the name of the restaurant, the approximate distance to it, the location, the price range, and the average rating of other people.

Results

Selecting a place gives a more detailed overview with all the necessary information (opening times, location, detailed information about ratings). Very neat is also the integration with the maps, which allows one to see one's current location and the location of the selected food outlet.

Details 1




Details 2



Map

Lastly, it is possible to bookmark one's favourites. However, one has to register at the HungryGoWhere.com website first.

Bookmarks

Every morning on my way to work, I read the morning news while on the MRT/bus. My preferred sources for local news are the Straits Times and Channel NewsAsia, both for which an application for the iPhone exists (Note: there's also an application for Today called iToday, however I never read Today, and thus haven't tested this application; also, I have two other applications (Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal) installed which I use for other news).

Straits Times
The Straits Times application downloads the latest news during startup. These news are grouped into different categories (Singapore, SE Asia, Asia, etc.) and an aggregated view with the top stories of each category. The news preview displays the time when it was posted, the headline, and (if available) a small image. Within an article, that image and the article's text are displayed. However, it has to be noted that, like with the online version, for some articles not the whole text is available (only in the printed version).

Startup screen



 
Top Stories
 



Article view

Channel NewsAsia
The CNA application downloads the news online on-demand and not all during startup. Similar to the Straits Times app, it groups the news into different categories, and for each article it displays the time, the headline, and a picture.

Startup screen




Category view




Select more categories




Article view

After a long long time, I'm finally going diving again. Tomorrow evening I'll leave Singapore and go to the Perhentian Islands, Sunday to Monday night I'll be back in Singapore.

Tonight, I'll have my refreshment course, to relearn how to use the equipment etc.