My contribution to Google Earth

I'm delighted to announce that my model of the Big Chicken has been accepted into the default buildings layer for Google Earth. Located just outside of Atlanta in Marietta, Georgia, the Big Chicken sits atop a KFC and provides a valuable point of reference for navigating the busy Cobb Parkway corridor ("turn left at the Big Chicken", "if you pass the Big Chicken you've gone too far", "do not taunt the Big Chicken", etc). And now the rest of the world can enjoy the beauty and majesty of this timeless local landmark.

Radiohead on Rhapsody

Hooray! Radiohead's catalog is finally on Rhapsody

OK Computer by Radiohead

Gracie's lolcatz debut

moar funny pictures

Filter connected Web Part using a drop down list in SharePoint

I needed to connect two Web Parts in SharePoint to show the relationship between a list of physical servers and the logical instances on them. Connecting the Web Parts is easy, but SharePoint displays the parent list with radio buttons. All items in the parent list are always displayed, and you filter the child list by clicking the radio button beside the parent item you want. That's fine for a few items, but if you have more than a few parent items (physical servers in my case), then it just doesn't look very good.

What I want to do is put the parent list into a nice, neat drop-down box, but SharePoint doesn't do that out of the box. It took a few days but I figured out how to do it. Here's the end result:

Now when I select a server from the drop down, it refreshes the page and populates the physical server detail (right below the drop down) and the logical server instances list (on the right).

You can't do this through the browser. I used SharePoint Designer to insert Data View Web Parts, basically following the instructions in this video (update: the original video is gone so I've found another one that gives similar instructions) as a starting point. That got my data elements on the page and connected, but the physical server selector is still a list of all the rows. At least it's not radio-buttons anymore, but I want that dropdown box.

To change the server list into a drop down I followed these steps in SharePoint Designer:

• Click on the web part
• Open "Common Data View Tasks" by clicking the little boxed arrow hanging off the right side of the web part
• Click on "Change Layout"

• This takes you to the "Layout" tab of the "Data View Properties". Scroll down through the "HTML view styles" until you see the template that looks like a drop down (it's second to last for me). Select it and click OK.

Now you've got a drop down box. Save the page and open it in a browser. You'll see that the drop down is populated with the list of servers but there's a problem. Selecting a server doesn't do anything. The page doesn't refresh, and the other lists aren't filtered.

To get the drop down to work, I found this page on Microsoft support that describes the code change required. The article says it's for FrontPage 2003, but the solution worked for me using SharePoint Designer for SharePoint 2007 (MOSS, WSS 3).

So it works now, but there is one drawback to this approach. After you make your selection and the page refreshes, the drop down reverts to its default ("Choose One..." is on mine). I haven't figured out a way to have it display the current record after selecting. If anyone finds out, please let me know.

Crowdsourcing address geolocation

Google has just announced a new feature allowing users with Google accounts to edit the location of addresses in Google Maps (presumably this will be rolled into Google Earth at some point too). What this means is that when you search for '123 Main St' and Google shows you the placemark, you can edit the location for that placemark right on the map. You can move it to a more precise location and the next time anyone searches for '123 Main St', the placemark will be displayed where you moved it to - how cool is that?

This is a great way to solve an annoying problem. As I understand it, street addresses are mapped to physical locations (geographic coordinates) using the range of numbers assigned to a block. So even if most addresses on one stretch of road are bunched up on the southern half of the street, mapping programs/sites/GPSs assume that the street numbers are evenly distributed down the length of the road and display them that way. But when you show up at the spot given to you by the mapping site, the place you're looking for isn't there, it's somewhere else down the street.

A lot of times this isn't a big deal because the block may not be that long (so there's not much room for error in the street number anyway) or the place you're going to is large and easy to spot. But frequently (and usually when you're running late), the address won't be where the program thinks it should be. I find this a lot for businesses in strip malls, shopping complexes, or office parks. My own office is a good quarter of a mile from where all the mapping sites place its address.

I'll be editing/correcting places that I know as I'm sure many, many people will do. With a small amount of effort from a lot of people, we'll get our maps as accurate as possible. Oh, and Google will have some extremely valuable geolocation information that Navteq and TeleAtlas would give anything to have...

I think I'm in love

Could it get any better than this? I don't think so

SharePoint Issues list disappearing comment

I had a stressful 15 minutes yesterday. I had set up a new list in SharePoint to help our back-office manage sets of transactions they'll be manually processing over the next couple of weeks. I started from the pre-made Issues list since it had most of the data columns I needed already. I added a few text fields and a few drop boxes pre-populated with values. I tested it out with some data they would actually be using and gave a quick training session on the tool. I repeatedly recommended that they work from the Datasheet view, since that look the most like the Excel spreadsheet they're used to working in.

The next day, the team started using the list. About 30 minutes into it, a user sent me an email saying that the text she was entering into the Comment field seemed to be disappearing. Uh oh. I quickly jumped into the list, assigned a few rows to myself, and started playing around with values to see if I could get the comment to disappear. I entered data into the row (in Datasheet view), and arrowed down to the next row to save. No disappearing text. I went back to one of the status fields on that row and changed a value from Y to N, then arrowed down to the next row. Poof - the text in the Comment field disappeared. WTF?

The answer, of course, is that the Comment column in the Issues list has preset behavior. They way you're supposed to use it is to enter a comment for that record describing the update you just made to the record. So when you make a change, SharePoint helpfully clears that field out for you so you can leave your current comment. The old comment is not lost though. SharePoint also archives the comment with the record - which you can see if you look at the record in detail view. Since I had everyone working in Datasheet view, I didn't see that the comments were being archived with a date/time stamp.

Since the comment was archived, I told everyone to stop working for a minute while I created a new column to hold their data. I copied the existing comments into the new column, and for the one's that had been auto-archived, went into the detail view and then cut-pasted those also into the new column. Then I hid the old Comment field from view so no one would accidentally use it again. Problem solved. Hopefully if anyone's googling this issue, this will help them.