Finally got my Japanese drivers' license

It felt like it took forever but I finally got Japanesed drivers' license on Monday. I finally passed on my third try - boy these guys are picky, picky, picky...

Nice step-by-step for Outlook passwords

I found this one today and I was digging through Outlook 2007 password prompt issues for someone at work: http://www.petri.co.il/save-your-exchange-password-in-microsoft-outlook-2003-or-2007.htm

Odd ball error on SharePoint

I've come across a very odd error with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) that I just can't figure out. On line searching is leading me around in circles.

With MOSS 2007, there is a default search page, _layouts/OSSSearchResults.aspx and you just paste in that URL into the Simple Search web part or the Advanced Search web part. The first page of results will display just fine using either web part. However, the "next page" link fails for the Advanced Web Part.

When you use the Simple Search web part, you get a long URL:

/_layouts/OSSSearchResults.aspx?k=test&cs=This%20Site&u=http....

K = the info you put into simple search
CS = scope for the search

When you hit next, the JavaScript appends more stuff to the URL and off you go - no problems at all.

/_layouts/OSSSearchResults.aspx?k=test&cs=This%20Site&u=http....&start1=11

The advanced search does not format a long URL. When you hit Next, you get a blank page. I have been looking through everything I can find about this web part and I have gotten nothing out of it. It seems that 90% of developers out there roll their own search web parts instead of use Microsoft's. Even on the office.microsoft.com search, the top articles are how to make your own.

Come on... can't I just used the built in one?

Crackberry withdrawl...

I didn't actually have a Blackbery, I had an HTC Windows Mobile phone, but I have to say good-bye to being connected to my work e-mail 24x7 for the first time in years. The phone is over two years old - almost three - so I guess it is time for some hardware issues to crop up. I can't figure out if it is related to the sliding keyboard or something internal to the phone but it turned off when bumped. Wedging the battery in place didn't work, either so it is off to the repair shop.

Though, it may not be. Our main office recently selected the iPhone as our default corporate phone - right before the global down turn frozen everyone's budget. So, there is a chance I will get something totally different, instead. In Japan, the iPhone is still restricted to a single carrier (SoftBank) and they are still charging a little extra for the iPhone data plan. That makes it a lot harder to justify it as a business expense.

You can buy 100% legal, unlocked iPhones from the Hong Kong Apple Store, as long as you have it shipped to a location in Hong Kong. We have sales guys traveling to Hong Kong all the time... very, very tempting...

Switched my commute around

This week, I decided to change the way I get to work. Instead of taking the Yurikamome (ゆりかもめ) I am taking the regular subway, connecting through the Yurakucho/Hibiya (有楽町&日比谷) stations.

It made me realize how well-connected the Tokyo area actually is. I have three different ways to get to work that get me there about the same time plus a couple of alternates that are little slower. I have a half dozen different ways of getting to work that do not involve a single car. Coming from Seattle, that is kind of a shock. I suppose that Seattle is getting better, and I know that Seattle is smaller, but still...

Week numbers

My current company has an interesting method for coordinating work: they assign week numbers as the targets and deadlines. Instead of saying "finish Phase X by April 15th" they will say "finish Phase X by week 15". I hadn't encountered that in an American company before so it struck me as odd.

We did have some fun this year, though. The ISO standard for week numbering did not match the USA formatting for week numbers so we had a little be of conflict this week.

Training in Nagoya

I took a bullet train(shinkansen - 新幹線) trip this morning to Nagoya(名古屋)run an afternoon of training classes today. The trip was about 2 hours and my E-Mobile wireless network card kept the connection almost the whole way. It only dropped connection in the tunnels and smoothly reconnected on the other side. Very impressive, really. Even though I'm zipping along at 200mph, the cellular card handled everything.

Japanese Drivers License

I took a half day off today and a half day off last week to take care of getting a Japanese drivers license. When you are a permanent resident, you can only use an International Permit for your first year. After that, you have to get a Japanese drivers license.

If you are from Europe, Australia, Hong Kong, or another half-dozen countries, this is a simple paperwork process. Those lucky people do not have to take any tests. Americans do have to take a written and practical driving test, though. Based on what I could research on the Internet, this is because drivers licenses are issued by the states and not the federal government so Japan cannot create a single, unified rule for all American drivers licenses. Americans still have a paperwork process to go through, though. You have to get your driver’s license translated at the Japan Automobile Federation (JAF) and then bring that, your foreigner registration card (外国人登録証明書 gaikokujin tōroku shōmeisho), a new photo, and passport to your local office. They will take the paperwork, give you a quick eye-test, give you the written test, and get you an appointment for the driving test.

The written test is ultra, ultra simple. It was a ten question, true or false test and you were allowed to miss two questions. The questions were so easy that you would have to be very tired not to get a perfect score.

The practical test is a lot tougher. Very few people who take the test pass on the first time because the inspectors are extremely picky. If you search on the expat sites about driver’s licenses, you will find a lot of people complaining about the practical test. You have to drive letter perfect and with exaggerated care in order to pass. There is a wiki site for the Ehime driver’s test that recommends that you actually vocalize your safety checks (Mirror OK! No one left, no one right, OK!, etc.) That might be a little overkill, I suppose, but it does get you past the test.

I took my test this morning but managed to fail it. The car needed a lot more brake than I was used to so I overshot a stop line early in the test and that was an automatic fail. Today was not really a fun morning… Oh well, I try again in two weeks.

A little humor for the morning

This is funny for anyone who's traveled in Japan or China. Though, to be fair, the quality of English signs in Japan is a lot better than it was 10 or 15 years ago. I assume that Japanese marketers advertisers got tired of being teased about it and spent more time on translations. Quality of English signs in China is pretty bad, though. From talking to the people from China at the office, everyone thinks that since there are fewer English speakers in China, it is harder to get a proofreader.

One year - exact

February 15th is my exact one year anniversary of arriving in Japan, according to the date stamped in my passport. This year has gone past pretty dang fast but I guess that isn't too surprising considering how many things have changed.

My next major challenge is filing my American taxes. I've decided not to do them myself after I started to read IRS Publication 54 which is 40+ pages long and insanely complicated. Just trying to figure out the "physical presence" rules was confusing. Maybe I can go back to doing them myself next year or the year after but not this year.

I found a tax accountant in Hawaii that specializes in providing tax services for people living in Japan. He was well recommended in expat community websites here in Japan. We'll see how it turns out.

Almost the one year mark

In less than two weeks, I will hit the one year anniversary of my arrival in Japan. It seems to have been a very fast year. My first day in the office was the 25th of Febuary but I got to Japan about two weeks in advance. I think I'll arrange some sort of party, celebration, or something. Japan is a pretty good place for a fancy night out...

Microsoft finally made this a part of Exchange

Exchange 2007 finally has the ability to add a custom footer or a disclaimer on all outgoing e-mails as a native part of Exchange. No more fumbling around with odd VBScripts, registry hacks, and third party tools. The Daniel Petri site at http://www.petri.co.il/transport-rules-adding-a-disclaimer.htm has a good explanation. I like the warnings at the bottom about that are basically "this will affect everyone, test it first"...

Winter hasn't been too bad

We're on the "backside" of our first full winter in Tokyo and it hasn't been too bad. Tokyo is warmer than Seattle, overall, but you spend far more time outside in the cold so it feels much colder. The majority of December and January have had a high of roughly 10 degrees Celcius so in the high 40's or low 50's with low temperature dipping into the 3o's. We probably had less than six days of below-freezing low temperatures. But, since I actually walk 15 minutes in the morning to the train station vs. starting the car in the garage and driving to work, Tokyo seems cold.

We didn't get any snow in Tokyo itself and only had a handful of rainy days - probably the biggest difference between Tokyo and Seattle. The vast majority of the winter is sunny. Last week, we had four days of gray and drizzly weather and we had a couple of scattered rainy days but it seemed always sunny.

Still alive...

I'm slipping on my new year's resolution to post more often. Things have gotten a little busy at work so I suppose I have an excuse, even if it is a lame excuse. I've been working on a whole bunch of training material for SharePoint and WebEx and I've started using the Camtasia Studio software to put together Flash demo clips. My company bought Version 5 in a bulk license deal of soome sort. There apears to be a newer version available but we haven't purchased that.

It has been a long time since I had to do a lot of video work but Camtasia is a lot better than any of the tools I used previously. You can drop in clips and different resolutions, glue them together, do a voice over, and then spit out the video in whatever format and size you want. For Flash video, you can have it create the clickable chapter headings on the left, build the web page, and output it straight to FTP if you want.

There might be better tools - and Camtasia is kind of expensive - but this makes it easy...

Happy New Year!

明けましておめでとうございます。今年もよろしくお願い致します。

It’s been a while since I uploaded any new posts – almost two months. I will try to do a little better than that in the next couple of months.

New Years was relatively tame for us – no big trips or vacations. Chiho’s brother came up to visit us and Chiho’s parents and we sat around and ate a lot of food. Also, we watched a lot of television. The Japanese TV studios show a lot of once-a-year specials right before and right after New Years and they can be a lot of fun. Our cable service comes with a DVR so we can skip all the extra commercials they throw in there too...

Heading back to Japan

I'm sitting at Vancouver airport in the Air Canada business class lounge waiting for my flight back to Tokyo. I really lucked out on weather this week, dry and mostly sunny the whole time. It's raining at a solid, seady downpour at the moment but I really don't have to care about that since I'm inside.

Noon must be a popular departure time for Air Canada because the lounge is packed. I know this isn't all for my plane since buisness class isn't that big. Since I wasn't sure about the traffic and the boarder, I got here quite early. It gave me a chance to catch up on work related stuff.

It was a fun break and I had a chance to meet everyone. Not sure when my next trip is but hopefully not too long from now.

PowerShell profiles

Powershell has one oddity that is both useful but somewhat wierd. when you first launch PowerShell, it looks for "profile scripts" and if they are found, they are launched automatically. That's useful, but the location and filename of this setup script is hard-coded and fixed. The script located at [All Users]\[All Users Documents]\WindowsPowerShell\Microsoft.PowerShell_Profile.PS1 and [Current User]\[My Documents]\WindowsPowerShell\Microsoft.PowerShell_Profile.PS1 are run. This allows you to pre-load and preconfigure a variety of stuff, which is nice. Why they are in a hard coded place under My Documents with such a long name, I don't know.

As a side note, PowerShell will only run digitally signed scripts so you might need change that setting to create scripts of your own. You should probably just make an internal CA for signing scripts, though.

Another interesting thing is the transcript function. The transcript will record to text file all of the contents of the shell window. Whatever you type and whatever is reported to the screen will be recorded. I think that is very useful, so I've come up with a profile script that will start the transcript automatically. Of course, that's a lot of text files, so I have the script clean that up for me, too.

Here is my script, colored and highlighted by PowerGUI (an open source PowerShell tool). I may have to experiment with the formatting to get it work correctly in the blog screen.

[string]$TimeStamp= get-date -uformat "%Y-%m-%d at %H%M%S"
$MaxAge = New-TimeSpan -days 7
$LaunchTime = Get-Date
$MyDocsPath = Get-ItemProperty "HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders"
$TranscriptFolder = $MyDocsPath.Personal + "\WindowsPowerShell"
[string]$TranscriptPath = $MyDocsPath.Personal + "\WindowsPowerShell\" + $TimeStamp + " Transcript.txt"
[string]$LaunchPath = $MyDocsPath.Personal + "\Script Experiments"
start-transcript $TranscriptPath
get-childitem -Path $TranscriptFolder -Filter *.txt | where { ($LaunchTime - $_.CreationTime ) -gt $MaxAge } | Remove-Item
cd $LaunchPath

The $TimeStamp variable is a date time formatted YYYYMMDD at HHDDSS so that the transcript that gets created has a unique, useful name.

The $MaxAge is how long I want to keep the transcripts. Date comparisions in PowerShell work completely differently than VBScript so you have to create a new date-time object for comparisons. It took a lot of experiments to get that working the way I wanted it to.

I read the location of My Documents from registry. I picked the registry so that I can be sure to grab the path of a relocated My Documents folder. I haven't tested this with a network-relocated My Documents folder, yet. One thing about reading the registry from PowerShell, you grab the key (the folder), then you retrive each value as a property. So, you'll notice that I grab the "Shell Folders" as $MyDocsPath and then get the value for the entry "Personal" by requesting the $MyDocsPath.Personal value. That is definately different than VBScript.

The $LaunchPath variable is just where I happen to keep my scripts, you would need to change this or delete this to match your preferences.

The script than purges any *Transcript.txt files that are older than the max age variable, starts the transcript for the current session, and changes the current directory to what I put into the $LaunchPath variable.

Let me know what you think...

Back in Seattle...

...well, Anacortes at least.

Flew in from Las Vegas to Vancouver BC and then rented a car to drive down to Washington. Amazingly, there was only one car in front of me in line at the border. For all intents and purposes, I only waited one minute (maybe two) for a border crossing on a Friday. That's never happened before.

Airport wireless

I'm sitting in Las Vegas airport and they offer free wireless throughout the terminal. The Vancouver BC airport offers free wireless, too, and it got me thinking - why do so many airports only have as a paid service? With DSL costs and equipment costs dropping all of the time, I have a hard time understanding why an airport can't provide it. If you were to take one of the satelite terminals at Sea-Tac as an example, I think you could cover that with two Cisco 1200 series access points with high gain antennas. Add a NetScreen or WatchGuard firewall and a DSL line, you could support 200+ users. Upfront costs would be about $3,000 (probably less), monthly costs for the connection would run less than a $100 per month, and warrantee support would cost less than $300 per year.

Isn't that a small investment for traveler convenience?

ILM from Microsft

I attended a session on Identity Lifecycle Management(ILM) for SharePoint and we walked through the process of configuring ILM and it is a pretty complicated system. Unfortunately, this is a mission critical service for my current company that controls everything about Active Directory. I wonder if I should be trying to learn that system or if I should stick with Exchange and SharePoint...