Kaisa's blog

I found this test over at a Martin Bekkelund, a former collegue's, blog (all in Norwegian).

How geek am I?

Martin is only 43% geek. I'm not sure if it's a good or bad thing to have a higher score than him, but I feel pretty confident the test is true enough.

My blogging has been embarassingly sporadic. The second half of 2007 was crazy, I spent a lot of time working on a fairly big BI project as well as trying to pass Microsoft exam 70-445 (TS: Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence – Implementation and Maintenance). I also went on a 2 day training course on MEC, Microsoft Enterprise Cube. I've implemented PerformancePoint Monitoring Server a couple of times, even enabled it for Kerberos authentication. (Should write a post on that.)

But the biggest stress factor, as well as happiness factor, the last half year was to sell our old flat and buy a new and bigger one! Even though the estate market isn't as problematic as in the USA, we decided to sell first and buy afterwards. Our flat was on the market for about 2 months, which felt like forever... But in the beginning of December we sold it, just a bit under the asking price. The first weekend in January 2008 we went to see 10 appartments on sale and bought the first we visited... It sits on the ground floor, has 1 more room than our old one and a better floor plan. AND it has a terrace and a garage.

As soon as we'd signed the papers, we started furniture shopping. We wanted to throw out our sofa and lounge chairs and get a new bed and a fridge. New bed was easy, I wanted a Tempur bed. We visited a show room where we could try different Tempur beds and Bernt agreed that this was the way to go.

Then there was the fridge. We were kind of looking for a side-by-side fridge, but knew that the freezer part of these fridges might be a bit small. We found a really smart one from LG, with double (French) doors on the upper section and a freezer drawer in the bottom. Our fridge isn't as full as this picture. Yet.

When we'd settled for a bed and a fridge, we started looking for a sofa. I'd visited a rather nice and swanky furniture shop a few months earlier, and brought Bernt around to see if there were any sofas we liked there. Off course there was. We found a really nice Rolf Benz sofa. None of us have that much knowledge of fancy furniture brands, but this seems to be more like an Audi than a Volkswagen. After some though and visiting other furniture shops without finding any other sofas that we liked, we decided to go for the Rolf Benz Dono. Ours is dark brown with walnut railing and the right leg is longer and has one more pillow. It's awsome! Because our whole flat has white painted walls, it doesn't look too dark.

But the BEST part of moving house, was a coincidence that happened last week. A friend of our's sister has a really old cat, and she needed to give it a new home. And miracle over miracles, Bernt decided that we could take him in. I've wanted a cat since before we started dating, but he hasn't been too keen on the idea. I came home from a visit to my grandparents, and there Bernt was on the new sofa with an old cat in his lap. This cat is around 20 years old, has about 4 teeth, has blue eyes and mostly white fur (bit gray on top of his head and end of tail) and is very, very talkative! And cuddly. And shedding fur like mad. And I'm really fond of him. :) He loves being outside and to cuddle, or cuddle outside.

More pictures of The Cat will be posted at http://blogs.spipp.net/photos/kaisa/category1024.aspx

For the next 2 days, I'm attending a training course at Microsoft UK (Chertsey office). Off course, all their keyboards are with English key setup, which lacks 3 letters (æøå), and also has the different symbols in very weird positions compared to a Norwegian keyboard setup. But hey, as long as you're using Windows, you can change your language settings fairly easily to your own keyboard setup. So now I have all 29 letters, and the symbols like ( )'- are in the "right" place.  

Now, as long as I don't look at the keyboard while typing, I'm good to go.

One of the first things I did starting at Avanade, was to create a blog there. It's at http://blog.avanadeadvisor.com/blogs/kaisal/default.aspx

But for some silly reason, I can't get the cross posting to work. Avanade is running the same edition of Community Server as I do. Other Avanauts have gotten it to work. But me? Nah. I can cross post from my Avanade-blog to my spipp.net blog, but not the other way. Weird.

Update: The mystery is solved. I started checking the error logs in Community Server. Turns out that our ISA server is blocking all outgoing traffic. Off course I knew that, but I didn't remember it when I started setting up cross posting. So that means no cross posting, no track backs and no ping backs. Well, I won't end up spamming anything then.

I found a link to the "Which Transformer Are You Quiz" at fellow AvaNaut Bryant Likes' blog.

I AM
79%
OPTIMUS PRIME
Take the Transformers Quiz

That's pretty cool!

And for those who don't know who this Optimus guy is, here's the description from Funflip:

Optimus Prime is the heroic leader of the Autobots. He is the personification of courage, strength, and integrity. His personal motto is that “Freedom is the right of all sentient beings.”

Like Optimus Prime, you are good by nature. But beware because mischievous thoughts sometimes tempt you. You are inspiring, confident, and a natural leader. The Autobots have chosen well. In addition, you enjoy being one step ahead of your friends as far as trends and technology.

Yesterday I ran into a small problem with adding parameters in a report's URL. All parameters were based on MDX queries. One parameter was for time, and the parameter usually looks like this "[Time].[YMWD].[Month].&[4]&[2007]". When I did a drillthrough directly with "Jump to report", the parameters were sent without problems, even with MDX syntax. When I did "Jump to URL" and added a javascript, the part with "&[4]&[2007]" stopped the report from rendering.

Error message:
The path of the item '/MyReport,[4],[2007]' is not valid. The full path must be less than 260 characters long; other restrictions apply. If the report server is in native mode, the path must start with slash. (rsInvalidItemPath) Get Online Help

After searching a bit, I found a white paper at TechNet called "Implementing Smart Reports with the Microsoft Business Intelligence Platform" by Teo Lachev. The article looked promising until I got to the part about "Implementing Drillthrough Navigation":

"Initially, I was planning to demonstrate the Jump to URL option which gives more flexibility to construct the URL link. For example, assuming that you have an embedded function that sets the reportLink variable to contain the URL address of the Daily Product Sales report, the following URL navigation action would open the report in a new window and resize the window.

"javascript:void(window.open('" & reportLink & "','_blank',
 'location=no,toolbar=no,left=100,top=100,height=600,width=800'))"

The problem with URL navigation and OLAP reports is that the parameter values would typically contain ampersand (&), e.g. "[Dato].[Time Index].&[200312]". This presents an issue with the URL addressability option because the Report Server interprets & as a query parameter placeholder.

Even escaping the parameter value (JavaScript escape function or using %26 for &) doesn’t help because Internet Explorer automatically unescapes the value. If someone discovers a workaround for using special characters and URL addressability, please let me know."

Fortunately, Nilesh Unadkat here at Avanade was better at figuring out what to search for than me, and pointed me to this discussion:

http://prologika.com/CS/forums/p/370/1564.aspx

In order to make ampersands (&) work in a URL when used with a javascript, regardless of Reporting Services or MDX, you need to escape it and force it to use &. You do this by replacing the original & with %2526.

Geoff, the guy who posted the solution explains it like this:

So, in order to use Jump to URL when you need to have &s in your URL, you need to do something like this:

="javascript:void(window.open('" & Globals!ReportServerUrl & "/?%MyReport&MyMDXDate=" & replace(Parameters!MyDate.Value, "&", "%2526") & "&rs:Format=PDF'))"

(Teo's example says Date instead of Dato, but Community Server would not let me save it when I used Date. Not quite sure why, though. If you don't want to have it in PDF format, just remove "&rs:Format=PDF".)

(The discussion was found on Teo Lachev's forum, so, the last comment about letting him know about any workarounds has been fullfilled. He's even written a post about it: Ampersands Gone Wild. )

I've been using an application called Feedreader to ... well ... read rss feeds for a few months now, and I'm still quite happy with it. Sometimes it seems to have deleted the "read log", so it displays things I've marked as read as unread, but I think that might be due to a problem with my profile.

What has been annoying me though, is the fact that this application can't cope with my switching from two displays to one. At work I have an external display, which I use as a secondary display. I don't always remember to change my display settings from two to one displays before shutting my laptop down. Most applications will start up in the primary display when there's only one display available. But not Feedreader. This one will start up and display the application window at whatever coordinates it had when I closed it down.

I complained about this to Bernt, and being the techie that he is, he suggested I find the feedreader.ini file to change the coordinates. Now, finding this ini file wasn't too easy, but in the end I found it at C:\Users\myusername\AppData\Roaming\Feedreader\feedreader.ini. I changed the parameters for left and top from 1320 and 20 to 200 and 200 and startet Feedreader. And there it was, at 200 pixels from the top and from the left edge of my screen. Yey. Nice to know. (Yeah, not rocket science, but I post it to remember it later.)

We returned from Japan last night. Even though our vacation there has been wonderfull, it was quite nice to come back home to our own bed.

We arrived in Tokyo on April 4 and headed straight for our hotel, The B Akasaka. We met up with Kazue, a friend of Henrik's at the hotel. Kazue has lived in Norway for a few years, and trained Kung-fu with Henrik. She whisked im off to the K1 tournament in Yokohama, so Bernt and I had the night for ourselves. The hotel is quite cool, but the rooms were very small. If there'd been somewhere to unpack our luggage it would have felt less small, but it worked out OK. Our biggest problem was the heat. On the first day, we turned on the air condition to 20 C, and went out to eat. When we came back a few hours later, it was 30 C in this little room! Turned out the heating was still on, but not the cooling system. Fortunately we could open the window, but sleeping in a room with 27C wasn't too fun.

Tokyo is off course a more modern city than Kyoto. We spent most of our days shopping and just watching people and buildings. As the weather is a bit warmer in Japan than Norway, the girls were wearing spring clothes. Seems that trench coats, shorts and knee-highs are very hot. At first it was quite surprising and fresh, but after a week it seemed that japanese girls are just going for variations over a few styles. Still, I did get some inspiration for a summer wardrobe.

During our stay in Tokyo, we spent most time in Shibuya and Roppongi. The Center Gai crossing outside Shibuya Station was very busy. It's busy with cars and busy with people, mostly just one of these two. But one day we saw a rather adventurous guy who decided that jay-walking isn't all that dangerous. So when all the other pedestrians stopped walking, he just walked out into the street. By the time he'd got 15 meters from the pavement, the lights turned green for the cars. There are about 4 lines each way, and he was caught between all the cars. He survived, but I guess he might think twice before walking on red again. The Center Gai crossing also gave us a heavy feeling of Blade Runner.

We also checked out classy Ginza and electric Akihabara. In Ginza we found a department store with big signs saying "Scandinavian Fair" on the outside. Off course we had to check it out. At the top floor there were stalls with designs from the different Nordic countries. There were mostly design items from Denmark and Sweden, but we did find some from Finland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands. But where were the Norwegian stuff? In the end we found some Ekornes Stressless chairs in a corner. Bernt says they are very popular, but they are also insanely ugly. I was very depressed for Norwegian design after having found thos chairs.

At Akihabara there were lots of electronics and gadgets. I'd read about Maid Cafés before I left home, and wanted to go to one. Turnes out there were quite a lot of them in Akihabara. We went to one from the @Home World branch. It was rather weird, but quite innocent. There are probably Maid Cafes that are more fetishy. Bernt and Henrik felt quite uncomfortable, while Kazue and I were not so put off by it. The ice cream was good, and it was an experience. We couldn't take photos inside the café, so I took a photo of their audition poster. Later we found a trio of cos players out on the street. One of these wears the uniform that the @Home maids wore. Not quite sure if the others in the photo are wearing uniforms, which is a bit disturbing. Having a man wear a pink maid uniform, blonde wig and ears is plain weird, having a Japanese guy wearing a Nazi uniform, denim skirt and purple hair is weird weird. And very Japanese.

On the last day, Bernt and I went over to Odaiba, which is an artificial island in Tokyo bay. It's a recreational area, with quite a few museums, a few shopping malls, a hotel and a beach. So we spent almost an hour just walking along the beach. It was tranquil and strange. There's also a scaled down version of the Statue of Liberty. We went to two museums there, the Maritime Museum and the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation. The Maritime Museum was good. The best part was the models and pictures of old ships, like the ones Clavell writes about. Unfortunately there were very few signs in English, but we got a pair of audio devices with tapes with descriptions of the items. The most amazing thing was how they'd built it. Some of the pieces in the exhibition were too large to fit through the doors of the museum building, so they'd put them in the right spots first and built the museum around them afterwards.

The National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation (Miraikan) was brilliant. We only had an hour in there, which wasn't enough at all. We started with the exhibitions called "Innovation and the Future" and "The Earth Environment and Frontiers" and tried making nano figures. Then there was a session with Asimo, Honda's Humanoid Robot. It was great fun watching the little robot run and dance. After Asimo, we went to see the "Life Science" and "The Earth Environment and Frontiers" exchibitions. There was a model of a space ship capsule there, which you could enter. All in all it was a great museum, and I wish we'd had more time there.

But we needed to hurry back to the main land, as we'd agreed to meet up with Henrik and Kazue at Harajuku. And Harajuku was a feast for the eyes. Most of the people there looked like all the other teenagers we'd seen so far, but there were some who showed what Harajuku was all about. Gothic Lolita seemed to be the biggest trend, but there were all sorts of ecentric styles to be seen.