March 2005 - Posts

• Bill Gates' Think Week - An inside view

  Robert Guth of the Wall Street Journal has a fascinating article on Bill Gates’ twice-yearly solo retreats, known inside the company as “Think Week”. During Think Week, Bill goes off by himself to small cottage armed with a collection of ideas from Microsoft employees in the form of research papers.  I remember my boss at Microsoft asking me to submit my own papers a few times, but I don’t recall that I ever did.  However, I remember reviewing material that my team was sending. I’ve always loved the idea of a Think Week, so much so that I called a brief trip last August to a friend’s cabin my “Think Week-end”. Does anyone do a solo vacation, without family or friends – to catch up on reading or just to think? Posted Mar 28 2005, 03:05 PM by ChuckOp with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Microsoft, Recreation

• Grammar check article on Slashdot

  I submitted an article to Slashdot today and it was accepted!  Within a few hours, it collected over 200 comments. My submission was based on an above-the-fold, front-page article in today's Seattle Post-Intelligencer on a marketing professor's attempt to get Microsoft to improve the grammar checker found in Microsoft Word. Personally, I'm a huge fan of the grammar checker.  I use Microsoft Word to edit my e-mail messages and have the grammar checker flagging grammar and style.  The only options I have turned off are "Use of first person", "Passive Sentences", and "Contractions".  I wish I could use the editor for these blogging posts (I know I can via various tools, but it's slows down the process and I blog less often). Todd Bishop of the Seattle PI also blogged about it as well as including a humorous graphic. Posted Mar 28 2005, 02:39 PM by ChuckOp with 3 comment(s) Filed under: Microsoft

• Create New Folder in Explorer – why not easier?

  Since I started working with the Windows Explorer shell in Windows 95, I’ve often wondered why there isn’t a “New Folder” toolbar button. Today, I was organizing some files and dragging-and-dropping them to other folders and occasionally, in the middle of a drag operation, realized that I needed to create the destination folder first. The way sub-folders are created is currently a click, right-click, hover, and click process.  Click once to put focus into the file area of the folder you want to be the container for the new folder.  Right-click for the Properties menu, hover over New and then click Folder.  Then type the name of the new folder. The shell-provided file Save As common dialog has a new folder button on its limited toolbar.  So why isn’t there one for Windows Explorer?  Actually, I know the reason for that, at least what the usability people would say – that’s it would contribute to UI bloat.  Nevertheless even things like the Full Screen option have a button and its functionality is even easier to get to; press F11. Ideally, the context menu would have a new folder item as well.  That way can scroll the folder tree to the destination folder, right click on it, choose New Folder and type in the new name.  You wouldn’t have to navigate back to the source folder and the original method would stay valid. I’m sure someone has written a shell extension to do this already.  Does anyone have a pointer to an existing package? Posted Mar 23 2005, 10:46 AM by ChuckOp with 14 comment(s) Filed under: Microsoft, UI, Rants

• Windows Media Player not adding albums to media library

  Have been moving my music collection around and noticed that nearly half of the files didn't get added to the media library when monitoring the folder, or manually scanning it. After investigating for awhile, I discovered that folders marked with the System attribute were being ignored by the media library.  I guess this is understandable, but left me with two questions:  First, how did only certain folders get this attribute set.  Secondly, how do I go about changing it? About 130 of 410 total folders had the System attribute set.  I don't know exactly how it got set, but it may have something to do with the folders being stored temporary on a Samba-based file share. My first though was to type attrib -s *. /s /d However, while *. should match only files without extensions (which includes directories), attrib matches all files when given the *. wildcard pattern.  I was worried that the various WMP related files such as AlbumArt* and Folder.jpg and Thumbs.db would also lose their System attribute. Executing the attrib command above did attempt to reset those files as well, but since they are also marked with the Hidden attribute, and error was presented and attrib moved on. What I learned was that with Windows Media Player version 10, the media library will not automatically add folders that are marked with the System attribute.  If you are having problems getting artists or albums to import correctly into the media library, check the System attributes. Posted Mar 18 2005, 12:05 PM by ChuckOp with 71 comment(s) Filed under: Microsoft, Tip

• Backup Favorites Quickly

  A friend and former co-worker at Microsoft recently sent out an e-mail to several people describing a way to backup the Favorites folder to a writable CD/DVD-ROM drive.  I started thinking that it could even be easier: Start Menu -> Run (or press WIN+R) Type %userprofile% and press ENTER Right-click Favorites folder Choose Send To -> and the drive to copy all the favorites to Works with floppies, USB drives and writable CD/DVD-ROM drives. Posted Mar 02 2005, 03:18 PM by ChuckOp with no comments Filed under: Tip