Tilburg University visit

Was invited to share work experiences with about-to-graduate master students at alma mater as a part of Economic Business weeks Tilburg organized by . First visit to UvT in 2 years since graduation. Met nice people, had a pleasant chat with a few university officials, formally became a member of alumni association. Was totally worth three-hour train trip.

Firefox - uninstalled

No words, just a few links explaining the move
Brendan Eich Steps Down as Mozilla CEO
Mozilla CEO “resigns” after uproar over his opposition to gay marriage

Why I hate airport security rules

On my previous trip from Paris to Amsterdam I was once again forced to leave behind a few items at the security checkpoint. Not for the first time, but after this occasion I grew pissed off enough to right a post on why I don't respect those rules.
First, about my understanding of what a rule (or, in that case, airport security regulation) is - although, obviously, nobody cares about my understanding :). Rule is supposed to be unambiguous, or at least designed to be close to that. And in fact, a lot of rules we deal with in every-day life are such ("Don't enter the shop with an ice-cream", "Do not kill people" etc., and if something is not clear enough, you have numerous documents written in sleep-inducing language, called legal, where extra explanations are provided. Airport security rules, contrary to those mentioned above, are open to interpretation. Talking about European rules, there is a pretty formal list that can be found  here. Funny enough, although such list exists (even having some interesting items in the list, like that one
 blunt instruments - (objects capable of being used to cause serious injury when used to hit), including:-baseball and softball bats,-clubs and batons, such as billy clubs, blackjacks and night sticks,-martial arts equipment;
so what about duty-free items can I hit somebody to death with a bottle of champaign? Or even a suitcase - oh, believe me, it's heavy enough to kick sh*t out of somebody.), some other statement on the same web-site say that "you need to refer to your airport rules for verification of what is allowed". Basically, it leaves the "rules" to the interpretation of the local airport services. On most airlines' web-sites in the section describing carry-on luggage regulations you are also very likely to see the phrase similar to "Before your flight, therefore, please check the website of your departure airport to find out which hand luggage regulations are in force there." (Lufthansa web-site). So, let's imagine I follow that advice. I will navigate to CDG web-site only to discover

CDG Security Tips

As with most airports in the EU, there are strict regulations on which items may be carried within your hand luggage. Liquid restrictions apply so ensure all your hand luggage liquids, gels and gas items are stored seperately in the airport-regulation plastic bag.

Airport security strongly advises against passengers accepting luggage from other travellers, and from leaving their own luggage unattended.

Not an extensive list, is it? And once you arrive at the airport, right before the security point you will see the stands with a notice on restricted and prohibited items, similar to the one referred before. The main difference though, is that after every dangerous good category there is an addition
Any blunt instrument capable of causing injury, including, but not limited to
And believe me, most of the people working there don't listen to whatever you tell them about false perception of danger or even common sense.
I really hope that sooner or later officials will realize that the real way to safer stay on board is not additional restrictions, but better information exchange and identifying potential hazards long before people even arrive at the airport.

On air travel comfort

Tall people, are you also annoyed by the fact that the height, at which windows in an aircraft are located, is just not convenient for enjoying the views on a sunny day? I literally have to pull my body down and pretend to be in a laid-back mood, or bend my neck to the extent that makes me fall asleep or start reading a book. Boeing, Airbus, any technology in mind to make it adjustable? 

On girls-meeting probability theory

Today my topic is girls :) I've never written on it before, although it's definitely stated among my interest on the blog description. But now, after a bottle of a perfect Chilean Sauvignon Blanc, I have enough determination to admit that I was looking forward to flying anywhere in expectation of meeting some of nice examples with a broader outlook for interesting things in life than mine, plus being beautiful enough to forget about their stupidity if that wasn't the case :)
So, what do I have in that respect to date? The answer is really knocking down - nothing, or, better said, nobody. I've never been seated to a person I had really pleasant flight with, during all my travelings. Never, ever!!! Does it make me seem like a chronicle looser? Not at all! Last time I flew with Emirates I was seated alone in a 3-seat row on the overbooked flight, since 2 other travelers missed the boarding, effectively making me flying almost like a business class passenger on my longest flight so far. But the question forced me, as a person with a strong mathematical background, to calculate what the odds are of such a miss.
According to flightdairy I had 86 flight I could have recalled. According to the aircraft types, average capacity of the aircraft boarded was about 130 people. Being potentially seated with 1.7 people (due to the limited ability to communicate to an aisle-seated person, when taking window seat), my odds of not being seated next to an attractive girl (here, I assume, below real-world levels, of at least 1 hot girl) are (1 - 1.7/128) = 0.9867. So, in 86 flights, my odds of meeting no one who falls into the target category are approximately 0.32, which is much more than I expected. And which makes me think that I just haven't flown enough, and that's why I'm planning my next trip to Israel in May :) It also reminded me of my favorite tennis player's, Stanislas Vavrinka, tatoo - "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better."

Hide Site Actions menu item in Sharepoint 2010

Today I've decided to make an exercise for my fingers and write one more post, although I haven't done it for quite long already.

The topic is related to SharePoint 2010. This is a very known problem on hiding View All Site Content link, which comes all the way from previous MOSS version. There it could be solved using some basic javascript or css change. With 2010 version the pain was added in the form of presenting this link in Site Actions menu. The same JavaScript won't work as expected in that case, because the ID generated for that menu item in drop-down menu seems to be quite dynamic (zzX prefix added, where X might be any number).

So my approach is to refactor our JavaScript code to something similar to this one.

<script language="javascript">
String.prototype.endsWith = function(str)
{return (this.match(str+"$")==str)}

document.getElementById('ctl00_PlaceHolderLeftNavBar_PlaceHolderQuickLaunchBottom_PlaceHolderQuickLaunchBottomV4_idNavLinkViewAllV4').style.visibility = "hidden";

var menuItems = document.getElementsByTagName("ie:menuitem");
for (var key in menuItems)
{
 if (key.endsWith("ViewAllSiteContents"))
  menuItems[key].hidden = true;
}
</script>

I also wanna mention some caveat on that whole Site Actions menu items stuff. Although you can hide some of the items there using <HideCustomAction> declarations within feature's elements, this approach won't work with View All Site Content menu item. I was pulling my hair out trying to find the declaration for it somewhere, and after all I was surprised to see it in <ConsoleNode> declaration for EditingMenu. As far as there is no way of hiding console nodes declaratively, you will need to write feature receiver which will get the .xml file with declaration, change it, check-in and approve. And even in this case this is not the best solution, as far as this EditingMenu is a "site collection scoped" functionality, so there is no way of applying this only to some specific subsites.

Hope I gave a very thourough insight into that topic, if something is missing or needs to be pointed to, don't hesitate to ask.

SharePoint Quiz delivered!

Today I would like to speak a little bit about my work and the project I am currently dealing with. First of all I should mention that my area of interest is Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Not long ago I’ve obtained Microsoft certificate on WSS 3.0 Configuration () and together with my small team of three persons we have been developing Quiz site template for WSS / MOSS for a pair of months already. Now when the project is almost ready I could reveal some nice features which were implemented and make some kind of promotion :)

First, business requirement were introduced by our internal company needs but it seems to me that they are and not very specific and are common enough.

Second, WSS-oriented solution helped us to use some nice advantages of SharePoint such as Active Directory integration, usage of SharePoint lists, several helpful controls etc.
In some cases we should have bent SharePoint to make all we need but it was quite nice experience.
Now let’s discuss the features with the help of pictures and screenshots.

1) Division into three site roles: Site administrator, Tutor and normal user.
a. Normal user can execute exams assigned to him by administrator or tutor, view his results, restore interrupted exams and that’s all.
b. Tutor has all the functionality of a normal user plus he/she can create exams and topics, add and edit questions to his own topics, use questions and topics of another users without possibility to edit or delete them, view his own exam results, assign his exams to users.
c. Site administrator has all the functionality of tutor without any limitations that is he can add, edit and delete any entity in the Quiz portal.

Figure 1. Administrator's main page

2) Three types of questions: Single choice, multiple choice and free text which is determined automatically regarding to the quantity of answers and correct answers among them.

3) Each question has its own weight ranging from 1 to 5.

4) Question could be formated in a rich way: styles, colors and fonts are up to you, at the same time you may use images in a question’s body which could be easily uploaded to the portal directly from question’s creation form.

Figure 2. Create Question interface

5) Every assignment has its Due Date so you can easily control the status of completion of exam by the users.

6) You can create exam in a very flexible way by utilizing any topic in one of the two forms:

a. You can take any percentage of questions belonging to topics or

b. You can take specific questions directly through UI.

Figure 3. Edit exam interface

7) Email notification of exams assigned to a user.

8) Exam statistics.

Figure 4. Exam statistics interface

9)Multi-language support in two forms:

a. Multi-language site templates in case several language packs are installed on WSS.

b. The possibility to switch the language in already created site.

Figure 5. Site in russian switched by one click.

Additional languages could be easily installed and this process doesn’t involve any kind of programming or recompiling the portal.

10) And many others...

How do you like it?