Zaske's Blog

My Form

zaske — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 03:24:56 +0000

Bellevue Botanical Garden

zaske — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:01:14 +0000

The final weekend of Festival D’Lights

My Blog Has Moved

zaske — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 06:09:20 +0000

There are just too many cool WordPress plugins I want to play around with that are not supported on the free WordPress server. So I’ve moved my blog to a new URL. My new URL is steve.zaske.com

Robert Scoble has a carpeted toilet!

zaske — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 07:51:26 +0000

I don’t usually read Robert Scoble’s blog (to be honest) but I ended up there earlier tonight and was mortified to see he has a carpeted toilet. There are only a few things that gross me out in this world, and carpeted toilets are one of them. There are plenty of nice places for carpet within the home, but wrapped around the toilet seat is not one of them.

Speaking of urine, we have a new guy who makes his Shit List debut at #1! This unnamed coworker broke one of the golden rules (pardon the pun):

No matter how hot it is outside, it’s never cool to walk into a mens bathroom bare-footed.

So for this unspeakable foul, you mister unnamed Office dev, just made my “Shit List”.

Guys who walk barefoot in mens bathrooms
Websites that ask me to enter my password twice.
??
??
??

OSU Fight B-E-A-V-E-R-S!

zaske — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 06:02:42 +0000

Okay completely NON-nerd related. My alma mater OSU just won the College World Series. This is the best thing to happen to Oregon State since this (and I was there. WOOT!).

Recommendation: Check out Pandora.com

zaske — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 17:44:51 +0000

Last night I was reading a friends blog when I stumbled onto this post about pandora.com. Okay, I’m sure this “so last week”, but I haven’t heard anything about it and I think it’s one of the coolest Web 2.0 like websites I’ve seen in a long while. Pandora.com is a streaming music site similar to Launch.com (AKA music.yahoo.com), but with more knowledge and a better selection of music. I don’t consider myself a music fan, (haven’t been since I turned oh, 30) but I’m blown away by this site. It definitely nailed me as a customer. Simple and easy to use UI, good quality audio streams. I’m actually listening to music again.

Blogging from Word 2007

zaske — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 09:47:00 +0000

I’m testing one of the new features of Word 2007, the ability to use Word as your blog post editor. It partially supports WordPress. The one problem at this point is that it doesn’t support categories. Here is a link to a webpage Microsoft offers that give you more information about Word’s blogging ability and current limitations.

Microsoft responds to Adobe

zaske — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 20:19:50 +0000

Microsoft released this response to Adobe. I haven’t seen much about it in the press, so I thought I’d post a link to it here.

Here is the super quick back story:

Microsoft announces that it plans to add PDF support to Microsoft Office 2007 (currently under development).
Beta 2 of Microsoft Office 2007 is released with the ability to export files to the PDF format.
This story hits the nerd press.
Adobe finally responds with this statement.
Now Microsoft responds to Adobe’s statement with its own statement.

Hidden Gem #2: “Set Default Paste” in Word 2007

zaske — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 06:33:02 +0000

This may seem trivial, but it was one of those annoyances that really seemed to irritate me in Word 2003. It would appear the Word development team heard my cries for help…and added the feature to Word 2007. You can now set the default paste type in the "paste options" button. Here is a screencast of the feature in 2003 and how it has been improved in 2007.

Excel Calculation Performance

zaske — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 04:21:32 +0000

With all the discussion about XML file formats, people seem to have forgotten one of the main reasons for picking an Office suite. Performance. I've always been super impressed with the Excel development team, and how well they've optimized the Excel "Calc" engine. I threw together this video that demonstrates how OpenOffice 2.0.2 compares to Excel 2003 and Excel 2007 beta 2.

Before I get flamed for spreading FUD or get accused of rigging these results, let me say a few things:

I work for Microsoft but I do not speak for Microsoft. This is my own personal blog and I have not been asked by Microsoft to share these results. I'm simply proud of the work my co-workers have done and want to share some of the amazing features in Office. Especially features that don't get a lot of attention (but are impressive nonetheless).
Here is a link to the test file. Please feel free to run this test on your own system. Your mileage may vary.
The test file was created to exercise the calculation engine. It was not created to represent a typical Excel file.
The test file is made up of SUM's, divisions, IF's and VLOOKUP's because historically these are the most often used functions within Excel.

I don't believe this is a suprise to anyone who has been paying attention. Michael Meeks discussed this OpenOffice problem at Linuxworld Boston, and of course George Ou has mentioned OpenOffice performance problems in the past as well. I don't think of this as so much a weakness of OpenOffice, rather a testament to the complexity of spreadsheets and the amount of work Microsoft has put into optimizing Excel's calc engine. I just thought it might be fun to actually see the difference visually.