shahine.com/omar/

There is really no excuse for how long it takes for Adobe Acrobate 6 to launch. I mean all the Microsoft apps launch in seconds (office, IE, etc). Why does Adobe want me to stare at their splash screen for so long? There is nothing worse than clicking a link on the web and waiting for the dreaded memory hungy acrobat plugin to bastardize your web experience by launching an app in your browser.

Thanks to Dumky for this tip.

A few weeks ago, we created microsoft.public.mac.virtualpc in the microsoft usenet namespace. Unfortunatley, none of the web based usenet browsers have picked it up. I've e-mailed google to ask them to do this, and they responded with:

Hi,

Your request to add a newsgroup to the Google archive has been forwarded 
to the Google news administration department for review.

Sincerely,

The Google Groups Team

Cool, humans on the other end. Hopefully this will happen soon. I loathe using newsreaders, and the google web ui does the job well.

The folks at abletfactory ran a study to see what effect importing words into the Tablet User Dictionary has on recognition. The gist of it is, when they added 2000 medical terms, reco increased from 58.1% to 83.8%. When 42,000 words were added, reco increased to 91.5%.

That's pretty dammed impressive. I guess that makes a strong case for getting your hands on a Special Interest Dictionary, or spending some time entering all the words that aren't recognized. The later takes quite a bit of time though. I wonder if there are any freeware dictionaries out there? People must have been compiling these things for speech dictionaries a long time ago.

I just picked up a SonyEricsson T616 from ATT Wireless. Seems that they just started selling it. For the past year and a half I've been using a SonyEricsson T68i. It's the longest lasting phone I've had, but I'm growing tired of it. You see, it's got some great features that no one else has yet.

1. It's small
2. Battery life is excellent
3. Bluetooth.

No one else can seem to get this right. However, the T68i is slow as molasses and I'm really tired of that. Plus the UI is anemic.

I've wanted a Microsoft Smartphone for a long time, but since I can't get one, it's not really a choice. Additionally, no Microsoft Smartphones have Bluetooth support which is a deal breaker.

OneNote is a great app. I've beeen using it for a few months and have migrated most of my note taking to it. I figure I spend only about 30% of my time using Ink in OneNote, and the rest of the time my keyboard. I have structured my notebook into Work, Personal, Weekly Meetings and Side Notes. I use the app every day and keep it running about as much as Outlook. I've been trying to migrate as much data as possible from Outlook to OneNote because I find I can better organize my info, and it's more easily searchable.

Being a tablet user, I've stopped using Journal and exclusively use OneNote. I hate the notion in Journal of having multiple files for each document. I much prever the view the OneNote provides of my notes (better than using the filesystem).

I am still not Tablet enabled, but I use OneNote all of the time. InfoPath got a lot of hype, Outlook was cleaned up nicely, but for me, the reason to upgrade will be OneNote. Now, if I could only get a Tablet to use it on :)
[Scott Watermasysk On .NET]

BlogX is getting no love right now, and I'm craving some new features and more polished blogging tool. The folks at newtelligence did an amazing job taking the BlogX code base and making dasBlog out of it.

Their goal was to completley replace the features found in Radio Userland, and IMHO they sucedded.

Migrating from BlogX to dasBlog was pretty painless but did require some work. I had to make the following changes:

1. Modify the dasBlog source code to handle the BlogX style PermaLink and Categories urls. You see, BlogX handles a permalik like so: http://www.shahine.com/omar/PermaLink.aspx/6258ada1-e5e6-4af8-a8c3-824abf472302 wheras dasBlog expects http://www.shahine.com/omar/PermaLink.aspx?guid=6258ada1-e5e6-4af8-a8c3-824abf472302 . So I added support for this to the dasBlog source tree. See this post for details. You'll need to enroll in the workspace and checkout the current source tree.
2. Move the contents of the /contents/ folder to your new dasBlog folder
3. Delete all your cookies. If you don't the BlogX cookie will mess with the dasBlog and you won't be able to login to your site
4. Configure the siteSecurity.config and site.config files

That's it.

PS - if you want a great, inexpensive ASP.NET host try http://www.gearhost.com. This is where I host my dasBlog site.

Today Microsoft released an app I wrote, Dictionary Tool for Tablet PC. You can get it from the Tablet PC PowerToys website.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/tabletpc/downloads/powertoys.asp

Background

I wrote this app because I was frustrated that the Tablet Recognizer (which is actually the speech recognizer), did a poor job with many words that I write. Working at Microsoft involves lots of jargon, TLAs and so on that the Tablet doesn't get right all the time. I was also frustrated at how difficult it was to add words to the recognizer. I was also frustrated that you couldn't import the Microsoft Office dictionary into the Tablet Recognizer. Finally, I added the ability to import an arbitrary text file via the GUI or a command line allowing you to batch import words. This app also supports adding and removing words in your native OS Language. If you select a word in the listbox it will display a tooltip showing you the language of said word.

So, I wrote a little app in Visual Basic.NET. I had never written a VB.NET app before and had a great time writing this program. I think that it demonstrated the power that the Microsoft .NET programming environment actually offers. Later on I learned C# and ported the app over (the shipping version still uses VB.NET).

This app also makes use of the Tablet PC SDK 1.5. If you click in the Edit Text box with the Pen on your tablet you will get a little Pen Input Panel letting you easily add words when in Pen mode.

Troubleshooting

Having said all this, some people have been reporting problems using the app. Much of this is covered in this thread on Tablet PC Buzz.

Many of the problems are likely related to the Dictionary file. I'm not sure what the cause of these problems are, and it's pretty hard for me to troubleshoot some of them.

So if you are having problems, one thing to try is moving your tablet dictionary file. it is located here:

%USERPROFILE%\Application Data\Microsoft\Speech\Files\UserLexicons

If you got to Start->Run and enter the path above you will be in a folder that should have one file. Move that file to the desktop, and then re-launch the Dictionary Tool and add a word to the dictionary.

Want all your CDs digital but don't have the time or energy to do this yourself? I've been dreaming of a service like this and it turns out that there is one: Get Digital will take your CDs and rip them for about $2 or less per disk and return them to you on DVD or a Hard Drive. Sweet. To bad I am almost done ripping all my CDs for the 3rd time. This time I am ripping to a Hardware RAID and using WMA Lossless so that I never have to rip again (famous last words)!

Microsoft recently released Digital Image Suite 9. This is a great product for organizing and editing photos. I find this product better than Adobe PhotoShop album.

One amazing feature in this suite is the Smart Erase. See below.

Basically I think Comp USA is an evil store. Their return policy is just horrible. They always try and sell you an overpriced service plan, which is never a good deal. Of course when you try and return something you wish you got it.

Unfortunatley, in San Francisco You don't really have a choice. If only there were a Fry's, which is just a geek paradise. They also happen to have the best return policy around.

This is my first post using my newly created Pocket PC BlogX client! I wrote this app in a few hours using the Pocket PC 2003 SDK. It runs on the .NET Compact Framework.

Microsoft Watch writes: Microsoft Shakes Up Its Mac Lineup.

"Separate from Office, Microsoft reportedly plans to begin marketing Virtual PC under the Microsoft brand in August. The company told resellers that it will ship a standalone version of Virtual PC for Mac 6.1, but that it's "strictly a rebrand release" with no new features as compared to Version 6.0. Instead, Microsoft will revise the packaging, copyright information, and support details."

Well, this is what I've been working on since Feb when we aquired Virtual PC from Connectix. I can't wait till it hits the shelves!

This past weekend disaster struck. My 200GB Western Digital hard drive suffered from NTFS corruption. In my sad attempts to repair this I rendered the drive unusable. I lost 160 GB of lossless WMA music that I just finished ripping. I still have all the CDs, but I'm not looking forward to re-ripping them. Anyone know of a service that will do this for me ?

Monday, my boot volume, a Seagate 80GB drive, suffered a power failure and won't spin up any longer. Lucky for me I used Retrospect to backup 10 days earlier, but I only backed up my wife and my home directories, and nothing else. Major bummer.

So, I decided that I've had it. In the past 3 years I've had Maxtor, Seagate, and WD drives go bad. This just sucks. Hard Drive are not reliable. As such I immediately went to Fry's and purchased two 200 GB Western Digital drives and a Promise RAID card. I created a RAID 1 array (this is two drives always mirroring data). So far so good. I am still re-installing everything, so we'll see how that goes. So far I've noticed two problems:

1. For some random reason, my RAID card complained that one of my drives failed last night. I rebuilt the array and all was well. This was after re-installing Windows over an existing install that was working fine, so I think that may have been the problem. However, I have noticed that my PC is much hotter now; with 2 7200 rpm drives I'm not surprised
2. It takes longer to boot. The RAID card takes forever to complete "Searching for IDE drives& ". This adds about 10 seconds to my boot time (which is 10 seconds). So it essentially doubled it.

Well today I made the switch from Radio Userland to BlogX for my web site. I also switched ISPs from pair to GearHost cause I need a server running Windows and .NET frameowrk + ASP.NET. Currently I am using:

• BlogX for managing, editing, posting, and hosting my blog
• Newsgator and RSSBandit for RSS and rews feeds

Overall I like this approach much better. I don't need a client running on my machine and rendering out static pages to my website. Instead all my content is just XML files and the server handles rendering them etc. I can also read my news feeds in either Outlook or in the RSSBandit client.

Both BlogX and RSSBandit were started by Microsofties. They both reside on the GotDotNet workspaces. Chris Anderson started BlogX and Dare Obasanjo started RSSBandit. Now they are both community efforts.

It's been a few months now since I've been on CalTrain. I have been dreading this day for quite a while. Looks like they've made some nice progress on the track improvements. I really can't wait for the baby bullet project to be complete. At that point riding the train will be a viable alternative to driving.