shahine.com/omar/

I am in New York visiting my parents. My Dad has been asking me about getting a Tablet PC for a while. You see he was a Newton user for about 3 years, and loved that device. Last year I switched him to an iPaq, but he still longs for the handwriting functionality and user experience of his newton (larger form factor, drawing, note taking).

So, we stopped by J & R Computer world and got a Fujitsu LifeBook T300D. We took it home and I loaded it up with Office 2003 professional, OneNote, and used the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard in XP to copy all his settings over from his Vaio. It is really amazing that it took me about 3-4 hours to do all this. Way to long in my opinion. But I'm thankfully that the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard exists, or it would have taken way longer.

Anyway, my Dad started using it today and it was fun to see and witness his reaction to the tablet. First of all he though the whole thing was cool. He seems to enjoy OneNote (note: I didn't even show my Dad Microsoft Journal, and I have no intention of doing so, OneNote is where he should be doing 100% of his inking, I never liked Journal and it only has one redeeming feature, which is the print to Journal feature that lets you annotate a document like paper).

The LifeBook is a nice piece of hardware. Much better than my Toshiba 3500. It's got a Centrino for one thing, but it also doesn't have a 1) crappy graphics card, 2) loud ass hard drive, 3) slow ass bus, 4) dim hard to read screen, 5) loads of crappy OEM software that switches the backlighting and processor/fan speeds every few seconds. So it's a nice improvement! One thing that doesn't work as well is the mechanical rotation functionality. It's very hard to align the screen when you are rotating, and it's hard to snap the screen shut when it's either in portrait mode or notebook mode. This is really the only downside the the hardware.

My Dad really likes Outlook 2003 thought. At first he was like “what's this? it looks funny”. However, a few hours later he said that he loved the new three column view and the new icons. It's amazing what people will notice!

It will take my Dad a long time to figure this tablet thing out. It's too bad that LoneStar hasn't shipped yet because he'll then need to get used to the in place TIP which will be new to him. He was obviously able to figure out how to use the Newton, so I'm not too worried about this. Another reason why the convertible is perfect. It lets my Dad ease into the Tablet functionality, it will be there when he needs it, but for now he still has his mouse and keyboard to use.

If you ever go to Japan, you must have Qoo. It's the best soft drink ever. And it has a really funny story to go along with it (Qoo is not male or female, and Qoo only says “Kooh“). Qoo is made by CocaCola and they even have a web site: http://www.qoo.com.sg/

Here is a snippet from the site (the Qoo story).

Very little is known about the origins of the cute character Qoo (pronounced "koo").

The Qoo drinker is someone who enjoys spending time with her friends, but enjoys daydreaming and living a carefree lifestyle, unburdened by life's little troubles. The Qoo drinker is optimistic, vibrant, and walks with a spring in her step. She is envied by others for her eternally youthful outlook and joie de vivre.

Qoo appears on all Qoo product packaging (300ml cans and 345ml PET bottles), in our cute and quirky TV commercials, even on our desirable Qoo gifts!

Anyone know if they sell Qoo here in the US?

Nice overview of Lonestar (aka Tablet PC 2004). Lonestar rules. I've been running it for a while now and it's made my tablet so useful in pen mode. One of my big gripes about the Tablet PC User Experience so far is that Windows XP is just so mouse/keyboard focused and that entering text via Ink was just excruciatingly painfully. I think over time my usage of pen vs keyboard went from 30% to less than 10% as the novelty factor wore off. However, with Lonestar I can do e-mails in Outlook quite efficiently (as well as browse the web etc).

Lonestar is going to be a boon for the Tablet PC and means that we get some much needed usability enhancements before Longhorn!

Here is a screenshot of something I've been working on... I'm 70% of the way integrating nGallery with DasBlog. Also, check out the search box... coming soon to a dasBlog near you.

I've finished up my NewsGator plug-in for DasBlog. You can download the installer by going to the GotDotNet DasBlog workspace releases page.

Lemme know if you have any suggestions or problems using it.

note: you need to enable the Edit Web Service in DasBlog. This is not enabled by default. You can turn this on from the Configuration page under Service Settings.

Dare recently posted about blogging software and support for conditional get. Details on what this is all about is covered on this article on HTTP Conditional GET requests. I ran into a few problems making this all work in dasBlog, but I can happily say that this site you are viewing will not unecessarily send you my entire RSS feed every single time you check it using your RSS readers. This can consume horrible amounts of bandwidth. I am already using up many gigabytes a month at my hosting provider. This should make it into the next rev of dasBlog, but if you want it sooner you could always check out and build from the GDN workspace.

I spent way to much time today and last week on a really silly problem. I'm trying to test one of the web services for DasBlog and I keep getting this error:

An unhandled exception of type 'System.Net.WebException' occurred in system.web.services.dll

Additional information: The request failed with HTTP status 401: Access Denied.

I spent a long time trying to figure out what was wrong with the code. Turned out I was getting this error because I didn't give anonymous access to the IIS Application Directory. Problems like this seems to consume an inordinate amout of time. The main problem being the simple solution is not the one I consider first. Sigh.

Looks like Apple decided to Patch Jaguar with the security fixes.

"Apple's policy is to quickly address significant vulnerabilities in past releases of Mac OS X wherever feasible," the company said in a statement. "The shipment of Panther does not change this policy. Apple has an excellent track record of working with CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) and the open-source community to proactively identify and correct potential vulnerabilities," it said. [C|net]

That's nice. Now what Apple should do is publish something like this:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=%2Fdirectory%2Fdiscontinue.asp

Cross Posting, is a great feature that was just added to dasBlog. I started off with my personal blog. Recently I've been blogging inside Microsoft, behind our firewall. I keep internal only info on my internal blog, and mostly keep interesting information that isn't to be kept Microsoft internal on both blogs. However, it's been a pain to try and keep the two in sync.

Well, cross posting rules. I can now post in once place (in this case my internal blog), and have that info posted to both. The post is then kept in sync etc. Way cool.

I'm 6'3” and traveling on a commercial airline can be brutal. Even more brutal if the person in front of me reclines. For the past 4 years I've been able to mostly avoid this because I fly enough on American to find a way to upgrade. However, this doesn't always work out. The next best thing is to sit in an exit row seat.

However, check out the Knee Defender. I might have to get one of these .

Well, it's 9:30 pm and I am sitting in the convention center waiting for the BOF Weblogging session to start and reflecting on the day.

I've been in LA since Friday (my wife and I drove down). We've done some fun things like visited the Getty Museum (really amazing), visited family, and done some shopping. She flew home today and it's just me in LA with some of my co-workers. The firers are so bad that my asthma is bothering me.

Overall things have gone smoothly. I am humbled by the number of people that are at this conference. This is MUCH larger than any Apple WWDC that I have attended. There is no reality distortion field, and well, real code was written during the keynote. Contrast to WWDC where the Keynote is really just another opportunity for Steve to “wow” the audience and such you in to the reality distortion. None of the Microsoft execs have quite the charisma that Steve has, and well, we are talking about stuff that will ship in a few years from now and not in the coming year (but giving developers working bits)... it's very different (plus there is no sexy hardware for us to demo).

It's crowded here. Most of the sessions I've attended were standing room only. I stood for the last two, and for one of those I didn't even stand inside the session room, but watched the powerpoint slides and audio on a plasma display. As a Microsoft employee, we were under strict orders to accommodate customers as much as possible, and this meant making sure that we were not occupying seats or space that they might otherwise want. So that made for an uncomfortable day .

The technology demoed was amazing. Longhorn looks great. Whidbey, to me, is even better. Some of the changes coming in the near future are really going to have an impact on developing apps today, on XP, and provide a great transition to Longhorn. I'm really looking forward to being able to develop apps and stuff using Whidbey.

I think I just saw Clemens walk by me. He was in a pack of other folks, and I think they all bought him some beer, because they were loud as they walked by .

Oh... Internet access sucks. My hotel, the Hyatt, is very primitive. Only dial-up there. The convention center has too many people and wireless is having a hard time (as is Ethernet). However, the conference folks have done a great job providing tables, Ethernet cables and power strips everywhere. Fantastic.

I've seen my fare share of PowerBooks here, which is interesting. I've also seen a lot of Tablets (and my Toshiba) which I have decided is a complete and utter horrible machine. I hate my tablet now. This thing is SLOW, annoying, hot, and unpredictable. It freezes, and crashes and I'd about ready to throw it out a window. This is what I get for using a v1 hardware product I guess.

Clemens put together version 1.4 of DasBlog for the PDC. There are a lot of great features in this release. Clemens added some cross posting features (so you can have posts go to multiple blogs (cool), as well as some better tracking tools (stats) for people who read your blog through web aggregators).

Also new in this release that I contributed are:

• Kick ass new HTML Web Editor using FreeTextBox
• This new template, which is XHTML Transitional (no it won't validate till Whidbey, sorry) and give you an easy way to control the look. There are a few stylesheets that componentize page look and feel into layout (using CSS positioning for the layout), dasBlog styles (I tried to pull out every available css style DasBlog exposes), colors (you can change all the colors in once place), and calendar (which contains all the calendar specific styles). This new theme is simply called DasBlog. I also updated justHtml with the same files, but the styles are all empty.
• Some small bug fixes here and there.
• A list of all new features is here:

I'm not sure why my site says it's still running 1.3 though.