shahine.com/omar/

Scott Hanselman reports on his new Toshiba M205 Tablet PC. Dam I wish I had one. Unfortunately it will be a while. Microsoft typically swaps out our hardware every 2-3 years. At 3 years the warranties are usually done and they’ve already finished depreciating them. I’ve averaged a new laptop about every 2 years and a new desktop at about the same rate. However, this year I got a lot of new hardware due to my switch over to working on Virtual PC. My current crop of hardware consists of:

1. Apple PowerMac G5 1.8 GHz with 512 MB RAM and 120 GB SATA hard drive
2. Apple PowerBook G4 1.0 GHz with MB RAM and 60 GB HD
3. Dell 3.0 GHz P4 with 1 GB of RAM 160 GB SATA hard drive
4. Toshiba Protégé 3500 tablet pc with 1.3 GHz PIII with 512 MB RAM. Feels like 200 MHz though
5. Gateway 1 GHz PIII running Windows Server 2003

Item 1, 2 and 3 were purchased this fiscal year. Item 4 was purchased November 2002. So perhaps in fiscal 05 I’ll get a new laptop, but this new tablet sounds sweet. I Item 5 was my old PC of 3 or so years before I got my new Dell.

It’s not normal for a Microsoft Program Manager to have this much hardware, but in MacBU we average double the machines due to the fact that we have both Macs and PCs. Most MacBU PMs have at least a Mac and PC desktop as well as a Mac and PC laptop. Many of us have two Mac desktops so that we can dogfood more flavors of our software as well as new versions of the Mac OS.

My co-worker Rob is a Photography fiend. Witness the miracle that is his Nikon D2H Digital Camera at the San Francisco Zoo.

I'm pretty sure the comments on how to use a Histogram are targeted at myself and Mike since we argued with Rob about the merits of an SLR digital camera if we didn't care to use the histogram, but only wanted the SLR for the ability to change lenses .

Apple recently released Mac OS 10.3.2. The significance of this update is that I can finally join my Macintosh to the Active Directory Domain at Microsoft. This functionality was originally added in Mac OS 10.3 but it did not work with Windows 2003 Server, only Windows 2000 Server.

Here is what Apple calls this fix:

"improved file sharing and directory services for mixed Mac and PC networks"

Translation:

Before we didn't work with Windows 2003, now we do.

Why might you want to do this?

1. Authentication via Kerberos, the most secure mechanism for sending your credentials over the wire
2. The prospect of Single Signon. I log onto my machine once, and I don't have to present my credentials over and over to every file server and web site I visit on the Intranet
   1. Unfortunatley Safari seems to botch up the WWW-Authenticate Kerberos negitiation with IIS and this doesn't work at all.
   2. Unfortunatley, if I try and connect to a server on a different domain, I am still prompted for my credentials

Hopefully Apple will fix the items above in 10.3.3?

I have set up a FlexWiki on my site. FlexWiki is an ASP.NET Wiki mostly written by David Ornstein, a Lead Program Manager on the eDocs Avalon Team. I don't think he has a blog, but hey, who needs one when you have a Wiki?

There is a DasBlog Wiki that I'd like people to use for documenting the product. I put it on my site cause I think Clemens is really busy now and doesn't have time for Wiki sillyness, but I hope to have it live on http://www.dasblog.net in the future. It will be really easy to migrate it there (just copy a folder) if he decides to host it. Otherwise it can live here.

Even better would be for GotDotNet to use FlexWiki for the documetation engine on Workspaces. I've already sent them this feedback.

If you use dasBlog and have something interesting you've written or would like to share, please feel free to add to and edit the Wiki

I've ocassionaly seen some strange referer's in my Referer log (a referer is the site that the person was browsing before they came to yours, usually by clicking a URL).

When you do a search on google, and you click a link to a site, that site's logs get the search request that you used. Kind of neat. Anyway, there are some funny ones in my logs, but this web page is devoted to funny referer entries. Some are hilarious.

For example, I have a bunch of pictures from an off-roading adventure in death valley last year. One of the things I saw were naked people in the Indian Hot Springs. So when people search for naked off road death valley my site appears.

I have sort of used the IE address bar in the Windows XP Explorer to do somethign similar (launch web pages and applications) but it left a lot to be desired.

Thanks to Tommy I've discovered SlickRun. This wonderfull little app lets you launch products, web pages, and is a small global floating window that can sit anywhere on your screen. It can also serve as a small notepad for throwing text in there (better than launching notepad.exe).

I highly recommend it.

Since it's open season for Microsoft employees criticizing other Microsoft employees, I will use my pulpit too .

A few days ago Dare posted about moving RSS Bandit to Sourceforge. That's fine and dandy, Dare can do what he wants. However, as a Microsoft employee I personally would not have done what he did, I'll explain why.

Dare posted the Top 10 reasons for moving his project, and I even commented on some of them in the RSS Bandit GotDotNet workspace. I asked Dare if he sent this feedback to the GotDotNet team and Andy Oakley, the PM for that team. Dare wrote back that he sent the same list to Andy, but well, since I guess he did that at the same time that he made the move, I'm guessing there was little Andy could do or say about fixing any of Dare's issues.

Tim Marman then commented on his blog:

"My only question is, if you work for Microsoft, wouldn't it be more beneficial for the entire community to work with the GDN team and have these things fixed?

I'm sure it won't help the GDN community grow when you have Microsoft employees moving their (high-profile) projects elsewhere."

Which is something that struck me, because I thought the same thing. Dare responded to Tim and stated:

"Which is more valuable to Microsoft, that developers and users have access to well-written and innovative applications targetting the .NET Framework or that everyone use GotDotNet to host their project?

Quite frankly, I'm quite irritated by the number of people who've been hassling me about decisions regarding a project I work on in my free time and the implicit obligations they've placed on me. Should I also sell my iPod because it doesn't support WMA? How about my car? Should I also sell my car and get a BMW 7-series so I can run a car with Windows Automotive? Should I get rid of my TiVo since it doesn't use Windows? Should I sell the shares I have in other companies and buy only Microsoft stock? If RSS Bandit being hosted on GotDotNet is so important to you, the source code is available. You can fork the project and keep it alive on GotDotNet."

 

Just today I discovered how to use the FormatPage functionality in dasBlog. This functionality allows you to take a regular plain html file and have it rendered in your site using existing templates etc.

Coupled with URL Rewriting you can create your own custom URLs for these pages. Say for instance that I wish to create a page for some software projects I'm working on, I don't want create a blog post for this because I want it to be permanant and static etc. So I create a simple HTML file and name it:

somefile.format.html

This file should just contain the HTML that would normaly between the tag. Note that the file name must end in .format.html or none of this will work.

You then place this file anywhere in your blog. I like to keep things in my /content folder so I create a new folder called /projects in /content and place the file in there. The path on the server is now:

/content/projects/somefile.format.html

To get to this page in dasBlog I simply type:

http://www.shahine.com/omar/FormatPage.aspx?path=content/projects/somefile.format.html

However, I don't like the way this URL looks. So to address this I go into my Web.Config file and find the section and create a new URL mapper expression.

The following expression:

<add matchExpression=
"(?&lt;basedir&gt;.*?)/Projects\.aspx\?=(?&lt;value&gt;.+)"
 mapTo="{basedir}/FormatPage.aspx?path=content/projects/{value}.format.html" />

intercepts all requests to:

http://www.shahine.com/omar/Projects.aspx?=somefile

to

http://www.shahine.com/omar/FormatPage.aspx?path=content/projects/somefile.format.html

and shows the top URL to the user. Basically Projecs.aspx is a non existant page, and dasBlog is magically loading the content in somefile.format.html and displaying it to the user.

Now I can create a number of pages in my new /content/projects folder and I can use the same URL for all of them. I would simply change somefile to whatever the name of the *.format.html file prefix is.

Last night was the Microsoft Bay Area Holiday Party. It was held at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. This was the best holiday party I've attended. The Asian Art Museum is a spectacular building. There was great music, lots of food and everyone was in a great mood. I'm going to have to go back to see the artwork!

As a party gift they gave out Abacus'. I don't know how to use one though. I have this magic calculator button on my keyboard .

I saw this ad last week at the same Bart station. I wished I had my camera, but I'm glad some one did!

Now I know it's an HP ad, but at the time I didn't.

Lets face it. The FTP client in the Windows XP Shell is a piece of junk. It always locks up explorer, spews random error messages, and has a problem just working.

However, I am loathe to pay for an FTP client. I stumbled upon SmartFTP today. It's free for non-commercial use. Sweet, my favorite after donationware!

Really excellent article written by Clemens on dasBlog and Blogging phenominon/software. You can read it here, check page 34.

Clemens posted DasBlog 1.5. This is the first release that I put a lot of work into. It's now running on my site and took all of 5 minutes to copy up.

The features for this release (both large and small are)

• new dasBlog theme designed by me. I like it . It is mostly XHTML + CSS and renders well in WinIE, MacIE, Safari, Firebird. This took forever to get right!
• Seach capability (check out the search box below the calendar)
• Ability to delete comments (for comment spam)
• Better support for RSS clients. We now support the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This should be a huge bandwidth saver for you folks with popular blogs.
• Can change password from Config page
• Can Test SMTP settings out
• New admin UI that is a lot cleaner (styled like tabs in a few of the themes)
• NewsGator plugin for posting to DasBlog
• Category pages render all posts for that category (determined via preference)
• Fixed problem with cookie corruption

For the next release I'm working on photo album functionality that is closely tied to dasBlog's current way of doing things. I'd also like to see Story support (Harry is working on that), and a theme designer for folks who want to change aspects of their theme w/o creating a brand new one.