shahine.com/omar/

I spent some time this evening watching Jimmy play with Tiger. Today there is nothing really in the Mac OS that gets me excited (other than Entourage 2004 and Virtual PC!). Watching some of the subtle effects, the cool widgets, the awesome animation, search, made me envy a mac for the first time in a very long time.

Yes, I love Longhorn, and yes I went to the PDC and drank the kool-aid. However, as I sit here and look at my Tablet PC I realize that I'm not going to see any real change for 2 or more years. I won't see applications that take advantage of that stuff for longer. Well that makes me sad. Granted, I can't handwrite on a Mac, can't use OneNote, can't run all the media in my house and so on. But that still doesn't change the fact that I smile when I look at Tiger... it's so pretty, and inviting.

You see, it occurred to me while watching Jimmy. Apple elicits amazing emotional response. I couldn't help but feel happy just watching all the new features. I don't have this attachment to my PC. It's really a tool that I use to get x or y done. It's a really important tool, and one I rely on (and run my life on). But I don't really think searching for a file on Windows XP is fun (actually I never find anything so, it's definitely not fun).

Anyway, Tiger looks very cool (and very stable for an Apple OS that isn't shipping for 8 or so months). And I can't help but feel that Longhorn is to far off for me to pay any attention to. I may have to go to another PDC to find the love.

But please, grow up Apple. Everyone copies everyone. I can think of a few feature in Entourage that ended up in Mail.app, and the Address Book after we did them. It's really sad that they must market their product(s) in this manner, and I think it reflects the way that upper management at Apple behaves and views Microsoft... it's no secret and this becomes pretty obvious once you start dealing with them. Apple's will retain their 3% market share because they are cool, and people like them. That should be good enough.

For the past 5 weeks (other than a trip to Alaska planned a year ago) I have been living work, breathing work, and dreaming about work (not by design). And today the news is out.

Hotmail is aggresively moving to make storage a non issue any more (in light of gmail and yahoo's recent offerings). It's been incredibly fun, challenging and scary all at the same time. I'm really glad to be part of such a kick ass team... hotmail is going to be cool again!

Exective Summary of changes

• Free users get 250 MB
• Premium users ($19.99 a yr) get 2 GB of mail

In other news, Dick Craddock is joining my team as our Development Manager. This is so awesome. Dick worked on Internet Mail and News for the Mac, then Outlook Express, then became the Product Unit Manager for the Mac Internet Product Unit (which was merged into the Mac Business Unit) where we shipped OE 5 and IE 5 and rocked the house. He then left to work on MS TV and stuff, and is back in the e-mail game after taking a nice long sabbatical. Last week we had a little offsite in Redmond and it was funny how many former Mac folks were in the room...

Jimmy documents his experience on the new Airbus A340-500 service from Dubai to JFK. I wish Airlines in the US had this kind of money...

Donovan has posted a preview of the managed OneNote API that I collaborated on. Donovan did most of the heavy lifting and is the papa of the actual Data Import API in OneNote. The managed interface that we worked on provides a very rich way to interact with OneNote using C# or VB.NET. This is what my and David's upcomming PowerToys are built on.

For anyone out there, I would love to see a faceless sys tray app that sucked my messenger history into a OneNote section. I don't have time to build this myself, but if you are interested in doing this download the files from Donnovan and start coding!

Lora and I went to the Vespa dealership in San Francisco today. I think we are going to buy a Vespa ET4. We are really excited. I won't live in SF forever, so I would love to experience the wonders of getting around the city on a scooter. Additionally, Lora can use this to commute to work letting me drive to work more frequently.

The only problem with getting a motorcyle is that this requires that I go to the DMV and get a permit and then later on take a driving test to get my license. Argh, dealing with the DMV is probably one of the most painful things.

So, I've been using Mailblocks for 2 months now and I've been meaning to write up a review of my experiences with it, but my buddy Mike did this already.

Mike highlights the big problem with mailblocks. You see they have NO SPAM filter. They simply challenge every piece of mail you get, and whomever can figure out how to prove they are human gets to have their message delivered to your inbox.

Well the problem for me is the sheer number of spams I get and the number of e-mails that are not sent by humans that I care about. I have taken the unusual approach of having all my mail forwarded to fastmail.fm, my main e-mail host, have them scan it using their spam filter (spam assassin), which gets rid of 80% of my spam, then forwarding anything else to mailblocks which gets challenged.

Well the problem is that I still have to scan my pending folder all the time to pick out mails that I care about. There are enough of these that I just don't get the value of challenge/response. Additionally, about 6 spammers a week actually go through the challenge response and I am still getting spam from them. That just sucks.

So, I have decided to discontinue my use of mailblocks and switch most everything over to my hotmail account. The reason being, hotmail has the best server side Junk Mail Filter on the market... and I am not kidding here. I get an average 5 spam messages a week in my hotmail account, which is much easier to deal with than the 30 items I day in my mailblocks pending folder (the 20% of the spam messages that fastmail's spam assassin filter does not get). I estimate that hotmail, when set to Enhanced gets about 93% of my junk with very few or zero false positives. For me, I get on average of 180 spam messages a day! So, every percent matters.

Want to use Windows Media Player to watch QuickTime movies without the Apple player (which I find has a poor user interface, and non standard windows controls)?

http://www.free-codecs.com/download/QuickTime_Alternative.htm

The best part is that it includes a DirectShow filter. This means that any application on Windows that supports DirectShow (Windows Media Player, Media Center) can just play .mov files. Sweet!

"Jeyo Mobile Extender for Outlook adds mobile SMS messaging capabilities to your Outlook application by connecting your Outlook with a Windows Mobile Smartphone or Pocket PC Phone Edition device. It allows you to exchange text messages with other mobile phone users anywhere around the world directly from your Outlook and manage your SMS data with ease. With Jeyo Mobile Extender for Outlook, you will find using SMS from a PC as simple and easy as email."

This is a really nice piece of software and integrates very well into Outlook.

http://www.jeyo.com/products/JeyoMobileExtenderForOutlook.asp

Well my second week in Hotmail has almost come to an end. There past two weeks were the busiest in the past few years. I am amazed by how much there is to do, and how excited I am. I really like the team I'm working with, love my new office, and have some great direct reports.

My experience can be summed up like this. Last Monday I came home to my wife and basically said “If I don't start getting my ass into work by 8:30 am I'm not going to survive”. Before this I never got to work before 10:00 am. The mere thought of getting up at 6:30 to catch the train to Mountain View was a non starter. Between 8:30 and 10 is pretty much the only time you will find me in my office. I only went to the cafeteria once in two weeks. This past week I had a total of 6 hours between 10 and 6 that did not have meetings . Most of the time I had two or three meetings going on at the same time!

Anyway, tomorrow I fly to Vancouver to spend the night and then off to Alaska on a cruise that my wife's grandparents are taking us on. So exciting!!! I can't wait to play with my Nikon D70. This is probably my first real vacation in a year?

In other news, I stopped home at Borders books today and randomly found three books in the aisle that I picked up.

• The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror - this looks interesting. Being Muslim and all, I don't read enough about Islamic history and particularly modern events that have pretty much shaped public perception (mostly negative, thanks Osama).
• A People's History of the United States : 1492-Present - Last year I read a book called the History of the 20th century or something and loved it. I never got past WWI in any of my studies, and would like a refresher on US history.
• Old School - I loved A Boy's Life which I read in high school. I heard this was good.

Scott Hanselman and Clemens ran into a nasty dasBlog 1.6 bug. Basically it was possible for your entry cache to get corrupted (not your entries). Thanks to Erv Walter for quickly investigating and fixing the problem.

I have uploaded a hotfix for folks that are running 1.6. It's a single DLL that you drop into your /bin folder. I have also upgraded all the MSI installers and .zip downloads on the workspace. You can download all the releases here.

Today I got a letter from AT&T Wireless telling me how cool GSM America is (some new short lived effort on their part to stop hemorrhaging customers, till the Cingular deal is final). Here are the benefits:

• Double the coverage
• Improved signal strength, even in buildings, for enhanced call quality
• No roaming charges from coast to coast
• No domestic long distance charges

“One of the way we've improved our service is by making special arrangements with other carriers. So although you might see the name of another carrier on your phone's screen, you will not pay roaming charges.”

Translation:

Cingular just purchased us. If you live under a rock and don't know this, then check out our clever marketing in this message. You have nothing new. We aren't telling you who this special arrangement is with because we want to keep our name and launch a new service with Sprint using CDMA. At that point we're sure to have confused the hell out of you.

Lets look at the bullet points.

Double the coverage - not really, since there is 80% overlap in their existing coverage.

Improved signal strength, even in buildings, for enhanced call quality - um, not for me. I don't have an 850 MHZ phone, so net change is zero unless I get a new phone.

The last two I already have... it's called a nation plan.

I have released my Media Center Front Display Panel SDK. You can find API documentation here.

This is an SDK that I created to give you a managed API and State Aggregator to get notified of state from the Media Center State Aggregator Service. If you have a Windows Media Center 2004 machine you can implement IFrontPanelDisplay and do what you want with the information. In other words, if you want to write some code that gets notified of things like current tv show, elapsed time, volume level and so on then this is for you.

For example, Ian Kennedy (a fellow MSFT employee) wrote a C# implementation for the Hitachi HD44780 Parallel Port Vacuum Fluorescent Display that comes with our D.VINE Media Center cases. I wrote an implementation for my machine using his code and voilà. If you happen to have a Media Center box with such a VFD you can feel free to download it.

I've been soo busy this week that I haven't even had the time to enjoy some of the wonderful things the press are saying about Office 2004. I worked on Entourage 2004 for about 16 months before moving on to Virtual PC. I just saw this review in PC Magazine and it had this wonderful paragraph

Entourage's main competition comes from Apple's own Mail, Address Book, and iCal apps, which are preloaded on every new Mac. While the price is right, Entourage's various utilities are so thorough and well integrated that it puts Apple's efforts a distant second in quality.

I couldn't be happier about that. I am really proud of this release, and of the people that made it all happen. One of the things I spent about 6 months working on is the S/MIME v3 support that we added to Entourage. This was a huge undertaking for us and I had an amazing developer and tester working on it with me. Getting my head wrapped around PKI, X.509 and S/MIME took a very long time, and trying to design a simple solution to meet the needs of our users took even longer. I'm happy that our users can now send secure encrypted/signed e-mail.

Another feature I worked on was the DAV Mail replication that we added to replace our IMAP Mail solution for Exchange. Entourage 2004 has a local sync model just like cached exchange in Outlook 2003.

But my favorite feature of Entourage 2004 is the three column view that Dennis designed (based on Outlook 2003's implementation).

Found a solution for my annoying toolbar changing behavior between IE and Explorer.

Go to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Toolbar\ShellBrowser

and Set the Permissions for your account to Deny. Haha, take that Windows. Try and change things now.

THIS IS DRIVING ME NUTS!!!

Every few hours of using my computer, my Explorer Shell inherits the layout of my IE toolbars. This is NOT WHAT I WANT. I manually move them back the way they are supposed to be, then lock toolbars and then all of a sudden the Explorer Shell Toolbar layout is back to being the same as IE.

Does anyone have a fix for this? RegKey? Does Windows XP hate me?