shahine.com/omar/

Latley, I've been using Excel a LOT. Right now it powers (along with the people of course) the development process we are using in Hotmail (Modified Scrum). There are features in Excel that I didn't even know about till I started looking at the template that we have here (created by the Engineering Excellence Group). One thing I always strugle with is how to create a Pivot Table. I usually curse at my machine, and go find some one else in my hallway that knows how to create a Pivot Table with the information I want.

Ask no more. O'Reilly has a how to for Pivot Tables. Rock on.

I think I might have to purchase Excel: The Missing Manual.

There are a few things I still use Google for.

1. Stock Quotes inline for search results
2. Mobile Local/Maps
3. Spell Checking in the Google Toolbar
4. Usenet search (if you write code you need this)
5. Movie Time Search

#1 and #2 no longer a reason thanks to MSN Search. However, MSN Mobile folks, I have yet to figure out how to get to the Local link. Where is beta services?

Google, listen up. Your services aren't "sticky" yet. I can and will go to the better product anytime I like. Right now, the MSN Search guys are shipping new bits faster than you. Like the MSN Weather Plugin (rockin), MSN Screen Saver, and Desktop Search.

So last night Lora and I went to SBC Park (I liked it when it was called Pacific Bell Park better) to see Dave Matthews Band. This must have been like the 6th DMB concert we've been to. My first DMB concert was at the Irving Plaza in 1993. Back then it was just UVA kids and a few other enlightened souls. Satellite was the big song back then.

The best thing about this concert? Jem and Black Eyed Peas opened. It was the best part of the concert. SBC is way to big and awkward for Concerts though. Most of the DMB shows I've seen are at outdoor amphitheaters which are better suited. SBC Pack is a place that you need a band like U2 cause they are big enough to put on a real huge and exciting show (and they probably need a football stadium anyway).

Anyway, Jem was just fantastic. Black Eyed Peas were also great, but it was so closed that Fergie wore the most clothing I've ever seen on her .

Oh, it was freaking freezing. Dammed San Francisco Weather.

Special thanks to the folks who downloaded and tested the RC. Scott just announced that 1.8 is now finished. Between the RC and this version I added the ability for DasBlog to ping pretty much any site that supports the ping protocol. Before we only had support for Weblogs and blo.gs. Now we can support anyone that can speak regular and extended ping protocol.

And thanks to Scott for putting the release together. If this were on my plate right now it would not have happened for a while (Kahuna keeping me busy).

Here is my recommendation to you folks running dasBlog:

1. Turn off Referrals. they are useless to look at in posts now. The spammers have won.
1. You can do this by going to your Configuration and unchecking "Save referrals along with entries (not recommended for high traffic sites)"
2. Clean all your dayfeedback files of your referrals. The DasBlogUpgrader can do this for you (do it on a backup!!!).
3. Turn on Use Post Title for Permalinks. GUIDs are soo ugly.

update: added info about how to turn off referral tracking in posts.

It’s always cool when you get props from other folks in the company, especially folks who work on start.com/3 . Thanks for the feedback Sanaz, we hope to address your concerns over the coming months!

MSN Spaces just launched a beta mobile version. It’s really well done and already posted from my Treo. It’s a great, simple mobile experience and I was really impressed. Kudos to the Spaces and the MSN Mobile Team.

Url is: http://mobile.spaces.msn.com/

Well, the fun continued this week. I exchange my Shuttle ST20G5 at Fry’s on Monday morning. It was actually quite humorous to watch the Fry’s folks “test” my PC to really make sure it was broken. I basically had to assemble it for them so it could boot, so that they could see that it could not boot.

Not sure why I exchanged it, rather than returning the whole thing. But I had a glimmer of hope, and I like the form factor. After assembling the new box I could not get S3 to work at all without weird green specs on my DVI display after wake from standby. I twiddled dozens of unecessary BIOS settings that only a real geek would care to even mess with before giving up.

I returned the whole kit and kaboodle to Fry’s this morning. I got a trainee return person and it took 30 minutes, but I got every penny back . Here is what I learned:

1. Never buy a Shuttle PC. They are buggy, the BIOS releases are buggy, and if you read the release notes for the BIOS you’d understand. If you even read the forums for but a brief moment you’d come to the same conclusion.
2. Avoid ATI Chipset based motherboard with on-board graphics. Maybe it was Shuttle’s fault, but I blame ATI as well. The built in video was flakey, the drivers were flakey.

Now, I have built 3 PCees in my life. All were Intel based motherboards, Intel processors and everything worked as advertised. S3 works on my Media Center, old desktop etc. The BIOS upgrades are stable, the manuals are in english, tech support is available, and I just trust that the stuff works. When you buy an AMD, you are getting some third party chipset etc, and I just don’t trust this stuff any more.

So I went back to newegg, and found a nice SFF case that supports microATX allowing me to get a good old Intel Motherboard (yipee). So here is what I got:

• Case: SilverStone SST-SG01
• Processor: Pentium D 820 (Dual Core)
• 1 GB RAM
• Sony DRU800A DVD DL Writer
• Intel D945GT Motherboard
• ATI Radeon X550 Graphics Card

Why am I doing this to myself? I want a Small Form Factor PC, and sadly, none of the big guys make one that can supporr RAID + 2 IDE Drives. I also want a PC that’s quiet and does S3 Standby (Suspend To Ram). That leaves no real option but to build.

This brought a smile to my face:

REDMOND, Wash. — Aug. 9, 2005 — Microsoft Corp. and Scott Richter today announced they reached a full settlement of Microsoft’s claims against Mr. Richter and his company OptInRealBig.com LLC. As part of its effort to fight spam, Microsoft filed a lawsuit against Mr. Richter and his company in December 2003, when he was ranked one of the top spammers in the world. In July 2005, Mr. Richter was removed from the Register of Known Spam Operators maintained by the Spamhaus Project, a leading anti-spam and consumer advocacy organization.

…

Microsoft will direct $5 million of the settlement to expand the company’s Internet safety partnerships with governments and law enforcement worldwide through technical training, investigative and forensic assistance, and the development of new technology tools. The company has pledged an additional $1 million to provide many community centers in New York state broader access to computers for underprivileged children and adults through Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential Program.

Mr. Richter said today he had changed his e-mailing practices in part because Microsoft and the New York Attorney General sued him in December 2003. “In response to Microsoft’s and the New York Attorney General’s lawsuits, we made significant changes to OptInRealBig.com’s e-mailing practices and have paid a heavy price,” Mr. Richter said. “I am committed to sending e-mail only to those who have requested it and to complying fully with all federal and state anti-spam laws.”

And what a nice way to spend 7 million .

This is going to sound silly, but I was really really sad about his death. I remember when I was growing up my father and I would watch him on TV every day (back when you would watch the news with your parents). I remember watching him at the Berlin Wall. I never knew or watched any of the other shows/anchors. Today I find CNN to be frustrating (as are the other networks). When I am overseas, it’s a breath of fresh are to watch the BBC.

Peter was a great anchor because he was a fantastic reporter. I don’t feel that he ever pushed his agenda on anyone, and that’s how I like my news.

I never got to meet him, but I feel like I knew him. So very sad. If only because it’s a gentle reminder that the things I know and have experienced are starting to slip away.

As always, every few years the technology tax must be paid. This past weekend I picked up a Shuttle ST20G5 from Fry’s along with a proc and 2 GB of memory. I spent a bunch o time making a bootable XP SP2 CD with the SATA driver and my Promise RAID ATA driver slipstreamed (no floppy). Thanks to nLite this was a breeze. If you ever need to make a bootable Windows CD with your drivers, custom tweaks etc this is the app to get.

Anyway, I got everything, I mean everything working. And then the fun began. I had to make S3 standby work. I correctly configured S3 in the bios, but then realized that there was a special BIOS setting to allow USB devices to wake the machine from sleep, and it was off by default. Well, I turned it on and no dice. So I went back in the bios, and saw that there was a setting to allow a PS/2 Keyboard to wake it from sleep. So I turned it on and that worked (thanks to the fact that my MS Keyboard has both USB and PS/2). Then I was like, I wonder if this is fixed in the latest bios. So I installed that. Then my Monitor would blank out every 10 or so seconds. So I went back to the original ATI drivers that came with the motherboard. Problem fixed. But, my S3 problem was still there with USB (not PS/2). I should have just called it a day. Then really weird stuff started to happen, like weird video problems and windows telling my that my user profile was busted (could not load the registry).

Argggghhhh!!!! So then I go and re-install Windows. Easy enough since I have a bootable CD with all the goods. While that’s going on, I read up on some forums and find out that the bios I am using is completely unstable, and everyone in the forums is using the original version that shipped with the PC. So I figure, I’ll be safe and roll back. Well after Windows is installed, I do just that and Windows blue screens during the update process. Now my Shuttle is a big fat paper weight and I’m never getting back those hours I just wasted.

So I took everything apart, took the RAM/CPU out (and that dammed thermal grease). Now back to Fry’s to exchange this for a new one so I can back to where I was on Saturday (where I had S3 wake working using PS/2). I like the size and quietness of this thing to much to use anything else at this point. Sigh.

I know I'm being punished.

I agree with Steve, Consolas is the best programming/fixed-width font I’ve used. The ClearType hinting is excellent. I managed to grab the font a while back and it’s one of the first things I install on my XP boxes.

Now the real question is will Word, Excel etc change their default font from Arial to something > Arial. Arial is optimized for printing, not on-screen reading like Tahoma and Verdana. I hate Arial. Plus Arial looks horrible on a Mac.

This is pretty impressive. Actually, two things are. 1) India will be buying 490 planes in the next 20 years, and 2) the 700-200LR Can fly from India to San Francisco non stop (9,000 miles). That's amazing.

OMG OMG OMG!

Treo 670

Wow, this is FANTASTIC (if it’s actually going to ship).

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be inviting some folks into the Hotmail beta. Today is our first attempt at that, and it looks like it was a success. We made a little treasure hunt for people, and by the looks of it, things went well .

Part of our treasure hunt involved using MSN Spaces. I love this post:

“I totally want to check out the beta, enough so that I opened a spaces account just to track back to this article. Hopefully I'll make the list and I can see how much cooler Kahuna is than the current Hotmail, which is looking a bit dated.” [Ryan Blank]

As I said, there will be more ways to get into the beta soon .

Josh Ledgard and Kevin Briody have some good Microsoft tips. [via Furrygoat]

Here is my top 10. Many of these were borrowed from other great folks.

1. Process is no substitute for thinking

Don’t use process as an excuse, or get cornered into a hole because of process. If you use your brain, you’ll find it’s sometimes amazingly powerful at accomplishing hard things.

"we don’t pay you to type – we pay you to think"

2. Get out of your office

Seriously, get out of you chair, walk into the hallway and realize the full potential of being located near your entire team. Resist the urge to send them mail when you can just write it down somewhere and bring it up the next time you see them. On top of that, get to know your team. You’ll find you have an amazing set of co-workers who want to ship a kick ass product with you.

3. Use your product (the one your customers will)

There is no excuse for not knowing everything you can about your product. Don’t get stuck in a silo. The most successful folks at Microsoft have an amazing amount of breadth and depth to the product. If all you have is depth, you are going to limit your potential. When some one external to your team asks you a question about your product, try and asnwer it youself. Don't just reply CC'ing the person who owns that aspect of the product. You'll save an email, and learn something if you do.

Finally, you are shipping this thing to people who expect to use it. If you don't, how do you know you are shipping the right product?

4. Fix things that are broken rather than complain about them being broken. Actions speak better than your complaining.

I can’t tell you how much I value people who don’t ask to fix something, they just take the initiative and make the team’s life better. Fix one broken thing a year and you’ll be amazed at the results.

5. Make hard problem look easy. Don’t make easy problems look hard.

If you make a really hard problem look easy you are a rock star. If you make a really easy problems look hard, then you are making my life (or some one else’s) harder than it needs to be. I have my own problems, don’t bring me more of them.

6. Use the right communication tool for the job.

You need to learn how to communicate to the different people at Microsoft. You can’t talk to the planners or the marketing folk the same way you talk to you developers and testers. If you VP is on a thread, don’t reply with some useless thread propagating crap. Take discussions offline, meet with people, GET OUT OF YOUR OFFICE, and use email sparingly. Think twice, I mean three times about adding anyone to a thread. Once you do they are stuck on that thread from hell till it dies a few days later.

7. Learn to make mistakes.

Microsoft is amazingly forgiving about making mistakes. Software development is an Art, not a science. Try new things, go for the gold, be big and bold. You will screw up, don’t lament, learn and move on. Don’t make the same mistake twice.

8. Keep things simple.

Don’t over complicate things because you can.

9. Add value all the time

You are at the world’s largest software company that has some of the best minds and resources in the industry. Try and add value every day (by thinking). Help your team, co-workers, and other teams be the best they can.

10. Use their product

Make it a point to dogfood other team’s products. Get on their discussion or dogfood DLs. Try their new stuff, give them good feedback and bugs. You’ll get to know new people and personalities in the company, and you’ll be helping Microsoft ship better software. Microsoft has an amazing culture of getting and giving good candid feedback. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to help make another team’s stuff better.