shahine.com/omar/

The folks at smugmug have been busy. In the past week they overhauled some of their templates to be more AJAXy, which should improve album browse performance.

They also added support for geotagging. Very cool.

Meanwhile, Don MacAskill, one of smugmug’s co-founders posts a great response to Download Squad's post calling them an also-ran.

When people ask my wife what she does, sometimes she jokes and says she saves lives. The reality is, she delivers babies, and helps in the process of bringing new life into this world.

A few days ago she came home as I was waking up to go to work and seemed sad. When I asked her why she was sad she told me how a woman came into San Francisco General Hospital complaining of something or another. However, after running some tests, my wife was perplexed as to the results. A few folks wanted to just send her home, thinking she was fine. However, Lora insisted that she stay under observation.

Now, for some framework. San Francisco General is the city county hospital located in the Mission District. It by no means caters to affluent folks, or people who are typically insured. My wife sees a lot of “interesting” things. It’s also San Francisco’s only trauma center. So if you get shot 10 miles away, you are in for a long ambulance ride.

Anyway, what Lora found out was that the patient’s baby was dead, and no one knew how long. When a baby dies, and you don’t evacuate it, it starts to release deadly toxins into the body that will eventually kill you. This person was very close to death. Lora arranged for a late night surgery and the patent is now in the Intensive Care Unit recovering. This is a decision that was entirely her call, no one was there to help her make this choice.

What would have happened had they sent her home? I don’t even know if she had a home.

Why am I writing about this? Sometimes I think my job is so hard, and that the decisions at work that I have to make are so difficult. I get paid quite a bit of money (substantially more than my wife) to make software. It’s entirely possible that the software I work on somehow saves lives. However, the decisions I make on a daily basis do not.

If anything I’m grateful that there are people like Lora willing to make such sacrifices to make decisions that I can never make, and have a truly profound impact on one’s life.

We have this problem in Hotmail. If you walk away from your desk, even for a brief moment, and your PC is left unlocked, someone will walk in, and send mail to a broad distribution list with something silly. Like “I like oranges”, or worse things. Some of them even down right embarrasing.

For some reason this is called “Goating”. Anyway, I find it incredibly annoying. My office has a lock on the door, so I am just in the habbit of keeping my door locked when I walk away.

When I saw Scott’s article I was intrigued. I orderd one of these gizmo’s from ThinkGeek and it arrived tonight. I installed .NET Framework 2.0 and Scott’s software, plugged in the device (no drivers required) and it worked. I walked away from my PC and it locked itself.

One thing I’ve noticed is that this device is a bit sensitive to some kind of interference as my PC will think it’s out of range when I haven’t even moved the dongle.

I think this has amazing potential. I’m bringing it to work tomorrow so I can rig my PC to be “Goat Proof”. Try and mess with my machine now Hotmail people!

I have two Bluetooth headsets for use with my Treo. First I got the Motorola HS850 and then I got the Palm Treo Headset. I was going to write a review but saw that Treonauts has one.

I originally got the Motorola HS850 cause I liked the idea of the closing boom. Generally it’s a fine bluetooth headset. The best feature is that the device is “off” when the boom is closed, meaning you can effectively get weeks of standby time. The bad news is that when you get a phone call, and flip the boom on, you only have a 20% change of being able to answer the call (at least with my Treo 650).

Later on I picked up the Palm Treo Headset since I got it for cheap. It’s an incredible deal if you own a Treo because you get an international charging kit with the headset. The headset also charges using the same charger as the Treo.

The Treo Headset is by far the best headset if you own a Treo as when you dial/answer calls they automatically use the headset if it is within range. The Motorola HS850 does not support this. Furthermore, the Treo headset is more comfortable. The only drawback is that you can’t get weeks of standby time since it’s always on.

Bottom line, if you have a Treo, get the Palm Treo headset.

This is so unreal I’m not even sure what to do.

So there is this app called FolderShare. It’s amazing. More on that later, cause that’s not what I’m excited about. FolderShare just added support for MSN Desktop Search. What does this mean?

Log on to FolderShare from any computer on the planet. Enter text in the search box, and watch as you get back results from anything that is indexed on your machine running MSN Desktop Search. Holy freaking cow! I need more cowbell!

I didn’t think this would be useful till I was looking for a serial number for BlogJet which I have on my laptop but not my home PC. So I went to FolderShare.com, entered “subject:BlogJet” and the result was right there. I could pull up the email, and copy the Key.

Mind you, this email was in my Hotmail account, which I download to my PC using MSN Outlook Connector, which then gets indexed by MSN Deskopt Search. That's a lot of MSN goodness.

Freaking awesome I tell you. How much is this feature worth alone? At least the price of a FolderShare subscription. I know I am going to use this a ton. I can’t stand having multiple computers and being stuck without access to information that’s on another computer.

Not to mention FolderShare is amazing. I’ve replaced Groove File Sync with FolderShare due to the performance issues of running Groove with thousands of files (it would take over my machine for a while and consume a lot of CPU at times).

This is freaking awesome and I have to have one. I’ve always wanted to be able to walk away from my Work PC and have it “Lock” automatically etc. Have Messenger say I’m “Away” when I’m really away… geez.

Well look no further. For $15 and some free software from non other than Scott Hanselman, you can do just that.

They should put this article in the next Make Magazine (Scott just let me now that this is in progress).

update: you can purchase one from ThinkGeek.com. It's more expensive, but I got a cool t-shirt while I was at it.

Well, got all my parts from newegg (they rule) last friday and assembled my PC. Everything was smooth sailing. I have to say, I love my case. It's a perfect Small Formfactor (SFF) case and the fact that it takes a miniATX mobo means it's future proof which is nice. If I were building another desktop or media center PC I'd buy my next case from SilverStone.

You can see a very grainy photo here:

Two words sum up my experience. Intel Rules! The motherboard and processor installed w/o any problem, the instructions clearly indicated what goes where (all the front panel pinouts for USB etc) and the features are great. I have Gibabit Lan, 1394, 8 USB 2.0 Ports, 4 RAM slots, 1 PCIe x16, 2PCI and 1 PCIe, 4 SATA ports with RAID, and 1 IDE port.

The best part is that the BIOS defaulted to support S3 standby (that's a first for me) and what's even better is that it worked. This thing is flawless. Thank you Intel. Plus the BIOS doesn't have 1000 options that I don't need or care about. It's very simple and basic. I'd also add that Intel provides a Driver CD that takes care of installing every single driver that I need w/o any intervention on my part. It can even check the web for updates. Sweet.

Anyway, this thing looks great, is quieter than my Laptop (I have no case fans running, just the CPU fan and PSU on silent). At some point I will need to replace the stock Intel CPU fan, as those things are always worthless. Need to investigate more.

I really don't see why I'd ever shy away from Intel CPU/Mobo combos. This is now my 3rd and I've had nothing but positive experiences. I only wish I had never bothered with the Shuttle/AMD combo, but if I hadn't I never would have found this setup.

Update: I got some questions about how much this all costs. Here is my invoice. This gets you everything you need except hard drives (I already had two 200GB hard drives in a RAID-1 array).

• Case $188.00 
• RADEON 550 256M $79.00 
• DVD+/-RW 16X Sony DRU800A $84.99 
• Intel Pentium D 820 (2.8 GHZ) $245.99 
• Intel 945G D945GTPLKR $126.00 
• PSU Coolmax CXI-300B RT $39.99 
• DDR2 1 GB Kit (two 512 Dimms) $173.43 

Total cost was $937. Figure with 2 200GB drives another $250.

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 .