shahine.com/omar/

I have thousands and gigabytes of pictures. After installing Digital Image Suite 2006 (which rocks) I waited for a while as it created thumbnails and indexed my photos.

My wife wants to start deleting, managing, and organizing some of the photos we have taken over the years. So I logged into her account, launched Digital Image Suite and was surprised when there was nothing there. I guess I half expected that there would be a shared computer mode or something.

Well, the problem is easy enough to fix. Here is how you do it:

1. Locate %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\POD
2. Move the Pictures.pd3 file and move that to a centralized location (I placed this in D:\Files\Settings\POD\
3. Open the Registry and find HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Picture It!\11.0\POD
4. Set DBPath to the full path of the new file (for me this is D:\Files\Settings\POD\Pictures.pd3)

Now repeat this process for the second account and you are done.

I’m having a really hard time getting my head wrapped around the sheer destruction. I get the feeling that no one anticipated this amount of damage, both human and infrastructure. The pictures are just impossible to comprehend. New Orleans looks destroyed, finished, gone. I never thought a US City could be gobbled up by Mother Nature like this. In my lifetime I can’t think of a worse natural disaster. My poor brain can’t even figure out what was worse, the recent Tsunami, the Twin Towers, or Katrina. I only fully grasped the twin towers when I was in NYC in October of 2002 and being from New York City, with many affected friends, & family, it hit home like nothing else. The Tsumani was so far away, that it was hard to really understand what happened. But seeing a US city under water is just mind boggling.

Listening to NPR and watching the news I just can’t figure it out. You can’t really do anything about this kind of thing. What I wonder though is that we seem to be getting a late start to the recovery. Why wasn’t there a fleet of Navy Ships, etc waiting near by? Comfort just set sail from Baltimore today. Why wasn’t it en-route already?

Oh, and it’s nice that the President cut his vacation short. Geez. We can fight a war with tens of thousands of troops, planes, tanks, etc on a continent far far away. It takes 48 hours to start a massive recovery effort in our own country? I don’t get it. I feel really bad for the people that have been displaced by this. Their home town is gone, and uninhabitable for a long time. It’s like one of those movies Hollywood makes every few years.

I really can’t understand this.

Update: I need to clarify what I said. When I say "I really can't understand this" I'm refering to the destruction, the displacement, the force and magnitude of mother nature and just how powerless we can be when faced with natural events. We are just humans after all. We don't control weather, and can only try to prepare for this sort of thing.

So last week I was in Best Buy, intent on getting the Creative Zen Sleek to replace my Creative Zen Micro. I was kind of turned off by its size (same as iPod) but much larger than the Zen Micro. I forgot how small the Zen Micro is and wasn’t willing to carry around something bigger/heavier.

Anyway, I was completely taken aback by the Samsung YP-F1Z. It’s a 1 GB Flash based player, similar to the iPod shuffle. However, it’s TINY! I mean really really small. It also has an FM Radio, a OLED screen, Audio Recording, and Radio Recording. I picked one up for $159.

I really LOVE this device. I never realized how convenient it is to have a small selection of my favorite tunes, plus access to NPR via FM. The device is so small, that I just clip it to my shirt like the remote for my Zen Micro. In fact, it’s about the size of the Zen Micro Control. It also comes with a necklace like the shuffle with integrated headphones (I’m not keen on that though since I already have my own nice headphones).

Anyway, Samsung has a winner her. The device does not support PlaysForSure Subscription (only Download) though (which is a small bummer).

For now it seems that Best Buy is the only big retailer carrying this.

August 24th was MSN’s 10 year anniversary. What no party? Man, we’d better do something cool for Hotmail’s 10 year anniversary next July 4th.

The folks at NetCentrics have released a new version of the Getting Things Done Add-in.

I am not a fan of the software. I sent them a ton of feedback on v1 and they were kind enough to include me in the beta as well as incorporate some of my suggestions. However, I’m not going to use the new version, and frankly, I don’t think there is anything they can do that will get me using the software.

Here are my reasons:

1. The software is too overbearing
2. It mucks up Outlook with a zillion views, folders, and other stuff I don’t want.
3. It does not take advantage of Outlook features that already exist. There is plenty of duplication between what they do and what Outlook does
1. for example, Outlook tasks can have a Status field that they don’t take advantage of
4. They don’t attach emails to tasks, they duplicate all the text into the body of the task, and move it to a special hidden folder. This has a tendency to break and leave orphans (in my opinion). This is a deal breaker.
5. You can’t set due dates and reminders for tasks from their creation dialog. Also a deal breaker. Even though GTD says you aren’t supposed to do it, I do it anyway and don’t like when software isn’t flexible enough to meet my needs.
6. There is no good story for sync’ing to Palm as you can’t see your Project/Actions.

If you are using the software today, and you like it then you should upgrade. There are lots of good bug fixes and improvements in there. I for one will continue to use my hacked together, unsupported, only runs for Omar custom software that I wrote for Outlook. At least till the folks at ClearContext make my software irrelevant .

Speaking off, I had a fantastic dinner with the entire ClearContext team last night. They demo’ed some stuff in the next version and then treated me to dinner at House of Prime Rib. It was a good time.

They also showed me their ActiveWords agent. I still haven’t jumped on the ActiveWords train (sorry Buzz) but I tried it twice and just didn’t keep it around. I’ll need to spend some more time understanding the new ClearContext support.

Sony finally released the long awaited 2.0 firmware for the PSP.

This is great. I can now use WiFi to join my home network (I Use WPA, and 1.0 only supported WEP).

The best part is, there is a built in web browser, and it works pretty well! Really cool. It even renders my site.

FireAnt is a big deal for me. It’s the code name for the “plumbing” of Kahuna, the Hotmail Frontdoor rewrite. It’s one of the “Architecture” pieces that my team is responsible for helping build.

Last summer we spent a lot of time at the white-board evaluating a number of ways to deliver a new architecture for Hotmail. We considered a number of things:

1. Modification of the current C/C++ ISAPI architecture to support a hybrid ASP model.
2. .NET rewrite for the DataLayer and BusinessLayer and XML/XSLT for the PresentationLayer
3. Same as #2 but the Presentation layer would be JavaScript, XMLHTTP, and DHTML/CSS. This now has the fancy name, AJAX.

After much deliberating, we chose #3, and started running. For 4 weeks basically 1 PM, a developer and an intern built a prototype, and then the real thing (in case you are in college I’d note how cool it is that we put an intern on the most important technology we we're building). As more people started to move over to the FireAnt project, we got more and more excited about what was happening. You see, writing AJAX code can be a pain, and we didn’t want to spend our days and nights writing a lot of JavaScript and debugging client side Script. Instead we built an infrastructure that dynamically take server side objects (classes and methods) and automatically generates client side JavaScript stubs. The end result is that the client side object model looked exactly like the server side object model. Information was transported across the wire using XMLHTTP and the whole thing happened Asynchronously.

We extended .NET Attributes to mark classes and methods as FireAnt classes/methods and at build time the script is generated. If you think of SOAP support in the .NET Framework, it’s basically similar. As a developer you do not worry about generating SOAP messages, or building a SOAP parser. All you do is mark your method as [WebMethod] and your classes as [Serializable] and the .NET framework takes care of proxying, class generation etc. That’s what we were shooting for.

This was a big deal for us as it allows us to be incredibly productive. Since last summer, we have built a ton of features using FireAnt and the JavaScript Frameworks from Scott Isaacs. Late last fall we went up to Redmond and showed FireAnt to a number of folks in MSN, one of those folks was Steve Rider. It was really exciting to see the looks on folks faces when Walter (our FireAnt “architect”) setup his “Hello World” demo. You could just see that people realized that doing AJAX style development any other way was crazy.

We’ve since showed our stuff to a number of teams inside Microsoft. As a result of our work, Walter and Scott have spent a considerable amount of time with the Whidbey/ASP.NET folks and it’s pretty exciting to see ATLAS come together. If you want to learn more, Walter will be giving a talk at the PDC on what we’ve built. It’s great so see collaboration between our team and the Developer Division as the end result will be a better more scalable version of the .NET Framework for you.

We also just wrapped up another Channel 9 video, with more folks than the last one. It should be a great video when Robert is done editing it.

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.