shahine.com/omar/

Once a year I happen to learn about a new shortcut key that just amazes me. Usually it’s because it’s something I didn’t know was possible or was possible but required to many mouse clicks. Recently I learned of control-space and had that same reaction.

Control-Space

In Microsoft Word, selecting text and typing Control-Space will clear the formatting. Since I do this dozens of times a day when copying/pasting text into Word Mail this is super handy. Many thanks to Adam Barr for blogging this.

Control-+ (NumPadPlus)

This will cause any item list control in Windows to “Auto Fit” I use this all the time in the explorer shell to make all the columns in details view automatically fit to the items in the list. If you are a Microsoft employee, you’ll be happy to know that this works in Product Studio. I love this. Doing this on a Laptop is a few more keystrokes since you don’t have a NumPad that you can access without the Function key. I’ll post a way to fix this later.

As far as I can tell, this shortcut is not documented anywhere.

WindowsKey-E

This will launch the Explorer Shell to the My Computer View. I do this dozens of times a day.

WindowsKey-D

This will display the desktop and hide all application windows.

WindowsKey-L

This will Lock your desktop or switch user if you have FUS turned on.

Alt-F1

In Outlook this will hide the folder list, giving your reading pane more room to view a message.

WindowsKey-Q

If you have Office Communicator, this will expand it from the Tray and place focus in the Word Wheel Control so you can quickly initiate a chat.

Control-Alt-M

If you have Windows Desktop Search, and the Taskbar Toolbar visible, this will place focus in that control.

It’s kind of sad, but I’m no longer a Tablet PC Owner. I had a Toshiba Potege 3500 and then a Toshiba M200 for the past 3 years. I truly believe in the tablet platform, but not in convertible notebook designs. I ended up getting a regular old non-sexy boring looking laptop and I could not be happier (well I have some problems I need to blog about later).

My #1 reason for getting a normal laptop? The Screen. I stare at a Laptop for way to many hours. I need a bright, high resolution screen that is beautiful. The Tablet screens have an awful plastic coat to them and are not very crisp. Also I found that I would use the pen stuff about once every 2 months. I now have a Moleskine to write in, so I stopped using digital ink. Instead I copy relevant notes to OneNote later on. Finally, I CANNOT take the thousands of Toshiba processes that run on these things. I don’t need a stinking process for each hotkey on my keyboard. I hope people at Microsoft realize that the OEMs are destroying the user experience for end users. It's my belief that our platform should have all the "hooks" necessary to make OEM customization and expansion of hardware a consistent and seamless process. If I have to install 15 things from a clean Windows Install to make the laptop work, then we have failed. This is not tablet specific, but Laptop specific, and the Tablet just makes the problem worse since there is even more custom hardware.

Here are my other reasons:

Toshiba Tablet

• Screen is Dim
• DPI is too high and Windows support for changing DPI is frustrating
• Screen at 12 inches with 1400 x 1050 is eye killing
• Fans are always on
• Machine is hot
• Has 5000 little processes that run all day hogging up CPU, memory and space in my task manager
• Wireless support is flakey
• Battery life is mediocre

Dell Latitude D610

• Beautiful 1400 x 1050 14 inch screen
• Fan is never on, and when it is I can barely hear it
• Wireless support rocks
• Has little to no processes for proprietary buttons and crap. The Power Management software doesn’t get any better.
• It almost fully charges its batteries in 1 hour! This is killer
• Built in smart card reader
• Shock protection for hard drive
• Support for 2 batteries and about 5–6 hours of juice with 1 hour recharge in the middle = all day battery power.

When I do get another tablet, it will likely be very small, and dedicated for just using a pen. I would love one of these OQO devices as a Tablet PC or this Motion if it weren’t so expensive.

Now this Dell is not without it’s problems. I hand picked it and the only choices I had were a Toshiba M4 (bigger M200) or a Tecra M3 (I’ve heard they are noisy). So I had a Dell custom built and ordered. So far, the big problem I have with this Dell is that it’s worthless for listening to audio with headphones. There is some nasty white noise that I’m guessing I’m stuck with as Dell is silent on the issue even though numerous folks have complained about the problems in their forums. The good news is that a $20 USB Gizmo from Turtle Beach is an adequate work around for when I actually use headphones on my laptop (I have a portable audio player, so not often, maybe for watching movies). I’m beginning to wonder if I should have gotten a Thinkpad, but I can’t deal w/o a Windows Key on the Keyboard.

Anyway, I’m sad to say goodbye to the Tablet, but hopefully it’s only temporary. I hope my tablet fans don’t take this the wrong way, but the reality is, the screen thing was just a deal breaker.

No, Like Steve, I'm not going to PDC. I'm pretty sad about that, but I'll save you from the details.

However, Walter Hsueh, a Lead Developer on the Hotmail Frontdoor team is giving a talk about Hotmail and Atlas. I've seen the deck and it's a great talk. Walter is a major driving force in our FireAnt Architecture for Kahuna, and in collaborating with the ASP.NET Team in Atlas. He probably has more experience than anyone else in the company building a massive scale AJAX application in .NET.

Here are the details on the talk he is giving. If you are interested in AJAX, Hotmail, or Atlas I strongly suggest you attend.

PRSL02 - Case Study: How Hotmail Used Atlas and ASP.NET to Build a Great User Experience

September 14, 12:30 PM - 1:15 PM 152/153 (Hall F) Walter Hsueh

Microsoft's Hotmail web application team is developing the successor to Hotmail: a modern webmail experience focused on safety, simplicity, and speed. We will walk you through the scale and performance requirements of the Internet's largest distributed webmail application and show you how building on ASP.NET and Atlas technologies provides the right solution for the problem space. Learn from our experiences and design patterns of how we leveraged the "Atlas" programming model and "Atlas" components to build rich, interactive Web applications.

Every few weeks I get an email from some one asking me how I got started programming, or learned .NET and what books I’d recommend.

Well, 2 or so years ago (I think) I had never written a line of .NET code. I had some BASIC experience (small amount), a bit of scripting experience and two 100 level college courses on java and C++. I’d never written a Windows Application though.

I’ve read the following books at one point or another. I’m listing them in the order I’d read them today. I’d note that I actually learned VB.NET first, and then switched to C# a few months later. The switch took a few days of getting used to.

1. Programming C# – Jesse Liberty
2. C# Essentials
3. A Programmer’s Introduction to C# – Eric Gunnerson
4. Windows Forms Programming in C# – Chris Sells
5. Essential ASP.NET With Examples in C# – Fritz Onion
6. Programming .NET Components – Juval Löwy
7. Mastering Regular Expressions – Jeffrey E. F. Friedl
8. C# Cookbook

Besides reading books, I spent a lot of time using Goolge’s USENET search feature, and of course looking at real code like BlogX, then dasBlog. But the best way to learn is to think of something you would like an application to do, and write it yourself. GotDotNet has a ton of great user contributed projects, and samples to investigate.

I wanted to impress on folks the size of my new portable device. This picture is a side by side of the samsung and the remote control for my Zen Micro. What I can't figure out is why Best Buy is the only store selling these devices.

You know, I think Samsung is going to be a force to recon with. I have a Samsung Plasma display and love it. I find that their products are more usable than Sony products. They don't have the corporate baggage that Sony has (like supporting all these weird things like Memory Stick, Mini Disk, ATRAC3, Network Walkmans etc).

For a big 20 - 40 GB Music Player the Toshiba Gigabeat looks promising.

I was going to write a review of FolderShare, but all I was able to mutter was my excitement about one small feature, the MSN Desktop Search Integration. Well, Dennis Cheung managed to write a review already and to be honest, there is nothing more to say.

Since then Om Malik and Walt Mossberg have written glowing reviews of the product.

I really can’t add much here except to say that I continue to be amazed at this little gem. “It just works”.

I’m thinking of buying my parents the Iomega Network drive with built in FolderShare support. My parents don’t understand backup, and this is an easy way to provide them some form of redundancy. Most Iomega drives seem to support FolderShare, although it’s unclear what “support” means. I’m particularly interested in their 160GB Network Drive since it runs FolderShare natively.

FolderShare has some other great uses.

1. I can sent my family and friends my photos w/o any intermediate services
2. When traveling I can have offiste backup from my hotel room via laptop + internet
3. My wife and I can share files between our laptops.

Lately, I’ve been interested in Geotagging my photos. Ever since smugmug added mapping support it got me thinking. 10 years from now it would be sweet to be able to pull up photos from travel and sightseeing and see where those places actually are. Lora and I are going back to Paris and Egypt in a few weeks and I wish that I could see all the pictures that I took last time on a map. Now that would be nifty.

My Camera doesn’t have GPS, but 2 weeks ago in Vegas I saw Reeves with one of these Garmin Geko 201 devices. It’s a bit large and ugly, but it’s cheap. Doing some more research I found the Garmin Foretrex 101 which seems a bit nicer. Both will set you back about $125. The Foretrex is a bit smaller, has longer batterylife, and can be mounted to your wrist (or in my case, camera strap or bag).

Why do I want an external GPS device? Well Microsoft Research has written two neat applications which they have on their World Wide Media Exchange website. WWMX TrackDownload will connect to a Garmin GPS device via the Serial Port (don’t ask, apparentley serial is still popular at Garmin) and downloads thousands of little “bread crumb” tracks. You can then use WWMX Location Stamper to load the GPS data and automatically stamp your photos with the nearest GPS breadcrumb. The Location Stamper will also allow you to stamp your photos using the Mappoint web services.

Now this brings me to my next point. This GPS technology is soo ass backwards. My camera should have a chip, like my phone. However, comparing it to my phone is lame because the functionality is locked away by the carrier/manufacturer. Instead I have to chose from Garmin who seems to still be making state of the art technology for the 90s. Big ugly serial devices that eat batteries.

I think there is a market here for GPS devices specifically targeted at Geotagging. The good news is that Microsoft Research is providing some great tools to tag photos. Combined with services from smugmug, you can see your photos in 3 dimensions.

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.