shahine.com/omar/

Yesterday I read Thomas Hawke’s post about Media Center Sucking and didn’t know what to think. I can entirely empathize with how he feels. I also can understand and appreciate Charlie Owen’s response.

Here is my take. I still remember the day I got Media Center working. I had a TiVo for 2 years and loved it to death. I went to great lengths to build a Media Center 1.0 back when you could not do so. I had to scrounge a remote and tuner card from a buddy (who shall remain nameless). There was no such thing as “dogfooding” back then. But I made it happen, and I watched the internal Microsoft community grow around Media Center. My internal blog at Microsoft got a lot of traffic cause at one point I had the authoritative 50 step process on how to build your own Media Center box.

A lot has changed since then. Building a MCE box is a cake. I no longer use TiVo. Two versions have shipped since v1 (once a year) and I dogfooded each one. When Media Center Extender went into alpha I was one of 5 people selected for dogfood (5 people outside the MCE team). I was also selected to dogfood Portable Media Center. I was on all the DLs giving tons of feedback, filing bugs, and helping make the product great. I was incredibly happy and excited about the work the team was doing. I truly love my Media Center, but things have changed. I can claim credit for the fact that on a DVI based 16:9 plasma, the stretch/zoom modes work perfectly . I filed a bunch of bugs in this area. Same goes for 5.1 discrete audio support from WMV and AC3 audio. Finally I spent a lot of my time building support for my Front Panel Display, and giving the team tons of feedback about the APIs.

This year was the first year I did not dogfood Media Center. Why? I am addicted to high-def, and I get my high-def from comcast. I no longer use my Media Center as a DVR. I do use the extender to watch TV in my bedroom, and I do use it to record shows that are only offered in lo-def (like the daily show). But I pretty much stopped using it for timeshifting. The comcast solution is a piece of crap, but it works most of the time and allows me to timeshift HD, and that is the high order bit these days.

I still use Media Center for my music, photos, and DiVX stuff. But not much more. So I can understand how Thomas feels, and I can see Charlie’s perspective. But the reality is, my Media Center has turned into an appliance, and it can be so much more. Not having the hi-def cable support is truly unfortunate. I know the team is working hard on this, but the reality is, if I had to deal with the cable industry for my job, I’d quit.

PS - I do wish Windows Media Player was a whole lot more usable. The fact that there is no word wheeling is just weak. iTunes is phenomenally easier to use (but I still refuse to install it on my PC cause it's has all these useless running processes for no good reason).

The second Airbus this year that makes a safe crash landing and everyone survives. Amazing.

Cool, our Kahuna Channel 9 video is posted! With that, our beta users should be getting fresh code tomorrow with a number of cool features we demoed in the video.

A number of folks in the Hotmail org participated in this video.

• Imran (PM on the Mail User Experience & Safety)
• Pablo (Lead PM on the Backed team and Human Spam Filter)
• Aditya (PM on my team)
• Reeves (Lead PM on the UX Team)
• Walter (Dev Lead for Kahuna and architect of FireAnt)
• Me (Lead PM on the Infrastructure/Architecture)

Also, there is some great new info out there on Kahuna. Walter recently gave a talk at the PDC and you can get his slides here.

Aditya also posted some of the stats on Hotmail from Walter’s talk:

• ~200 million active users
• 3.3 billion inbound emails a day
  • 1.5 billion blocked at the router
  • 1.0 billion deleted as spam (never hits the user's mailbox)
  • 0.5 billion sent to the junk folder
• Over 100 million messages sent a day
• 80 - 100 million logins per day
• 5000 peak logins per second

I still find these numbers humbling. Last year when I visited our data center I got a sense of exactly what this looks like, and words can't describe it.

Of course, our secret weapon in developing Kahuna has been the creation of what we refer to as the STaR team (It stands for something but I forget). Basically, this is a dedicated set of folks who deal with the current live site (the code that everyone except the beta users are on). They allow us to do our jobs w/o losing focus on the challenge at hand (getting Kahuna to have the features our users want, and building it to scale).

As we make progress on our development I hope to post more about what it’s like building a service to scale.

Wow, this is a milestone. For the first time in the history of Entourage, a new version was released that doesn’t have anything new in there that I spec’ed :-(. So sad. Entourage still is the work I am most proud of. When I started at Microsoft, Entourage was a secret project; an offshoot of Mac Outlook Express.

The team did a bunch of work around Exchange and the release should be great news for any Mac users in an Exchange environment.

Dennis has a good run down of the features.

I wasn’t even paying attention and Steve started pointing folks here for Kahuna invites… well, one person already emailed me, so I have 4 more now . A couple of you guys that have emailed me in the past are already on my list so no need to mail me again.

We’re getting ready to release a refresh to Kahuna this week, and have some great new features for the beta users…

update: invites all gone

Unless I am mistaken, this new thinkpad has a Windows key. If that’s true, I think I know what my next laptop will be .

Currently, IBM has refused to add the Windows Key to any of their laptops. I guess this is a remnant of the OS/2 days.

I’m beginning to realize that the Thinkpad is pretty much the top of the food chain in the PC world for laptops. People that have them swear by them. The quality seems better, but they cost way more than Dell’s. Anyhoo, up till now I never considered a Thinkpad cause of the Windows key thing. Too many of my favorite shortcut keys use the Windows key.

Congrats to Dan Crevier on shipping Max. Dan has been working on this for quite a while now. I’m looking forward to trying it out.

There are at least two former MacBU folks working on Max. Dan Crevier is a Software Architect on the product, and Hillel Cooperman, the Product Unit Manager, used to be a PM on MacIE!

Max has a blog.

Like Scott, I keep a set of Registry Keys handy to tweak my machine the way I want. Scott posted a list of the ones he uses and Jeff Atwood posted his. Both are great and I’ve already got them in my Registry Hacks folder. I love the “Disk Cleanup” fixes.

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.