shahine.com/omar/

This is one of my favorite live sites, and I've been waiting to blog about for a few weeks.

If you have a custom domain (like me) and you want to give out free hosted email accounts to family members and friends (in my case, shahine.com has a few accounts that my family uses) go to http://domains.live.com/.

Windows Live Custom Domains allows you to basically point your MX record to us (Windows Live) and get free Windows Live Mail accounts, messenger accounts, and well anything you can use a passport for. No longer are any @hotmail.com or @msn.com domains necessary. You can get or use your own domain, and then enable all these great services. Plus you maintain control of your domain, so you can have your web site hosted elsewhere, etc. Only your email services are hosted by us. You can also kick people out of your domain, sign up for premium features in our network (like extra storage accounts, outlook live, msn premium etc).

Oh, did I mention, the service is FREE. All you need is access to change your DNS records. Once you do that you can create accounts and give them out for folks to start using.

Reeves has an awesome tutorial on how to Geotag your photos. I just did this for my trip to Egypt and Paris and it’s unbelievably cool.

The hardest part was dealing with lots of indoor/outdoor photos and aligning those to the timeline. You also need to change your PC Timezone to whichever timezone you took the pictures when stamping them.

If you are looking for a good inexpensive GPS device to use with your camera to geotag, I highly recommend the Garmin Foretrex 101. Make sure you also order the serial cable.

Jimmy Grewal’s Weblog » I can’t believe it’s real snow

Imagine, most people in the middle east have never seen snow. I wouldn’t even know how that felt. It must feel sureal.

Flight Test Journal: Mission accomplished! 777-200LR sets world distance record

Mission accomplished! 777-200LR sets world distance record

This is actually pretty cool. Flying more than half way around the world on a single tank of gas .

I really like Backpack. It’s a great web site that lets you create (in about 10 seconds) a personal task/wiki/notes application for yourself. You can do really cool things like:

• share with anyone
• view on your mobile phone (add /mob to the end of your url like http://<username>.backpackit.com/mob/)
• email to your site
• keep track of notes, and share them
• start a wiki like page (called a whiteboard) for collaboration with other folks.

It’s all very lightweight and uses AJAX so it’s very responsive. They also have an API to program against.

One use I’ve found so far is for Lora and I to share a “Family Tasks” page.

They have a pretty good examples page which lets you see the power of the product.

www dot aditya bansod dot net - Thread Killer

I'm testing Omar's Thread Killer Outlook add-in and it's making a world of a difference in my inbox triage. Normally I spend some good percentage of the day dealing with threads that I'm only tangentally interested in. I'd either delete them or file them as new mails on the thread flow to my inbox.

Now when I see a thread that I know I'm not interested or needed in, I simply click on any message in the thread and click the "Kill Thread" button in my toolbar and like magic, I never see it again. Since I've started using it yesterday I've noticed the amount of mail in my inbox drop and I'm seeing much more relevant mail in my Inbox folder now. I've killed about 25 threads, which has saved me from 72 pieces of mail ever hitting my inbox in about 24 hours.

Aditya is one of my beta testers for Thread Killer (more like alpha tester).

I’ve had a similar bliss like experience. I love it when a few lines of code can make such an amazing change. Watch out, when this thing spreads at Microsoft, email is going to get a whole lot easier to deal with. I view this as giving power and control back to folks who have since lost it.

Sadly though, in my process of writing the add-in, I spent 80% of my time trying to get deployment to work. It’s not easy cause you need:

• Outlook 2003 SP2
• .NET Framework 2.0
• Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 Redistributable
• Office 2003 Primary Interop Assemblies
• FullTrust for the add-in location

The last bullet point has been nothing but a hair pulling experience, but thanks to some friendly folks at the Company I got a lot of help on how to fix this.

In a few days I’ll place it internally on toolbox, and if all goes well, place it for download on the web somewhere. I feel like I need to get a cool sound like a shotgun blast to play when you kill a thread.

Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger » Om wonders if Microsoft will kill Mac client of FolderShare

I actually want to see MORE investment in the Mac space, not less. Why? Cause many of the influential are using Macs (you only need to look around at a blog conference or an O’Reilly conference to see that’s true).

Here is a question right back at Robert. What software do the “influential’s” want Microsoft to make for the Mac? Is there something Apple is not doing that they think Microsoft should make instead?

The only way a new application of any sorts will get created is if there is a business model that warrants such an investment. While I was in MacBU we always had to entertain the requests for Access, FrontPage, <insert ms application here>. We also looked at areas where we could create new applications. Unfortunately, Apple already had or released those applications. The bottom line is that you cannot sell a piece of software that competes with an Apple product and make the kind of money it would take to fund that product. Apple can afford to do everything and anything in the software space because it sells more boxes to existing Mac users who tend to buy expensive new laptops every 18 months.

So, chances are if there is a need for something that’s big enough to apply to the broad Mac user base, Apple is already filling that need. If it’s not big enough to apply to the broad Mac users base then chances are there is a shareware developer filling that void.

Wohoooo!!!!!!!

I love FolderShare.

Well as usually I’m late to the party talking about live. I dunno why, but when you live and breathe something that’s been in the making for a while, I have a hard time rushing to write about it on my blog .

A lot of folks have written about Windows Live. Aditya has a good post of what it looks like in our “war room” during a release. Reeves posted a nice Mail related post. For the past few weeks Reeves has been at the helm of this release (since it required a ton of coordination and I was busy trying to ship the next update to Kahuna). Watching it come together and get out the door without any problems was fairly amazing. We had to ship a new version of “classic” hotmail that my good buddy Steve Friesen got out the door, ship an update to Kahuna, and of course, change our domain, passport setup and a million little things. It all worked.

So, what do I think about Windows Live. Well here it is:

• safety.live.com is freaking awesome. Next time my parents/friends/family call me up with computer problems I’m sending them their to run a Tuneup, Virus Scan, Protection Scan etc.
• mail.live.com rules
• the domain, live.com is pretty cool. At only 4 characters it’s easly to type live, control-return and get there in a jiffy.
• ideas.live.com is a neat way to find out about the offerings, and get to the blogs for the various services.
• favorites.live.com is interesting. I need to play with it some more.
• live.com has a mail widget!!! sweet. now to make it my homepage.

Since this is really just the beginning, I think you’ll find some cool stuff coming down the pipe.

Uh, oh. If this is the experience I can look forward to from the music labels I’m not sure what I’ll do.

Shame on you Sony.

“In this era of 3ghz processors, 1gb memory, and 500gb hard drives, why is the Windows clipboard only capable of holding a single item?”

[via Jeff Atwood]

Good question. clcl is a sweet little app. Added to my arsenal of cool little utilities. Throw it in your startup items folder, or anywhere else (it’s portable).

I love apps like this.

So, with Visual Studio 2005 now RTM’ed it was time to get my hands dirty. I haven’t written any code in a few months, and that’s sad. I’ve also never played with Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 which now contains a wonderful new Outlook Add-in model. At long last, much of the heavy lifting of creating an Outlook Add-in is nicely abstracted away (as it should be).

Anyhow, this was a great excuse to finally build something I’ve wanted Outlook to do forever. A lot of the time I will get added to a e-mail thread by some one else. I have no desire to be on this thread, nor do I have any intention of continuing to delete e-mails as they trickle in for hours, or days! So, I built Thread Killer. It’s a very simple addin consisting of a button in Outlook called Kill Thread and a subfolder of the inbox. When you select an email and press Kill Thread I add the conversation index of the email to a blacklist (managed using the new ApplicationSettings feature). Then I process all the message in the current folder and move any instance of that conversation to the same folder.

Thread Killer also listens for all new mail that you receive and checks to see if we have blacklisted that ConversationIndex and if we have, then we move it to the Thread Killer folder.

Future versions may allow you to move items to the deleted items folder (I feel safer quarantining them for now). I’ll also think of adding some heuristics so that if some one mentions your name in a reply (indicating that you may need to actually see the email) that email isn’t filed away.

I’ll be placing this on toolbox soon for MS folks, and eventually I’ll release it.

BTW, Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 ROCKS! So does Edit and Continue! Unbelievable.

update: I finally posted ThreadKiller. Howevever, the version in ClearContext v3 is a bit more reliable IMHO .

I recently discovered a problem with Windows Mobile 5 and the Pocket MSN Messenger that comes with it. If your device is a Pocket PC Formfactor (not Smartphone) and you sign into MSN Messenger, every time a contact signs into the service your device will do the following:

• Play a sound
• Place an alert on the screen with [Chat] [Ignore] buttons. The notification will remain on screen for a few seconds and interrupt whatever you are doing (like writing an email).

If you have over 200 contacts in your buddy list, chances are some one is signing into the network at least once a minute during peak hours. You can imagine the shock I had when I discovered there was no UI to turn this off. I recall from Windows Mobile 2003 that you could go into Sounds & Notifications and select the “contact online” action and disable alerts and sound. However, this does not exists on my device.

I fired off a mail to some friendly folks in the Pocket MSN team. After a few exchanges they let me know that I could manually add the registry keys for the events and that this might resolve the issue (and that this was unsupported etc etc). So I fired up PHM Regedit (freeware) and added the keys. Lo and behold, I could now mess with the notification options in Sounds and Notifications.

Here are the registry keys you’ll need to add to your device:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ControlPanel\Notifications\{A877D65E-239C-47a7-9304-0D347F580408}]
"Options"=dword:00000008
@="Messenger: Contact Online"
"Wave"="notify"
"Duration"=dword:00000000

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ControlPanel\Notifications\{A877D65F-239C-47a7-9304-0D347F580408}]
"Options"=dword:00000008
@="Messenger: New Message"
"Wave"="notify"
"Duration"=dword:00000000

 After adding these you can go to the Sound and Notifications control panel and customize the notification behavior.

Today was a hard day at work. I was my usual grumpy self. But watching this video put a big smile on my face. Thanks to my little sister for forwarding (she is engaged btw for you folks that know her).

Whenever you switch from one platform to another, or one program to another, all you are doing is trading one set of problems for another. If you think otherwise, you are kidding yourself.

You are trading the problems you know about, for the problems you don’t know about. You don’t find out they are problems till you switch and live and breath that product for a few days.

I happily used my Treo 650 for 7 months. That is a pretty good run for a phone of mine. The shortest phone tenure was the piece of crap Audiovox 4100 at about 2 months.

Well, the thing that drove me to get rid of my Treo 650 (well give it to my wife who was using a Treo 600) was that I grew VERY tired of the exchange synchronization. It was buggy as all heck. Also, only Mail and Calendar Sync’ed. No Contacts, or Tasks. Lastly, you could not do things like move message on the server, and you were limited by the OS limitations of the Palm (15 categories, 5 phone numbers). Silly stuff that should have been fixed in the last century.

When I received my k-jam I was overjoyed. There are so many wonders of this device, and the software I now have running on it that it will take me days and many words to explain. The sheer bliss of having all my exchange PIM data on my phone, robust synchronization, wifi, and loads of other stuff are awesome… except.

Starting a few days ago, ActiveSync on the device would just get stuck trying to sync to Exchange (over the air, using Exchange ActiveSync). Pressing stop resulted in the stop button being dimmed and the app becoming useless. That required me to manually quit the process or reset the device. I NEVER had this problem on my Treo. If anything the Treo was rock solid when it came to GPRS and connecting to the internet when I wanted it to. The k-jam, while more reliable at making/receiving phone calls than any other Windows Mobile device I have used, seems to do so at the sacrifice of the functionality I really care about… getting my data when I want to.

What to do… not sure, it seems i’m on my own here, suffering the terrible repricutions of an early adopter using a v1 product. Maybe some Microsoft co-worker will have pitty on me and rescue me from this gadget hell.

Like I said, trading one set of problems for another… and such is life.