shahine.com/omar/

This is a pretty eerie picture. Madison Avenue w/o any cars. It was closed yesterday, along with 5th ave, for emergency vehicles.

According to the Transit Union Head, at this point the main "sticking point" are the pension issues. Just to recap:

• MTA wants employees to retire at 62 with full pension and wants new employees to contribute 6% of  their salary toward the pension (currently they contribute 2%).
• Union wants to maintain retirement with full pension at 55 and does not want a change in contribution.

I'm sorry, but I can't have any sympathy for the strikers. Retire at 55 with full pension? Meanwhile they say this is an issue about respect? I don't believe that most Americans are so lucky to retire at 55.

I'm lucky I'm on vacation in NYC right now and not working, cause getting around is a pain. Given the way things are going, I think this strike will last a few days or more. Roger Toussaint is starting personal attacks on the Mayor. The press isn't really having any of it. I suspect he will see the inside of a jail cell or bankrupt his union before the strike is over.

For some reason, the arrogance that is fuming from this post bothers me (which is in response to Scoble's Post). I think because I feel a bit the way that Tom Harpel does. He wrote in the comments:

"Every employee of every company (I work at Microsoft) has an opportunity to make their company better by respecting its customers. If your customers are stand-in-line types, respect and embrace that. Writing off your customers because you do not relate to them will make it harder for you to design and deliver products that your customers want."

Chuq, I have been to almost a dozen Macworld Expos where people waited hours and hours in line to watch your boss give a keynote speach. I will most definetley never wait in line for a movie or a product (just cause I don't care enough), but I won't bash folks for waiting in line to anxiously get their hands on a product.

BTW - I have a iPod Nano on backorder from Amazon.com for my sister. I ordered it a few weeks ago and estimated delivery is mid January. What's that about "delivering new hardware (in volume)"?

Jimmy Grewal (my former roomate) and I met the day he was interviewing for a Program Manager role on Mac IE 5. We were roomates for over 2 years and he is one of my dearest friends. He moved back to Dubai and left Microsoft a few years ago, long after MacIE was "dead". He has a great post covering the slashdot article and I highly recommend reading it if you are at all interested in some of the politics around MacIE and the Apple/Microsoft relationship. You don't get this kind of information often (usually in books).

I really cherish the years I spent working on MacOE 5 while he worked on MacIE 5. What kind of a company gives two 22 year old kids the opportunity to lead the effort for two products they are incredibly passionate about? It's one of the reasons I love Microsoft so dearly. We were empowered to build the best email and web browser for the Mac, and both products turned into best of class software applications. Those were amazingly fun times. It's sort of how I feel about working on Hotmail Windows Live Mail, except the challenge is bigger and Jimmy is not around :-(.

Slashdot has an article about Microsoft ending MacIE support.

Of course, since I used to work on MacIE’s twin sister, MacOE, I was looking for any good nuggets or posts from former MacBU folks. I figured Jorg would write something. He paints a rather interesting history of what happened to development of MacIE after 5 was released.

MacIE 5 was developed by an amazing team of folks. They paved the way for many features that were later hacked into the browser via add-ins (Forms Autofill which is now in the Google and MSN Toolbars, but not IE Proper) and some which have yet to make an appearance (web scrapbook). I had a lot of fun working with those folks as they worked tirelessly for many months (I remember when MacIE 5’s release slipped 6 months for a 1 year project). Tantec was relentless in pursuing full CSS and DOM compliance, and got further than anyone else at the time.

The best feature of Mac IE 5 never shipped. We had to remove it from the product 2 days before releasing it. For many months there were two builds of MacIE 5, one with this feature and one without. That was also true for the new Mac IE “chrome” which was a guarded secret, till, well, Apple also happened to have the same idea and they called their’s Aqua . Those were strange times.

So I’m sitting her pondering with my wife, why the heck do I need to bring my laptop to NY? So far this year I have spent about 3 weeks without my laptop, and it’s been great. Here is what I don’t plan on doing for the next 6 days:

• Looking at work email
• Writing code (this pretty much requires I bring my laptop).
• I usually enjoy writing code in my off time, but I’d rather read a few books this time.
• Doing other work related activities

What the heck do I need to lug 6 lbs to NYC and back for? It would be nice to go through TSA security w/o one (btw, every airport I’ve been to outside the US does not do the ridiculous laptop stuff).

What I do plan on doing the next few days:

• Shopping in NYC
• Cultural Activities when I’m not freezing
• Hanging with my family
• Seeing a Broadway show
• Blogging
• Reading RSS Feeds
• Reading a Book
• Playing with my PSP

With my k-jam, wifi, parents computer etc there is really no need to lug a laptop around these days. Now if I had a sub 4 lb laptop like my wife’s tiny white Vaio that wouldn’t be so big a deal, but my big fat Dell. Bleh.

This post is even later than Scott’s… Geez I suck. Joe Stagner (fellow MSFT employee) did a very informal podcast with Scott and me a few months ago where we talk about how we both got involved in dasBlog… It’s my first podcast .

A few months ago Scott and I started getting emails from Tom Watts. Neither of us knew him, but over the past few months has put together an excellent effort to expand our community support for dasBlog. Both Scott and I can barely find the time to get some code in here or there, and have always put docs, forums etc on the back burner. Scott covers the work in more details, but the short of it is we know have real forum support, and a real community web site (powered by dasBlog of course).

To paraphrase a bit from Scott:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dasblogce 

• is still the home for the code and all bug reports go here and feature requests go here.

http://dasblog.us

• For "us" and again thanks to Tom these are the new User Forums, replacing the lame forums and discussion tools at SourceForge. There's already great content here.

http://dasblog.info and http://dasblog.net

• For "info" and also thanks to Tom, soon this will hopefully handle all documentation and FAQs and the Wiki will be retired when the content has been moved.
• dasblog.net will take you to dasblog.info after a splash screen.

Thanks Tom!!!

Lora and I went up to Squaw Valley this weekend before heading up to New York City for the holidays. We checked the weather before hand and all looked well. Saturday started off a bit cold but nice. The mountain looked like it needed a lot more snow though. Sometime in the afternoon it started coming down. We weren’t sure how bad it would be though. The next morning we woke up, took a look outside and bolted for the car. If we had left 1 – 2 hours later it would have taken us all day to get home.

Around 5,000 feet things started to look good, but then the rain started. I have never driven in rain like this. It was so loud Lora and I had to scream to each other to hear ourselves over the rain. We saw many cars off on the side of the road spun out. Thank goodness for Quattro + All Season Tires.

Anyway, as you can see from the picture below, the bay area is being dumped on. You can’t even see Lake Tahoe in the picture below (it’s west of Reno).

Well, tomorrow we are off to New York. I hope to get a bunch of blogging in the next few days so I can catch up. I also have a ton of non-work email to go through. I’m so bad about replying to that stuff. It takes all my energy to deal with work email…

My sister called me up a few days ago and was like, I figured out when you are really busy and when you say you are busy. When I don’t blog I’m busy, and right now I have about a dozen items on my blog “backlog”. Bleh.

I’ve also been using a number of tools and gadgets in the past few months that I haven’t even had the time to go into detail about. Finally, big news has occurred outside the digital world that needs mention.

Stuff I’m using that’s cool.

• AutoHotKey – kick ass scripting tool for Windows. Combined with SlickRun you have a powerful way to fire off simple commands.
• Backpackit – Lora and I are using Backpackit for a bunch of interesting things
• We created  a page to share family tasks, and assign tasks to each other. For the GTD’er these are of the @Errand, @Home type tasks. We used this as a way to keep track of who was buying Christmas presents for different folks etc
• We created a page of Notes for random things like where to buy our cat Misha food and litter, contact info for the cat sitter, and travel plans/notes
• We created a page to keep track of any voicemail messages. This is a bit like a yellow sticky by the phone
• We created a natural disaster plan with instructions, maps, photos, meeting places and a plan for when mother nature does something bad to the bay area.
• Lora is happily getting used to my old Treo 650, and I’m still pretty happy with my k-jam. Torres has a great post on why this device is useful. He has the Sprint version which as EVDO which is about 5–7x faster Internet than my craptastic EDGE.
• Orb. Enough said.
• FireFox 1.5. It sucks less than 1.0, and there are some cool addins that I’m using like the del.icio.us and backpackit one that I use FireFox exclusively for.

Stuff that happened that I think is cool

• Lora (my wife) was accepted as a fellow at Stanford University in Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility (REI). I’m so unbelievably excited for her. There are about 30 REI spots a year in the entire country and most institutions accept a single candidate a year. She busted her ass the past 3.5 years in her residency but she still found time to do research publish a few papers and be the world’s greatest wife.
• Nevine (my sister) got engaged!
• Omar (me) won the Microsoft Internal OneNote Powertoy Contest. I got notified last week by mail . The entry I submitted was my Send RSS to OneNote Powertoy that I had never released. I did a bit more work on it and sent it in. I’m honored that I was the finalist. Not sure what I’ll do with the prize (a Toshiba M200 Tablet PC).

note: since this blog is aggregated on other sites (oops I forgot) I have sanitized the title as to not offend anyone (never my intention).

The Windows Live Custom Domains Team updated the product to address a number of user complaints. I’m happy to see that they added support for importing existing EASI passport accounts.

M3 Released

We’ve shipped a new version of our Beta. We’ve tried to address the main concerns and bugs that have been reported with our previous version, M2.

We fixed the sign-in problem many people were having. Some people would click sign-in and be taken back to a page telling them they needed to sign-in.

We’ve increased the number of users allowed in a domain from 20 to 40. We’ve also added UI to our user management page that deals with larger numbers of users in a domain.

We’ve added an ability to “import” existing Passports in the domain. This means if you used an existing E-Mail as Sign-In (EASI) Passport in a domain and later configured the domain for use with domains.live.com, you are now given the option of “importing” this user into the domain and giving the Passport an inbox or alternatively “evicting” the user so they are forced to pick a new name next time they sign-in.

We’ve worked on improving Firefox support.

We’ve fixed a number of minor bugs and problems.

Keep the feedback coming.

 

Wow, a week can be a really long and short time. This past week I went back to Shanghai with some folks from work to spend time with our team (in addition to working on our calendar product this team is also building the non-ajax version of Windows Live Mail that just shipped to beta testers). Shanghai is really an interesting place. Dick or Aditya said it best, it’s like being in the future and the past at the same time. Jin Mao Tower is quite possibly the most amazing sky scraper I’ve set foot in. Having drinks on the 88th floor is an experience I want to repeat over and over. Of course, it will soon be shorter than Shanghai 101 and Shanghai 102 currently in the makings and across the street in Pudong.

Anyway, the time difference really messes with you and my feeble brain gets confused often. I managed to keep up with most of my mail, but not any personal mail or rss feeds. Most of the time was at the office, or hanging with the team. On one day we took the team on a surprise moral event to a speed car racetrack. Most of the team members had never driven a car, but managed some pretty good lap times! Fun was had by all. There are some very striking contrasts in Shanghai… you can have lunch for $1 – $2, or dinner for $100. A subway ride costs 50 cents, 20 min cab rides a few bucks but of course starbucks, KFC etc all cost the same. Many of the folks who work in our office design and develop software for a living, but don’t own a computer at home.

Oh, now that I’ve been there twice, if you go, take the Timeout Shanghai Guide, it’s the only one worth a dime. A visit to the Shanghai Planning Museum is also a must (they have a model of the city that takes up a giant room and gives you a sense of how dammed big Shanghai is and how much bigger it will get in the next 6 years).

Well, the only thing I’ll close with is that some big things happened in the Windows Live Mail Space. We shipped our Milestone 4 release of Kahuna and it’s got some amazing features in there. More importantly, it will allow us to bring millions of people into the beta. This is really great news as up till now our beta audience was very limited. The feature I am really most proud of is the Microsoft Word style spell checking. It may sound like no big deal, but bringing real time spell checking to the web is no easy task. We are using the exact same spelling engine that will ship with Office 12, except we have to use many additional technologies to make it work. Primarily FireAnt (XMLHTTP, JavaScript, DOM, CSS, TriEdit, TextRanges). Spell Checking was one of the first things that we prototyped last year to prove FireAnt as a technology to build our product. One of the main developers on the spell checking feature loves to say that if real time spell checking were easy, everyone would have it. It’s hella hard, requires super smart guys, and of course technology from other groups at Microsoft. I also got to see some of the search stuff I have been working on ship (with lots of support from the Hotmail Backend team)…

You can read more about our M4 work in Kahuna on Reeves’ Windows Live Mail Update post:

The latest update to Windows Live Mail beta was released to the world today.  There are lots of great improvements including performance, in-line spell checking and the introduction of the "down-level" experience (the non-AJAX version for older browsers).  The best place for a quick summary is Steve's post and the best place for lots of details is Imran's post to the mailcall blog (be sure to also check out the video on spell checking).

A long time ago, I started a quest to find a portable music player that matched the iPod in every way. This is now my 4th device in that journey.

That quest is now complete, thanks to the Philips GoGear HDD1630 6GB (also in 30GB).

I can’t begin to explain how impressed I am that a device is finally available that offers:

• Good Sync experience (does not come with any proprietary crappy software, relies on Windows Media Player, and does not push some other agenda on you)
• Good design
• Good out of box experience
• Nice Color screen
• Photo support

The device has the best PlaysForSure support of any non Portable Media Center device. A bunch of devices that claim PlaysForSure can have other hidden surprises like USB 1.1 support (not 2.0), buggy sync experience, no support for subscription audio etc. A good clue if your device really supports Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) or is a mass storage device is if it has subscription audio support. You can still get PlaysForSure support by having a mass storage device since that will technically sync with WMP (like my Samsung YP -F1Z) but you will be dissapointed as I was to find that the experience is buggy at best. So, when buying PlaysForSure make sure it has both regular audio and subscription audio.

MTP support is what allows this device to finally sync such things as:

• Album Art
• Ratings
• Play Count
• Playlists

I’ll post a review in the next few days. This device really shatters the devices that Creative and iRiver make (which is great cause I never had very high hopes for those guys). Creative seems like a hopeless cause to me.

So if you are looking to buy some one a holiday gift and were thinking of an iPod cause it was the only game in town, take a look at the GoGear device. They are just as sleek, sexy, well designed and usable as an iPod (well the Video definitely raises the bar again).

Wierd title, but it's true. http://digg.com is a great site. I was never one to like reading slashdot, so I checked out digg and found that the design, site layout, and content was more to my liking.

I mainly read it from live.com as I find it's the perfect kind of feed for the live.com dashboard style rss reader.

BTW - Why in the bleeping hell does IE allow web pages to steal focus from the address bar? 9 times out of 10 I find myself typing a url when pages like msn.com and live.com steal the focus away from me multiple times. update: appears that all the focus issues were related to the MSN Toolbar. live.com no longer steals focus. I guess I’ll have to use firefox to get back tabbed browsing.

If some one told you to design a stylus retention mechanism, is this what you would come up with? If it was I’d fire you.

As you can see, the re-enforcement is in the wrong place, creating flex in the thin plastic. Over time the plastic wears out and it breaks, making the pen fall out of the case.

I fixed this by taking the device apart, and sticking some rubber at the end of the stylus silo to create enough resistance to keep the pen in place. Shoddy engineering. No wonder carriers test phones for so long. Imagine if 100% of the devices you sold needed to be serviced after 30 days?

If you have an HTC Wizard (k-jam), get ready for this. It will happen to you.

Ray just blogged about something he and his CTO team have cooked up since joining Microsoft. He calls is Simple Sharing Extensions, and it’s a really cool way to solve some hella hard problems by bootstraping on RSS. I got wind of SSE a while back when Ray came down to meet some of us in Hotmail. It was the first time I met Ray and I was incredibly impressed with what he had to say, and the approach he was taking to solving the problem around sharing of calendar and contacts data. Here is why SSE will succeed where other technologies have failed:

1. It doesn’t invent anything that doesn’t already exist. SSE makes use of RSS and XML namespaces.
2. It does not dictate a transport protocol. Anything can be used, including such things as HTTP and P2P file sharing
3. It doesn’t dictate how the RSS fragments are ACL’ed.

It’s quite simple, yet very powerful way to deliver software that can finally allow users to share data in a “mesh” scenario. I really look forward to one day sharing certain events on my calendar with my wife, and allowing her to read/write into my calendar (we both have Exchange accounts in different places as well as MSN Calendar accounts and we can’t do simple calendar sharing).

Congrats to Ray, Jack and George for getting this out there.