shahine.com/omar/

So, on Monday after a very frustrating experience ordering my Vaio from Sony, my VGN-TX630P arrived. After using it for a few days, I believe that I will ultimatley return it.

I LOVE this laptop for many reasons. It's sexy, small (and I mean small), light, has the thinnest LCD I have ever seen. I HATE this laptop for the reasons I hate all Sony laptops. They took over 6 GB of my 60GB hard drive for the "recovery partition" I understand if this machine had no CD drive, but it has one, and the cost to burn a DVD with the OS and restore software can't be more than a buck. The kind of company that skimps on a buck is questionable. And of course, the minute I booted the laptop I knew I had to flatten it cause it was rat infested with OEM crapware.

So, off to create restore disks I go. Sony included software to burn the recovery partition to 7 CDs. That took an hour. Then I installed Windows, and proceeded to install about 15 "utilities" and "drivers" to get the laptop to function. Some of the utilities didn't install properly and I could not get the power management sofware to install. To give sony credit, they make the process of downloading the bits easy compared to other guys. But installing is a nightmare of orchestrated instructions that resulted in failure (and I'm not a dumb guy).

Anyhoo, after about 6 hours I was done. Then the fun began. I got everything working the way I wanted. I marveled at how empowered and unshackled I feel. I can take this laptop anywhere! It's thin, and feels like I am carrying around a notebook. It's even fast and doing my daily computing tasks is no problem at all. It resumes from standby in a jiffy and I just LOVE to use it. The keyboard took a bit of getting used to and I have to admit I don't like the painted keys. It feels flat. With 17mm keys and 1.7 mm of travel it feels cramped. I don't see the benefit of the EDGE support since it's expensive (49.99 a month with a 2 year contract) and slow (100 KBps vs EVDO which is upwards of 500 KBps) so I won't use that. It has a nifty feature that lets you watch DVDs w/o booting Windows. The battery life really is close to 7 hours and the carbon fiber case is stiff and scratch resistent.

Every laptop should be like this. I will never buy another > 4 lb laptop again. I can use this thing with one hand and balance it on a knee. HOWEVER, I found out this laptop's dirty little secret. It's NOISY.

The Vaio starts out very quiet. But after 10 or so minutes the CPU fan it humming a long. I figure it's about 26 bB loud at idle and 40 dB lout when it's actually doing something. I an VERY sensitive to fan noise and I can't have a laptop that's louder than my desktop machine. Normally the sound is not a problem at work, but at home it drives my crazy. Also, there is this weird red hue on the screen when looking at white backgrounds (I assume something related to the LED backlighting technology).

The bad news is that apparently there is a revision to the Vaio TX series called the TX2 due out later this year that does not have a fan at all. Oh well. I can't wait, I can't go back to my big huge dell.

So I am going to follow the advice of all my friends, and order the Fujitsu P7120. It's a very comporable laptop with similar size, weight, specs, and battery life except it HAS NO FAN AT ALL. It's also got an array mic, and the folks at Fujitsu are very nice to me. I also get a DVD burner (which cost an extra $300 on the Vaio). Finally, the keyboard on the Fujitsu is a bit more roomy than the Sony and has normal keys (not flat painted ones).

I ordered the Fujitsu today; it ships monday and the will overnight it for $30 or ship via ground for free. Sony on the other hand will ship the unit 2-3 business days after you order it, will charge you $70 for ground and $140 for overnight. Also Fujitsu will not crap all over my hard drive and they include a recovery disk on DVD.

I'll let you know how it goes. I'm going to keep the Sony another week till I evaluate the Fujitsu, but will in all likleyhood send it back to Sony for a refund. And all those folks that gave me crap about supporting the Rootkit company rest easy .

But I am going to miss the extra resulution on my Vaio. 1366 x 768 is a great display resolution for this small laptop. Those extra pixels matter .

In the end it will probably be a wash. I give a few things up, gain a few things I didn't have and I won't have to listen to a cpu fan every day.

I'm actually working on writing a post about building to scale. Phil Smoot, the Product Unit Manager for the Hotmail Backend team (they build the systems that store and deliver email), was recently interviewed in an article titled Behind the Scenes at Hotmail and it's now on Slashdot. The comments are quite good and civil .

Dare has a few good posts on scaling that I plan on referencing if I ever get around to my post.

"The fact is that everyone has scalability issues, no one can deal with their service going from zero to a few million users without revisiting almost every aspect of their design and architecture."

...

"Building online services requires more than the ability to sling code and hack databases. Lots of stuff gets written about the more trivial aspects of building an online service (e.g. switch to sexy, new platforms like Ruby on Rails) but the real hard work is often unheralded and rarely discussed"

Dare speaks the truth. Walter Hsueh, one of our lead developers on Windows Live mail outlines some of our recent experiences with AJAX and the .NET Framework 2.0.

Three words: Best game ever. I played this for hours and hours with my college roommates, having it on my Gameboy Micro is just precious. Zelda, Super Mario Brothers, Mario Kart… it doesn’t get any better for portable gaming

It used to be that I could just flatten a PC w/o thinking about what was there before I flattened it. Since I have both a C and D partition, I keep any data on my D partition (I move all my doc folders etc using the Tweak XP Powertoy). However, there are a few things you want to do before booting Windows and paving:

1. If you use any downloadable pay for music services, make sure to de-authorize the computer. This will save you at least 10–20 min later asking tech support for that service to manually de-authorize for you. I was constantly hitting my 5 machine limit with MSN Music because of this.
2. If you use any applications that create a persistent cache then back up that data. You will typically find all this stuff in %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data although for some applications this will be located in %USERPROFILE%\Application Data
   1. FeedDemon comes to mind here. Since I use the NewsBin as well as flag posts a lot, I would like my new Windows install to have this data. I have lost numerous flagged posts because I forgot to backup the FeedDemon cache folder.
   2. Your Adobe Bridge Cache (this can save you a long time later)
   3. Your Microsoft Digital Media Suite 2006 Cache (ditto here)
3. Use the Save My Settings wizard in Office 2003 to easily carry over all your prefs from Office 2003 to the new machine. This comes in handy all the time.
1. Optionally manually migrate your Outlook Autocomplete history file to the new machine. Nothing sucks worse then having to look people up in the GAL if you can't spell their name.

update: added link to manually migrate the outlook autocomplete history.

Dennis has a bad experience with a Netgear router.

IMHO, avoid pretty much everyone. I’ve used Netgear, D-link, Linksys. None of them work reliably. So what do I use now? Apple. That’s right, cause I know that smart people down the street from my office designed that stuff and it works. But you pay a premium for it. I’m happy to do so when it comes to my home network. My first wireless base station was an Airport, and I’m back to using them exclusively after numerous failed attempts with everyone in between.

Dennis, you should know better. Get an AirPort Express if you want something small that will travel.

The Toshiba Gigabeat S will be my next portable media player. I beta tested Portable Media Center v2 and absolutely loved it (just like I loved v1). But the v1 hardware was huge, now with v2 they support much smaller hardware and the QVGA display I had on my test device was amazing.

This is going to be a killer device. PMC UX is far far better than the iPod. CNet may have given the Creative Zen Vision:M best of show for CES, but I don’t buy for a second that Creative has learned how to create a UX that’s any better than the Micro (which was just tolerable), or stopped pushing it’s bad media player software on you.

I’m so very happy that I won’t have to get a mac to get an app like Aperture. Lightroom looks great, and I can’t wait for the Windows beta.

Fortune just rated Microsoft one of the best 100 companies to work for.

According to Forbes, Microsoft is the 42nd best company to work for, the 11th best for a large company.

Microsoft is also one of 14 companies that pays 100% Healthcare.

“The software king offers what may be the most generous health-insurance plan in America. The premium is zero, with no deductible. And it's the first U.S. corporation to pay for therapy for dependents who are autistic. “

 

I never thought I'd see this day!!! So long Comcast and big silly cable co. I will be able to tune DirecTV directly in Windows Media Center. Unbelievable. It will also work with XBOX 360.

Will have to live with crappy Comcast DVR for a bit longer, but this is excellent news.

My Comcast DVR is such a bad product I don’t even know where to begin. The day I can buy this, I will drive this DVR box down to the comcast office and drop kick it back to them.

I really can’t wait. Latley my DVR has decided that it will only randomly play some of my recordings, cutting some off at 40 min, or 1 min, or just plane stutter for some of the others.

Vista + this ATI Gizmo will be heaven.

I broke down and got the Sony Vaio TX. I should have it in about a week. I got the VGN-TX630P/B but before doing so I looked long and hard at the Fujitsu P7120 which is a revision to the P7000 and has many more changes than you might expect. It was a tough call, and here are some of the facts:

• Both laptops have LED backlight displays, the first of their kind. This means they use much less power, can have thinner cases, and are brighter.
• The Sony’s Screen is 11.1 inch 1366 x 768 while the Fujitsu’s is 10.6 inch 1280 x 768.
• I believe the Sony’s keyboard is a tad larger (90% of a full size keyboard).
• Both laptops employ the same 1.2 GHZ Intel ULV processor and use DDR2 memory
• Both laptops have 1.8 inch 4200 rpm 60GB drives
• The Sony has EDGE support (at > $40 a month I doubt I will ever use it, pluse EDGE is slow compared to EVDO).
• The Sony claims 7h standard battery life, the Fujitsu needs the extended battery to get close to this.
• The Sony is thinner and lighter (2.7 lbs vs 3.2 lbs)
• The Fujitsu will obviously have less crapware installed by default, with is the big bummer about the Sony. I know I will need to flatten it first thing.
• The Fujitsu has NO FAN, and is completley passivley cooled.
• The Fujitsu has a modular drive bay allowing for another battery.
• The Fujitsu has an array microphone

Both were about the same price, but in the end the Sony edged out the Fujitsu due to the larger screen, higher resolution and better battery life and EDGE support that I may use. However I was VERY tempted by the fact that the Fujitsu has no Fan, making it totally silent… tempting.

Anyway, I’m looking forward for my new gadget.

Since 1999 I’ve done my taxes using TurboTax. I tried TaxCut one year (back in 2000 or so) and compared the results from both programs. TaxCut never asked me what I owed on my previous year’s state tax return, and as such never deducted it from my federal income. When I inquired about this via TaxCut tech support they informed that their software did not in fact support this “feature”. Holey smokes, I returned it for a refund in a jiffee.

Well 6 versions of TurboTax later I wonder if I am missing something. Well today in the mail I got a free shrinkwrapped copy of TaxCut. I guess I will try again this year and see if the software is any better. Clever folks, this is a good way to get me to try it.

Last year, I really appreciated the ability of TurboTax to automatically download my W2 from Microsoft. Saved my time and the possibility of making mistakes. I hope TaxCut can do this as well.

Sometimes I am awestruck by our software. Why here I am sitting at my computer. I just updated someone’s contact info using Outlook. I’m connected via RPC/HTTP which means I don’t have to RAS into work. 15 minutes from now, my cell phone will sync to exchange and automatically get this updated information. I don’t have to do jack. I could just have easily done this from an internet cafe by logging into Outlook Web Access. I never ever think about my phone being updated, or my Outlook Address Book being updated (or task list and calendar for that matter). True piece of mind, which is almost zen like.

This kind of stuff is no easy feat. Took a few release of some heavy hitting software… sometimes we just take this stuff for granted. I wish everyone that had a cell phone could have this experience. I hope we bring this functionality to consumers soon.

I often joke with people that the reason I’ll never leave Microsoft is that I can’t live without these kind of features. Can’t live without having an IT department that lets me pretty much do whatever I want to my PC. Or a release share that has every single product we’ve ever made, and others that have versions that won’t be out for years… an opportunity to help shape products I don’t even work on.

Microsoft is heaven for a geek.

I started working at Microsoft. Just as a data point, the “strike price” for my first option grant was $31.7250 (split adjusted). Today, the stock is trading around $26. At 7 years, there are two notable events:

• You start to accrue 4 weeks of vacation per year
• Your first stock option grant expires

So long option grant #1, I barely knew you . What are the chances the stock will shoot up 5 bucks in the next few hours so I can sell my grant?

On a more serious note, has the company really done so little in the last 7 years that the stock price warrants being down 19%? Will 2006 be the year MSFT rebounds? I sure hope so.

Anyway, it’s been a great 7 years. I look forward to the next few! Microsoft has been great to me over the years.

I’ve always wondered why I find it so hard for me to review tasks on my Outlook Task list. The view looks so busy to me when say compared to a web page. On the other hand, I have no problem looking at a task list on say Backpack or OneNote which is presented like any other web pages (font:Verdana, size:10pt).

Given that Outlook is infinitely customizable I set out to try and fix this. It took a few minutes, but now I have a view that looks just like a web page. You can do Customize Current View and set all the fonts to Verdana 10pt and remove the horrible grid lines. As you can see below, the After pic is easier to glance at. I also changed the By Category view to look like this. The large font gives you more white space (easier on the eyes) and removing the gridlines just takes away unnecessary stuff.

Before

After