shahine.com/omar/

I really like IE 7. It’s so much easier to use with the tabs and all and seems much faster. I also like the new search provider model.

There are two things you should know. Almost everyone I know goes and un-checks this checkbox:

Well you now want to check that box so that items you click open in the same browser window, but in a new tab. Otherwise you get a lot of new open browser instances.

You also want to make sure that this new radio button, circled in red below, is also selected:

Also, who thought it was a good idea to place the File Menu underneath the address bar??? What the heck? What possible kind of logic was used for that decision?

One minor annoyance is that installing IE 7 resets all your Sound Control Panel Settings. I hate the Start Navigation sound and immediately disable that on every machine.

Update: added the second IE tab setting

Well, the world seems to be moving forward. We no longer have to use such geeky terms as RSS and Atom. Products such as IE 7, FireFox, MSN Spaces, live.com etc are all using the terminology: Feed and Subscribe to Feed. I figured this was a good time to go through and fix up dasBlog to align with the new direction.

In the next update, dasBlog templates all display a single feed icon from http://www.feedicons.com. The icon links to your site's RSS 2.0 document using the FEED URI.

What does that mean for Atom? Still there. CDF? Still there... but who cares really. Aggregtors support both Atom and RSS and the dasBlog RSS 2.0 feed is more "feature rich" than the Atom feed. Anyway, subscribing to one vs the other has Zero material impact on your aggregator.

So, in this brave new world the user should not have to care. When they visit your dasBlog site using IE 7 or FireFox the browsers alert the user that this site has a Feed using the feed icon. If you click the Feed icon that appears on the web site it will launch your default aggregator and subscribe to the feed.

I got my Google AdSense 1099–MISC yesterday. When I entered it into TurboTax I was surprised that it said that I had to file a Schedule C (never done that before). Anyway, I found this website which explains what Google AdSense revenue means for your taxes.

Basically, if you made more than $600 on AdSense revenue you are now a small business. Congratulations . TurboTax made filling out the Schedule C easy enough. For me it turns out that my business is not a “passive activity” since I spend more than 100 hours a year on blogging and other related stuff and I’m the only person in my “business” that does this. Now I get to deduct any related “business expenses” such as hosting fees, DNS registration and so on.

Scoble points to a new comment service called CoComment that helps you keep track of the places you leave comments. One of my big problems with leaving comments on blogs it that I don’t have a system to go back and follow up on the conversation (I usually never do). CoComment should fix that.

However, I just tried the service out and it did not work on the first two blogs that I tried out. One of those is dasBlog. Oh well.

I’ve been thinking about Email more and more lately. I firmly believe that email is a fantastic tool, and that it’s also heavily abused in the work place. More often than not, what you hear when you send an email is deafening silence or a flurry of incomprehensible replies breaking threading and screwing up the conversation flow.

It is my firm belief that many folks don’t have any system for dealing with their email. They get overwhelmed by the amount of mail that they have, and as a result are unpredictable in getting back to you (if they do).

What this means is that not only do you have to manage your inbox, but you have to manage their inbox. I’ve started to write things down that I want to talk to people about, and every so often, walk into their offices and talk about the issues. It’s weird as this is what I used to do long before email got crazy.

I created a section in OneNote called People. I have a page for every person, and an agenda. The next time I find myself talking to them, I pull up the page and check things off.

Jeff Atwood answers this for us. I’ve always wondered about these fancy things that my graphics card can do for me, but never bothered to learn about them. Jeff does a great job distilling this one.

He also explains Bilinear vs. Bicubic.

And not the physical kind of Waterfall, the kind that is predominantly used for software development.

The Microsoft Product Lifecycle (last time I checked) was basically Waterfall, where you plan -> spec -> dev -> test. This is how Office is developed (Windows and Mac) and has worked well for at least a decade. However, we’ve found that Waterfall is no good for developing services and fast iteration of your product. That’s where interest in Agile development methods like Scrum have come into play.

As I’ve mentioned before, we kicked Waterfall to the curb last year and haven’t looked back. Waterfall 2006 looks like a great fake conference . Some of the papers/links are hilarious (well if you develop software for a living).

Last year I signed up for Amazon.com Prime. It’s a service where anytime you order a product that Amazon.com sells you get free 2 day shipping or next day for $3.99 per item. It costs $79 a year and I thought I would try it out for a year.

Well it’s been one year. Lets see how I did.

I ordered 21 individual orders last year. So that works out to $3.76 per order in shipping costs. I think that’s a pretty good deal for 2nd day shipping on all my orders. I signed up for a second year.

Well, I’ve had my Lifebook P7120 (review) for over a week now. I LOVE IT. This is the best PC laptop I’ve ever owned. When compared to the Sony TX Series it has the following advantages:

• it’s silent (it’s a bit eerie to have a silent laptop)
• it has a better keyboard (the feel, build, spring, spacing is better)
• has a better screen (no funny red hue)
• the array mic is nice, and the port layout is better
• the bottom is coated with a faux sued which keeps the heat transfer from the magnesium case from bothering you.

The build quality of the laptop is like a Thinkpad. This thing is solid, scratch proof, black, easy to type on, and has the best trackpad I’ve ever used on a laptop (as good as a PowerBook trackpad). It made me realize what a piece of junk the trackpad on Toshiba and Dells.

One nice touch on this laptop is that I can remove the DVD burner to save about .4 lbs which makes the travel weight 2.65 lbs, lighter than the Vaio TX Series. I can also add another battery in the DVD drive bay to increase battery life to approx 11 hours. Right now I’m getting about 5.5 hours with brightness set to 7/8.

Now, it’s not as “sexy” as the Vaio but that’s ok with me. The screen is not wafer thin, and it’s a bit smaller in width. But the overall thickness of the Lifebook is very close to the TX series anyway (with the rubber feet and all on a table they are almost identical even though the advertised thickness does not bode well for the Lifebook).

Some other pluses: I did not have to flatten the PC cause it wasn’t loaded up with Junkware. I did have one problem with their supposed power savings program. For some silly reason it will only run for a local administrator, not a domain account with local administrator privileges. I emailed Fujitsu about this but they are hopeless. In the mean time I found this great freeware battery monitor program. The Bluetooth module requires the crappy Toshiba bluetooth stack and will not work with the Microsoft stack (bummer). Another nice touch is that when the laptop successfully enters standby it beeps. I can’t tell you how useful that is because I've been burned many times by Windows preventing my laptop from going into standby causing my battery to get sucked dry. Speaking of standby, this little guy resumes from standby faster than any other laptop I’ve owned. It’s as fast as a PowerBook (and they are really fast). This must be some kind of hardware/driver thing.

I’m writing this on a plane right now, and love the fact that the laptop is really easy to use in coach even with the seat in front of me reclined.

Bottom line. This is an incredible laptop and IMHO outshines the Vaio TX Series in every way except for some subtle design aspects. It’s a fast machine and I have yet to experience any performance compromises compared to my Dell Latitude D610.

Shawn loves this post by Jeff Atwood, and so do I. In the software world you hear this a lot from folks. Most people just roll their eyes when the “.. and a Pony” requests/wishes come in.

I love this quote:

“It'd also be nice if trees were made of cotton candy, and rain was delicious lemonade.”

“This is what I refer to as ".. and a Pony!" thinking: the person asking the question doesn't know that what they're asking for is essentially impossible. So you might as well throw a Pony in there while you're at it. Everyone loves Ponies.”

[Jeff Atwood]

When I read great stuff like this from Scott Hanselman it makes me think that a bunch of us should get together and write some articles/chapters for a book on Systems of Organization.

We are each developing our own highly effective systems by hand picking what works best from a number of other sources like David Allen’s Getting Things Done. These span work, life, digital, analog, and a topic most folks don’t even think about; computer organization and digital clutter.

Why is it when Apple does something sleazy, no one calls them on it? If Microsoft did something like this there would be no end to the belly aching.

This is why I don’t care to ever install iTunes. It always installs some crap I don’t want (like QuickTime with it’s super crappy little tray icon and file helper resetting behavior). Not to mention all the extra processes that iTunes has running for no good reason (why do I need an iPodService running 24/7)?

Yeah Baby!!!!

A real server based contact updating service that works with your Messenger Buddy List or your Windows Live Mail Contacts.

2006 is starting off on the right foot for our services.

My favorite screen capture tool is Cropper. Version 1.7 fixes a bug I found where if you launched Cropper from SlickRun or AppRocket it would not work. Brian fixed it really quick, and even fixed another bug I didn’t report .

Cropper is handy cause you can measure/control the screen capture region before taking the screen shot and it has many flexible output formats (including AVI).

It’s a top notch app.