shahine.com/omar/

From Ars Technica on Gmail for domains in beta:

“This is probably about as close to an ideal turn-key solution for e-mail as you can get. Colleges, small-to-medium sized businesses, non-profits, and others should see this as a stellar opportunity to essentially "outsource" their e-mail—and all that comes with it (downtime, spam management, etc.)—to Google. How many organizations can offer 2GB of e-mail space and a user interface as refined as Gmail? Not many. How many can do it for free? Practically none.”

AHEM!!!! domains.live.com (in beta) offers FREE outsourced email for your own domain. Coupled with Windows Live Mail (in beta) you get 2GB of e-mail space AND a user interface as refined as Gmail as well as the opportunity to upgrade to Premium services so you can use Outlook to store your E-mail, tasks, notes and contacts on our servers. You can also use spaces, Messenger and any other Windows Live service customized how you want using your domain account as a passport sign-in.

“As an aside, it is worth noting that Microsoft's solution isn't truly free, no matter what you choose. The educational version, at least, requires Microsoft Identity Integration Server, which is sold separately.”

What University CTO in their right mind would hand over Directory Services to Google or Microsoft? Remember Hailstorm? Yeah I thought so. It’s fantastic that we allow universities to maintain whatever directory solution they want (LDAP, or Active Directory) and then give them tools to manage the user accounts themselves (we do not mange the domains or the accounts). This is a very powerful and flexible system and was built to scale to hundreds of universities in dozens of different countries.

I helped play a small part in the Windows Live @ edu Program by getting our provisioning system set up at Hotmail, but I’ve seen the work that a small handful of people created on and it’s world class. Expect to hear more about the University Program in the future, but for now check out this video.

Dare, Reeves and Scoble have posts that characterize this news as “been there done that”.

Update: I would like to note that I’m not particularly unhappy with Ars Technica as they did a better job reporting the facts than all the other reports on the topic that I’ve read. They do however omit enough details about what we’ve been doing that it does not paint the entire picture.

I’m not a huge fan of Podcasts. However, I do listen to the Engadget Podcast, NPR, KQED Forum (when their feed actually works and has enclosures) and now Hanselminutes by Scott Hanselman. It’s fun listening to Scott bring us some new geek topics every week. The quality of the website and content are very high.

Thanks to Craig’s pointer I’m now digging Copernic Desktop Search. It’s got a very clean interface, doesn’t take up much memory, and respects my PC. I find that it’s faster at picking up index changes than LookOut. If you are wondering why I’m bothering at all, see my post on why I stopped using Windows Desktop Search.

Jeff Atwood (who is becoming one of my favorite bloggers) has a great piece titled “Not All Bugs Are Worth Fixing”.

I have spent many months of my life in Triage Meetings. I consider myself pretty dammed good at it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bug come back to haunt me based on a decision that was made in Triage. However, if there ever had been, I’d be the first person to stand up and take accountability for the decision. I’ve seen many behaviors at work that I call CYA (Cover Your Ass) where people go out of their way to ensure that if anything goes wrong they are protected from any decision that may result in something bad. This is just the root of all evil and does a lot of damage to the team.

Triage can be a very tense and stressful environment. There are a few rules you can use to make it less painful:

1. Humor: no one wants to be there. Make it funny, have a good time and build a bond with your team mates
2. Publish out to the team when Triage is and who is expected/not expected to be there
3. Come prepared. If you don’t know your bug, go back to your office. Bring solutions not problems.
4. Focus on the customer impact, and the likelihood of the customer experiencing the problem.
5. Try and spend a small amount of time on each bug. Don’t rat hole.
6. Use clear language to talk about what bugs you will and won’t fix (we use terms such as LIKE and MUST to describe bugs). MUST = show stopper, LIKE = nice to have, but not recall class. As time goes on and you are trying to hit your Release Candidate you stop taking LIKE bugs.
7. Triage owns the final decision.

It’s interesting to see how Google approached a problem and Microsoft approaches it. The latest version of Google Desktop has a feature that allows you to share your index across multiple machines so you can search for things and find them anywhere you might have them. They do this by using the Google servers as a relay. In the past I’ve posted about how you can do the same thing with FolderShare (free from Microsoft) and Windows Desktop Search (free from Microsoft).

In Scenario A, you are giving all your information to Google for a temporary time period, but you are giving them this information non the less. In scenario B, FolderShare is acting as a P2P based distributed search agent doing the query across any of your machines that are currently online and running FolderShare and Windows Desktop Search. Your information is encrypted and traveling between your computers.

Personally, I would never chose the Google approach.

Well in the past two weeks I’ve given out 200 invites to various folks. After I plowed through the 60 that I had, I went and got some more (one of the perks I get I guess).

Well, copying and pasting those emails into the invite form, 10 at a time is really painful. So, my plan is to stop collecting names from people who email me, since at this point I run about a week behind. You are better off going to http://ideas.live.com/ and signing up for the mail beta there as they are processing that list pretty quickly.

Also, I sincerely appreciate all the really nice comments and emails I’ve received from folks. I had no idea so many people read this blog. I find it weird some times to publish stuff here w/o knowing my audience, but anyway I do appreciate the nice things people said.

From Mark Michaelis comes two very useful freeware programs.

7-Zip is a file archiver with the high compression ratio. The program supports 7z, ZIP, CAB, RAR, ARJ, LZH, CHM, GZIP, BZIP2, Z, TAR, CPIO, RPM and DEB formats.

PDFCreator easily creates PDFs from any Windows program. Use it like a printer in Word, StarCalc or any other Windows application

For YEARS i have complained and hated that our User Experience for Passport Signin was lying to me!!! I click “Always save my password” and I’m always asked for my password. Well I’ve always known the reason for this issue, but never liked it anyway. Trevin explains Why does Passport sign-in suck? and even details some Passport 101. He talks about what is being done about this problem (which I had no clue about). It’s a good thing we blog so publicly about the future…

Kudos for putting it out there Trevin!!!

Cingular now lists the 8125 (the HTC Wizard, like my k-jam) on their Business Web Portal.

What I found interesting is this:

“Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC (will support upgrade to support Microsoft's Messaging & Security Feature Pack when available)”

Now this is simply unbelievable… Go Exchange! I never thought I’d see Sony Ericsson as a licensee.

Is there anyone left to license this to?

Now if only some one would ship the Messaging & Security Feature Pack on a Windows Mobile Device. Yes I know it RTM’ed but in the Phone World that is meaningless.

A few days ago I commented on how I found a great Alt-Tab replacement. I had mentioned TopDesk in my post for having cool Expose like functionality.

James Stewart (the author of TopDesk) commented on my post asking why I wasn’t using it (he wasn’t aware that I was actually I registered user, and happen to like it a lot, but I did in fact stop using it). He let me know that I could map Alt-Tab to any of TopDesk’s functionality. I didn’t know that. We chatted over mail and a few days later he sent me a beta build that has the Vista Flip3D Task Switcher that apparently my good buddy Scott Hanselman had suggested to James.

Anyhow, Flip3D mode in TopDesk is THE BOMB. My only complaint (that James knows about) is that Alt-Tab in Flip3D mode does not mimic Alt-Tab z-ordering in Windows exactly. Hopefully he can figure that one out .

TopDesk is my new Alt-Tab . I also map the bottom center hotspot to Hide All Windows and the left middle to Tile All Windows.

After many months of using Windows Desktop Search I un-installed it. Why? Well it started with my new little Fujitsu Lifebook P7120. I never installed Desktop Search on it cause I was afraid of the overhead. Plus it’s just so darn speedy I didn’t want to slow it down and I suspected that Desktop Search manifests itself via lots of “overhead”.

However, I didn’t want to lose out on fast search in Outlook. So I just installed LookOut. It’s still out there and works just great. See the problem with Desktop Search is that it puts its hooks everywhere (it hooks into the Explorer, bunch of system processes, Outlook, and so on… it even replaces the super slow but reliable built in XP search assistant that I use all the time to find things in a specific folder). All I want is to find my email quickly and till Outlook 12 ships with its new fast search, I’m stuck with Outlook 2003’s slow search. I keep my filesystem organized, and use programs such as SlickRun and AppRocket to open folders and launch applications so I don’t need the file system indexer as much.

Anyway, I un-installed WDS from my home desktop. My memory footprint went down about 100 MB. Since WDS runs in other OS processes in addition to having it’s own, it’s my opinion that this just slows things down and causes general instability (just watching it go in FileMon and RegMon will make your head spin). I realize that this is a broad generalized statement to make, but I just grew tired of suspecting it of causing my instability. I’ll wait for Vista before where I hope the Search issue gets solved better.

So for now, I’m back to what I was using over a year ago, and it’s much more lightweight which meets my needs. Nothing against the great folks that work on this product; I was on the dogfood train for a VERY long time helping to test the product. I look forward to using their technology in Vista.

In this case, "the man" is Comcast. I am now on Standard Cable. No longer can I stand their horrible DVR box which can barely record lo-def TV. For the past 2 months my box has been recording shows and every 1-2 minutes inserting audio and video drop-outs and pops. I have replaced the box once, which was very painful to set up all my recordings again, and have had a service guy come out and replace almost all the wiring in my apartment saying my problems were signal related. Something is really broken with Comcast as they wanted to send me a guy again with another replacement box... do they hope if they do this enough times the problems will magically fix themselves? This is a software, and it sucks big time...

...the Motorola box with the TV Guide software sucks worse than any product on the planet. I'd rather have lo-def TV then crappy, choppy time-shifted HDTV. And I sure as hell am not going to pay $95 for an unfinished product... I will happily wait till the end of the year when I can get a Vista Media Center with CableCard support. In the mean time I may try and see if I can get OTA HTDV in my MCE box.

I've also managed to ween myself to only 1 hour of TV a day, which made this decision much easier. That extra savings (my new bill is $50) will go to a Cingular Wireless Broadband connection for my laptop.

Hmmm, this is a really lame way of sticking it to the man. I should just get rid of them completley. Where is my IPTV?

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.