shahine.com/omar/

I would never return a hard disk in a machine I’ve used to the manufacturer, sell it to a third party etc without using Boot and Nuke to wipe it clean.

You can grab the ISO, burn it to a CD and then be rest assured that your data is gone forever.

I always wondered this same thing.

Last weekend I decided I would make the switch from Cingular Blue to Cingular Orange (legacy ATT to Cingular). I did this for a few reasons.

1. I had a few hours to kill
2. They no longer make or offer any AT&T phones (phones that can take an AT&T SIM card)
3. I knew I would have to do this one day (see item #2)
4. Cingular finally has their act together when it comes to “Premier” customers which Microsoft is (I get all sorts of discounts).
5. It’s cheaper! (well I do have to pay for incoming SMS now, Dammit!!!)

I did a comparison of what I pay now and what I would pay under Cingular and my bill ended up about $15 cheaper a month. Not bad.

So, when I went to the store, I decided I may as well get a Cingular 2125 (HTC Faraday) so that I could get the cheaper data plan. You see, Cingular considers a device like the 8125 (aka HTC Wizard) a PDA and charges you $45 for data. However, they consider the 2125 a Smartphone and only charge $20 a month. Both phones are pretty much running the same OS, so go figure.

Anyway, as you may recall, I’ve been using a k-jam for the past few months. Generally I’ve been pleased with a few notable exceptions:

• The GPRS connection flakes out on Cingular’s network. This seems to happen as I go in and out of service.
• It’s difficult to use with one hand
• The Pocket PC version of Windows Mobile 5 is half-baked. It’s somewhat optimized for one handed use and completely useless without a stylus in some situations. You also can’t do things like copy and paste with the keyboard.

I’ve found that I’ve been really surprised by how much I like the 2125 and the Smartphone form factor. I can drive the device with one hand, do things faster, make phone calls quicker, and multi task easier (due to the back button).

I think that the usability of the Smartphone form factor is much better. Unfortunately, it’s a real shame that Mobile team could not have made the distinction between the two more seamless. And there are just some silly differences between the platforms like:

• Dialing a phone number on Smartphone is 10000% easier
• Pocket PC has 4 Alarms and Smartphone 1
• Smartphone uses a huge font for the email application which is annoying
• Smartphone has a better camera phone and MMS support
• Smartphone is easier to navigate
• Web sites are easier to browse on Smartphone
• Reminder and alerts are easier to dismiss on Smartphone
• Smartphone has phone profiles and can switch to “meeting” when your are busy (automatically)
• Pocket PC has much better task support
• Pocket PC has File Sync and Notes support
• Smartphone has much better Bluetooth support and you can dial phone numbers from a bluetooth headset w/o turning the phone on

But the final kicker is that now that I have a teeny tiny laptop, I don’t need a big PDA like phone device. I can get by with a smaller read only device optimized for phone use, and use my little laptop with tons of battery live and a broadband wireless connection the rest of the time.

No GSM version of the Q till Q4 2006 (that’s when the operators get it, not you). Motorola, next time don’t announce stuff you don't know how to deliver.

When I wasn’t paying attention they went and added some more stuff to the 802.11 WPA standard. Now there is WPA2. Hopefully this will make my Windows XP Wireless Connection not flake out all the time.

• Microsoft WPA2 Update
• AirPort Express Firmware Update 6.3 for Windows

You need a compatible Access Point and WiFi Certified support in your laptop.

 

My parents just sent me this picture from our window in manhattan... the last time I remember seeing that much snow I was 8 years old. It was a blast.

 

 

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)”