shahine.com/omar/

Back when I shipped versions of Mac Office it was obvious when you were done... it was also obvious when you could walk into a store and see a shrink-wrapped copy of your software sitting on a shelf. Man what a cool feeling.

Well, when you've continually shipped updates to a product over a 2 year period, you can almost miss the moment when you can say you are "done", but knowing that "done" is completely relative. You're never done and we'll ship an update to Windows Live Hotmail a couple more times this year (everything from small hotfixes to releases).

But... today is the day we are launching Windows Live Hotmail world wide. I've worked on this project since the very beginning and I'm really proud to have been a part of this first complete re-write of the hotmail frontend code base since its inception. It's been an amazing opportunity and one I'm glad I was fortunate to be a part of.

The best part of it all is how much I've learned from the folks I work with, and from the customers and beta testers that gave us feedback. We worked tirelessly the past few years to deliver something that our users want, and something that is architecturally sound...

We made a big bet on .NET and a lot of new Microsoft technologies along the way. We are running all of these things at a massive scale and have hopefully improved a lot of the technology and infrastructure that ends up shipping in lots of other products.

You can head on over to the Hotmail blog and read more.

One of the things I'm most excited about is that we are FINALLY going to deliver rich connectivity to Outlook 2003 & 2007 for FREE. As an Outlook user you will have a first class experience interfacing with your Hotmail account. I plan to blog more about this in the coming weeks. IMHO this experience will be unmatched by any of our competition.

Well I'm off to bed now, but tomorrow will be a fun day.

PS - if you look through all the team pictures on the hotmail blog you will find one of me reading a .NET My Services book. I thought that would be pretty funny.

It's nice to see one of our features in Windows Live Hotmail called out. We added the ability to unsubscribe to newsletter type email a while ago. All mass email senders should make use of the List-Unsubscribe Headers.

"Microsoft has recently made a small adjustment to its Windows Live Hotmail unsubscribe function that should mean good things for marketers.

Microsoft last August answered e-mail marketers’ calls to include an unsubscribe button in its interface so consumers will be less likely to mistakenly report permission-based commercial e-mail as spam.

The unsubscribe link appears in place of the report-and-delete button on some e-mails in Windows Live Hotmail, the free e-mail service replacing classic Hotmail."

[Source: Darren Straight]

Here is a screen shot of an email from a brick and mortar store that I've bought furniture from in the past. If I no longer want to receive messages from them it's a one click operation.

Notepad2 gets a nice update. I was trying to figure out how to replace notepad.exe on Vista with Notepad2 and was not having much success. Then I found this post and it looks even easier than my instructions for how to replace Notepad on XP:

1. Download and extract Notepad2.
2. Rename Notepad2.exe to notepad.exe.
3. Find c:\windows\notepad.exe and c:\windows\system32\notepad.exe and set the owner to ‘Administrators’, and grant Administrators full control.
4. Using Windows Explorer, drag and drop the renamed notepad2.exe to c:\windows and c:\windows\system32.

To take ownership of the file get properties on notepad.exe and select Advanced on the security tab. Then go to the owner tab and change the owner.

Unclutter is a great blog so far. Started by Jerry Brito, originator of the Moleskine GTD Tabs Hack.

Why don't I think of things like this? Hmm.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, Microsoft used to purchase truck loads of Odwalla Juice for the employees of Silicon Valley. This was a tradition started by many of the smaller splinter groups around Silicon Valley before Microsoft pulled them all together into our Mountain View Campus. I loved me some Orange Juice every day.

Well, Microsoft is also known for giving away all you can drink sodas. We also get these sodas, but this was a tradition Microsoft started in Redmond at some point.

Anyway, when the dot com bust happened Microsoft took away the Odwalla as well as a few other things. Why did they do that? Well, honestly, it was expensive and they didn't need to give it to us any more. Attrition went from 30% or so a year in Silicon Valley to record lows of 7% or so. I mean what were you going to do? Quit cause we took away Odwalla? I think most folks didn't really miss it much.

I remember one time an employee at work decided to take all the green superfood Odwallas out of the fridge on a Friday before a long weekend because they "expired". This was before Odwalla flash pasteurized the juice and it had a very short shelf life. They also used the bottle tops similar to the plastic milk cartons. Well, we referred to these things as Odwalla Bombs. The term was coined when we returned to our break room kitchen on Tuesday morning and it was covered in Green stinky plankton looking superfood. YUCK! In fact if you left pretty much any Odwalla out of a fridge for long enough it would explode.

Microsoft tried to set up Odwalla vending machines all over campus but no one purchased from them. After all, none of use were used to paying, and when we found out how much those little 12 oz bottles from heaven cost, we didn't buy. Instead we happily consumed all sorts of sugar water. We did however start getting Talking Rain, which is basically soda water with a hint of fruit flavor. Personally I don't like the talking Rain.

Over the past few years I have stopped drinking soda. For one thing it was rotting my teeth (really). Instead I have water or Welches cranberry juice.

This year I am trying to avoid consumption of high fructose corn syrup (HFC). What is that you ask? Well it:

1. tastes like sugar
2. costs a heck of a lot less
3. Is considered "unhealthy" and some believe contributes to obesity.

You'll be surprised at just how many things are sweated with HFC. Just look at the ingredients next time.

I have found that most things labeled organic don't have HFC and are sweetened with good old sugar. Anyway, recently our Cafeteria started selling Naked Juice for about $2.20 to $2.70. Now at first I thought this was expensive till I found out this stuff costs $3.99 at Safeway and Whole Foods. Creepers! That's more expensive than a Jamba Juice.

Anyway, a few weeks ago I decided I was going to start having this stuff at lunch. Since Microsoft is subsidizing it a bit I might as well.

The good news is, this stuff is DELICIOUS. I mean, I love it. It's much better than Odwalla. So far I've tried the following:

• Mighty Mango
• Pomegranate Acai
• Orange Mango Motion
• Power-C

and my fav is Pomegranate Acai.

I also found that Safeway often sells them for $2 each. I stopped by this weekend and loaded up. This stuff is yummy and good for you to.

The bad news is that this stuff is at least 100% more expensive than Soda sweetened with HFC and obviously not free .

Just heard about this on the radio and I just signed up.

For $41 they will take care of getting rid of most of your junk mail (the old skool kind that shows up in your mailbox).

Lora and I must get a recycle bin full of this stuff each month. It's amazing.

We'll see how this works out, but for $41 it's worth it to me.

Oh, and Lora and I haven't received any credit card offers for at least 3 years. How did we do it? Call 1-888-5 OPT OUT and you can essentially block the companies like Equifax from selling your info to them. I asked for a permanent block.

If you are using a ReadyBoost drive iTunes video is unplayable/unwatchable due to horrible perf.

I wonder who's at fault here?

I tried a few dozen things to get things working and then stumbled on a solution.... no ReadyBoost for me. Good thing I upgraded to 2GB of RAM on my Vista PC.

One of the things a lot of people don't understand is that for a mature service you must build for peak load. You don't care about anything except the point of time in the day or year that you will experience your greatest amount of traffic. And you typically add 20% on top of that just in case.

The reason you do all this? To avoid problems like this. I suspect that all the Turbotax customers that filed returns at the last minute could care less that Intuit was unable to handle their peak load.

Oh, another thing. Don't blame your customers:

While stopping short of promising that filers whose returns failed to reach the government on time would not face late fees, he described the IRS as sympathetic.

“Don’t wait until the last minute is the moral of the story,” Harry Pforzheimer, said.

[source: Herald Tribune]

Good thing I filed my taxes back in February. I think I will do the same next year .

Moleskine has come out with really cool city guides. I plan to get one for New York and San Francisco.

They have such features as:

I. General Information

» Key Map
» Metro Map
» Station Index
» Transportation
» Useful Information

II. Topography

» City Maps
» Street Index
(up to 36 colorful maps for the city and metro system, and an alphabetical street index)

III. Notes and Thoughts

» Blank pages (up to 76 blank pages, giving you all the space you need to write, jot down useful information, and record your thoughts)

IV. City File

» 12 tabbed sections containing another 96 blank pages, giving you all the space you need to capture your memories and favorite haunts.
» Six Std Tabbed Sections
Food: places, legends, recipes
 Drinks: bars, wineries, stories
 Sleep: places, dreams, adventures
 People: names, faces, encounters
 Places: info, shopping, art
 Books, Music, Movies
» Six Alt Tabbed Sections
Six additional tabbed sections can be personalized. A sheet of 35 adhesive labels is included with each book.

V. Loose Notes

» Quick Messages / Perforated

VI. Back Pocket

» Accordion Pocket

» Translucent sheets for tracking itineraries
» Adhesive labels for personalizing

This is really cool and something a lot of folks at Microsoft has been working a long time on, but yesterday Penn announced that they have selected Windows Live @ edu for their students and alumni over Google.

ArsTechnica has some commentary.

One of the cooler thinks about our service is that with a little bit of technology and a lot of great work by the folks who manage the Windows Live @ edu program we're able to offer a pretty great set of services to any educational institution out there.

Winning over Penn was the most challenging of the Schools because they pretty much put the students in charge of deciding the relative merits of the different service offerings. There are a lot of schools already signed up for WL @ edu but Penn is the first Ivy League. As you can imagine, the others schools pay attention to who is picking who (us vs goog).

update: Microsoft has released an add-in to restore this functionality in Excell 2007

As a Program Manager at Microsoft I spend days and days using Sharepoint Lists. It's often very easy and preferable to export a list to Excel and manipulate it there. For example, you can read/write changes in a list and then also crunch data on other sheets like making Pivot Tables and so on.

Well imagine my horror when I learned that the two way sync feature was removed from Excel 2007. A little part of me dies every time I export to excel and then have to manually go and update a sharepoint list. I don't want to use Access to manipulate lists offline, but it appears that's the only option.

Well, I did some searches today and low and behold there is a solution. If you look in the comments in the post I just referenced you will find this:

Hi,

You can have that 2-ways sync functionality back if you install the small free activeX (200K, no dependency whatsoever on anything) available here: http://www.softfluent.com/wsslists.htm.

It reroutes .IQY files associations to itself, so when you click on WSS's "export to spreadsheet" links, it launches Excel 2007, and creates a 2 way sync WSS list (sorry, "table" as the feature has been renamed in the newly created workbook/sheet.

Any questions can be sent to smo (at) softfluent (dot) com.

Simon.

Thank you Softfluent for restoring my productivity.

To make this work on Vista you must launch IE as an administrator, then install the ActiveX Control. Then export your list to excel and when you right click on the table you will see the "Synchronize with SharePoint" button.

Looks like we've released an update to address performance issues with Outlook 2007.

I've installed the update on a few of my machines and I can't say I've noticed much of a difference, but time will tell.

There is a bug fix in this update that I do experience all the time though:

You create an update to a meeting request or an exception to a meeting request in Outlook 2007. If the meeting request is open when you create the update or the exception, you receive the following error message:

The function cannot be performed because the message has been changed.

However, when you click OK to close the error message, an update to the meeting request is sent to the attendees.

This is just funny. Look at the Spam ads that GMail is showing me. Spam Primavera and Spam Breakfast Burritos. Yummm!

There are more. It gets better and better.

A few months back I wrote about a chemical called Bisphenol A (BPA) which is commonly found in polycarbonate plastics, which make up most baby bottles.

Today, when re-reading that article I saw a Google ad for a new web site which tracks all sorts of news related to BPA if you are so interested. It also contains links to some plastics guides.

http://www.bisphenolafree.org/

Looks like some one filed a class action law suit demanding that the baby bottle companies label their packages as having BPA in them.

BTW, we have been using Born Free Bottles for our little Sarah and love them. They look and feel like the Dr. Brown's bottles but they are made from a bio-plastic called Polyamide. They can be found at Whole Foods (they are usually sold out though). I highly recommend them for your child.

Also, San Francisco and the EU have laws that now ban the sale of baby products that contain BPAs.

Email is to Instant Messaging as Blogging is to Twitter

I think Twitter is just group IM. I've been wondering about the relative merits and recent popularity of twitter, and came to the realization that it's very similar to blogging.

In a way blogging simply made your conversation public. Twitter makes your IM style conversations public.

Both Email and IM are similar in that:

• You send messages to specific people
• You can't subscribe to messages
• You need to know ahead of time who you are sending the message to
• You can't search Google for private emails or IM.

Both Blogging and Twitter are similar in that:

• You typically broadcast messages/content to everyone
• You can subscribe to people you are interested in
• You don't need to know ahead of time who you are broadcasting to
• You can search for any archived content.

I think Twitter has it's place... it's just a twist on Instant Messaging.