shahine.com/omar/

My laptop is blue screening a few times a week now, and I have no idea why. I have been installing driver updates as they come to me from Lenovo and Microsoft, but this is just getting horrible.

Most recent issues are:

1. Laptop takes 5 minutes to go to standby
2. Laptop screen never turns on after standby
3. Laptop blue screens when waking from standby and docked
4. Laptop won't undock
5. Explorer is crashing left and right (due to Search Protocol Host crashing)

Problem caused by Windows Search Protocol Host

This problem was caused by Windows Search Protocol Host. Windows Search Protocol Host was created by Microsoft Corporation.

We are aware of this problem and working as quickly as possible to make a solution available to our customers. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you.

Recommendation

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This problem might recur until the solution is released. Please continue to send error reports so Microsoft can study and try to correct the problem as quickly as possible. If you report the problem again and a solution is available, you will see an updated message and information about the solution to help you fix the problem.

Not sure what to do except reinstall Vista, which I don't really have time for.

First there was Napster, MSN Music, now Urge.

The digital music selling business is a disaster. I wonder how one "authenticates" these songs in like 10 years... will those DRM servers be around to give you the right to listen to your music?

At this rate... Rhapsody might be next.

I suspect Apple will be around a very long time and will be able to answer the phone when iTunes comes a calling... ditto for Zune, but really, who needs this.

update: forgot MSN Music.

It's pretty darned clear to me that every time Apple fixes a bug with the iPhone that the intertubes and facebook will be clogged with posts about this... most wondering what the heck is updated.

This is mildly annoying since none of these updates contain better Exchange functionality, which prevents me from going to the Apple store and forking over $600 for an iPhone and god knows how much for accessories and stuff.

At the very least they could be more descriptive than "Bug fixes".

Last week I upgraded to Apple Bootcamp 1.4 for our Kitchen iMac. I think Apple has already become the best PC OEM. Why?

Well take a look at the new volume graphic that appears when you use the Volume Up and Down keys:

And Eject

Just like the Mac OS. It's beautiful. Contrast to the junky garbage you see when doing this on a regular PC.

Also new is the Bootcamp control panel for Windows.

Which gives you a lot of new functionality.

Also new in this version is that the Apple Remote works with iTunes and Windows Media Player and Apple Software Update which checks for updated Bootcamp drivers.

Also, Apple somehow manages to place all the required drivers on a single CD you can burn yourself with a single installer. Why can't anyone else do this is beyond me.

I think all my future PCees will be Macs.

For fun I ran YSlow to find out how it rated Windows Live Hotmail's Performance according to Yahoo's rules.

The reason Hotmail got a 98 and not a higher score? We use ETags... correctly. Yahoo should update that rule since we use IIS and you can in fact sync your ETags across your servers.

Update: turns out that YSlow doesn't work well with Frames, hence the numbers above are actually not accurate (at least not for The Full version of Hotmail). Not sure if this is something that will be fixed in YSlow.

Here are the numbers using the "classic versions" of each site. By classic I mean traditional Web 1.0 HTML.

If we didn't get an F on the ETags I wonder what our real score would be.

The Outlook Connector (the piece of software that lets you access your Hotmail account in Outlook) is finished out of beta.

You can download it here.

Itzy has updated SpeedFiler with a number of great enhancements. The two biggest ones are:

1. Boot Time is improved
2. Folder suggestions for filing messages

#2 is simply awesome. It reduces triage of mail to a single click operation in many cases. SpeedFiler uses some kind of clever algorithm to figure out where you are most likely to file a message based on past actions.

SpeedFiler is a very useful add-in for Outlook if you are a GTD follower.

Itzy has been kind enough to offer my readers a $5 discount through August 20th. Use the code SF520BL.

Well, since returning to the Windows Live Hotmail Team after my parental leave earlier this year I have been working on one thing, and that's the release that we started rolling out to the site today.

Ellie has all the details on the MailCall blog. There are a few notable items about this release. The first is that this is the first time we have released an update to a non beta service (note that Yahoo and GMail still appear to be in beta...). Previously, every release before that had been to upgrade or improve the beta in some way. So in this case the bar was much higher in developing our next milestone.

Today on Windows Live Hotmail we are hosting about 200 million accounts. The remainder of the users are still on the older MSN Hotmail Service. Over the next few months we expect that number to continue to climb as the remaining users start to use Windows Live Hotmail as their main service.

The scale of the site is also far greater. When I first started working on Hotmail back in 2004 we were working on building out our first cluster that would eventually support Windows Live Hotmail, and today the sheer number of machines running our code is mind numbing.

Some of the features in this release that I'm excited about are:

• Forwarding: you can forward email between Hotmail accounts (free users) and outside Hotmail (paid users).
• Vacation Replies: when you go on vacation you can configure a vacation reply, and optionally have it only go to your contacts/safe list.
• More Storage, not that it matters to most users. Storage is a race to the bottom anyway, but still seems to capture the hearts and minds of the press and bloggers.
• Contacts De-duplication: Get for free what Plaxo charges $50 a year for. With de-duplication and live contacts, your contact store can always be up-to-date. Steve Kafka has the nitty gritty on the de-dup feature.
• Performance: We've made tons of performance improvements to both the Classic and Full experience.
• BiDi: check out the crazy screen shot above. I wish I could read and write Arabic, but I'm sure that our Arabic speaking and Hebrew speaking customers will be happy that our BiDi (Bi-Directional Text) version of Hotmail is now out of beta!
• Today Page: don't need gossip about Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears? If you are like me and never make it to Safeway to read this while waiting in line, you can get it on our today page, or NOT. For the first time evar, you can turn off the today page for good. Just another token to show our deep understanding for your complaints and the feedback we get . I haven't turned it off though as it usually serves a few minutes of conversation when I get home... my wife is usually impressed that I stay on top of the US Weekly style "news".
• Better Junk Tools: You can report phishing messages, mark messages as Not Junk and help us improve our filter even more.

There is one other surprise coming that I'll blog about before the end of the month.

BTW, if you want to migrate over to Windows Live Hotmail from your service provider, we've made it super easy.

I have outsourced all my local backups to Windows Home Server and now am the proud owners of http://shahine.homeserver.com. What these guys have built is slick.

I've been using the product since it was in private beta and more than anything else love the fact that it's completely independent. It just does what it does best every night and I never have to even think about it doing its job. It's completely headless and configurationless.

My HomeServer is currently running on a PC with two 500GB hard drives (one internal and one external). It does the following for me:

• Backs up 3 Vista PCs each night (one Media Center, one ThinkPad, one iMac) and 1 Windows XP PC.
• Stores a copy of all my Photos, Music, Videos, and Software accessible via \\server on my LAN.
• Serves as a relay into my Home Network even with a DHCP address
• I can access http://shahine.homeserver.com from any computer and Remote Desktop to any PC on my Home Network. I can even wake up sleeping PCees.

In the last 2 months HomeServer has saved my tush two times.

Once when my wife managed to lose a file that she was working on and Restore Previous Versions in Vista didn't have a recent enough copy. I was able to grab it from the nightly backup from WHS.

Another time I wanted to replace a failed C drive in my Media Center. The drive though had two partitions, C and D. The C Partition was too small for Vista (15 GB) and when replacing the drive I wanted to double the size of the C Partition. The built-in Vista Complete PC Backup tool is unable to create and restore an image to the boot partition that is a different size. I was stuck.

Well lo and behold I burned a boot DVD for Windows HomeServer, popped the new drive into my Media Center and booted from CD. I was then able to restore both my C and D partition to my new primary drive from the backup on HomeServer over the network. The whole experience was amazing. The HomeServer automatically recognized my PC by MAC address and suggested exactly what I wanted to do. It even gave me the option of keeping the new partition size of 30GB for the C drive. Total down time... 30 min including opening the case and replacing the drive.

In short, Windows HomeServer is an essential computer for anyone with more than one PC and anyone that never wants to think about backups.

I love that I never have to configure anything. It backs up the entire computer quickly and efficiently without wasting any space.

The team hit a home run. I plan to have all my family members purchase a HomeServer so that I never have to worry about them losing data.

Run, don't walk to get your Vista Updates.

I wrote about them last week. Talk about fast delivery .

A while ago I started experimenting with the idea of using a Hipster PDA over a Moleskine for tracking tasks and notes. I was attracted to the fact that I could move the cards around, throw them away, and found the system very flexible with lots of templates.

However, I found that I simply used the todo template the most. The other day while browsing Staples I found the 3M Sortable Post-it. These products come in a variety of sizes and colors. They can be stuck like a post it but can be re-arranged in a stack.

I got the 3 x 4 cards. The are the perfect size, 1 inch shorter than an index card an perfect for jotting tasks and notes. With a little paper clip you can easily carrying around 10 - 20.

I love that I can just stick them anywhere. They are pretty cheap, and pretty darned neat. You can get them at Staples, Amazon etc.

I absolutely empathize with this post on Software + Services by Zoli. As a long time user of Microsoft Money, I am this close to outsourcing the software part to Wesabe... but like Zoli there are a few features that I use in Money that are critical to my life:

• Ability to itemize a paycheck
• Ability to see in real time what my Federal Tax Liability us (requires you to Itemize your paycheck).
• Ability to manage my loan accounts (including mortgage), as well as Brokerage Accounts (like my 401K).

This past weekend I got the most horrible and scary warning from Money. Just reading the instructions on how to keep using Money with Online Banking is enough to make this computer professional run screaming from my office. The instructions are 24 freaking pages!!! longer than the manual for the product. I seriously almost went to the "Add / Remove Programs" Control Panel to fix the problem. Luckily for me I was some how spared the misery of sinking 2 - 4 hours into Money. I did not have to update anything. Lucky me... for now.

Now, I don't agree that Microsoft lacks Customer Focus. That's saying that all 70,000 employees lack customer focus. I'm pretty sure the folks who work on Microsoft Money are crying about this update right now (at least the Tech Support folks are), but I suspect that since money was put out to pasture years ago, there is very little "big investment" in this product... and Customer Focus requires real investment.

It's so dammed easy to generalize when your personal experience is colored, especially in the wrong way. Zoli (and all the folks dealing with this nightmare) have a right to be pissed. So do the folks that went through the horrible horrible Money 2004 (or was it 2005) update where I lost a good day or so of my life. However, there is plenty of Customer Focus at Microsoft, at least that's my experience.

I happen to love Fidelity. They provide an awesome web site, great online tools, and lots of local branches to go to. I open almost all my new accounts with them since I already have my and my wife's retirement accounts there (401k, 529, Brokerage, etc).

Well I was pleased to find out that they just rolled out a new checking account called the mySmart Cash account. Perks include:

• No Minimum Fees
• Re-imbruement (same day) for all ATM fees.
• 3.5% APR (better than what Wells Fargo offers for Savings Accounts)
• Deposits via Mail or the Local Branch Offices
• All the other normal stuff

Now I need to find out if they support Microsoft Money or Wesabe.

Given that I love Fidelity and hate the "nickel and dime" Wells Fargo, I just might use this account.

It would be really nice to be liberated from the burdens of having to hunt for a Wells Fargo ATM. Granted we have one in our cafeteria.... however, once you leave your home state, making cash withdrawals can be expensive (like overseas).

Over the past 7 or so months, since getting the Samsung Blackjack, I have been using my phone for a lot more GTD task management. The keyboard on the device makes it practical for doing so.

I've evaluated a few applications to manage my tasks, and ultimately settled on using OneNote Mobile and SmarterTasks. For a long time I was using Oxios Todo, as it has an amazing amount of flexibility. However, what I found was I was tweaking it to get to a point where it was like SmarterTasks out of the box. I also have a few complaints about SmarterTasks, but they have all been rectified in the latest release, 1.1.

IMHO you won't find a better task application. It removes all the unnecessary clutter UX from a task, and just focuses on the core features. It lets you enter a subject, priority, category and project. New to 1.1 is the fact that Projects are persisted using the increasingly common format:

[Project Name]

Where the name of the project is surrounded by brackets. This method is employed by ClearContext and Jello.GTD.

A recent GTD hack I started when I was on parental leave and had errands to run every day was to create a task in the @Errands category with the name of the store I was going to. Then in the notes field I would list all the individual items I needed such as:

@Errands

    @Whole Foods

        - milk

        - new york strip

and so on. When I got something on the list I just changed the dash to a plus sign. When everything was purchased I just marked the errand task as complete.

Yahoo has an excellent and short primer on 13 performance tips for web developers.

The only bug is that for Tip #13 they recommend disabling ETags because if you use more than one box to serve graphics requests, the ETags won't match from machine to machine.

Well we use ETags just fine with Hotmail because IIS allows you to synchronize ETags across boxes.

Either way, this is good stuff.