shahine.com/omar/

I’m having a really hard time getting my head wrapped around the sheer destruction. I get the feeling that no one anticipated this amount of damage, both human and infrastructure. The pictures are just impossible to comprehend. New Orleans looks destroyed, finished, gone. I never thought a US City could be gobbled up by Mother Nature like this. In my lifetime I can’t think of a worse natural disaster. My poor brain can’t even figure out what was worse, the recent Tsunami, the Twin Towers, or Katrina. I only fully grasped the twin towers when I was in NYC in October of 2002 and being from New York City, with many affected friends, & family, it hit home like nothing else. The Tsumani was so far away, that it was hard to really understand what happened. But seeing a US city under water is just mind boggling.

Listening to NPR and watching the news I just can’t figure it out. You can’t really do anything about this kind of thing. What I wonder though is that we seem to be getting a late start to the recovery. Why wasn’t there a fleet of Navy Ships, etc waiting near by? Comfort just set sail from Baltimore today. Why wasn’t it en-route already?

Oh, and it’s nice that the President cut his vacation short. Geez. We can fight a war with tens of thousands of troops, planes, tanks, etc on a continent far far away. It takes 48 hours to start a massive recovery effort in our own country? I don’t get it. I feel really bad for the people that have been displaced by this. Their home town is gone, and uninhabitable for a long time. It’s like one of those movies Hollywood makes every few years.

I really can’t understand this.

Update: I need to clarify what I said. When I say "I really can't understand this" I'm refering to the destruction, the displacement, the force and magnitude of mother nature and just how powerless we can be when faced with natural events. We are just humans after all. We don't control weather, and can only try to prepare for this sort of thing.

So last week I was in Best Buy, intent on getting the Creative Zen Sleek to replace my Creative Zen Micro. I was kind of turned off by its size (same as iPod) but much larger than the Zen Micro. I forgot how small the Zen Micro is and wasn’t willing to carry around something bigger/heavier.

Anyway, I was completely taken aback by the Samsung YP-F1Z. It’s a 1 GB Flash based player, similar to the iPod shuffle. However, it’s TINY! I mean really really small. It also has an FM Radio, a OLED screen, Audio Recording, and Radio Recording. I picked one up for $159.

I really LOVE this device. I never realized how convenient it is to have a small selection of my favorite tunes, plus access to NPR via FM. The device is so small, that I just clip it to my shirt like the remote for my Zen Micro. In fact, it’s about the size of the Zen Micro Control. It also comes with a necklace like the shuffle with integrated headphones (I’m not keen on that though since I already have my own nice headphones).

Anyway, Samsung has a winner her. The device does not support PlaysForSure Subscription (only Download) though (which is a small bummer).

For now it seems that Best Buy is the only big retailer carrying this.

August 24th was MSN’s 10 year anniversary. What no party? Man, we’d better do something cool for Hotmail’s 10 year anniversary next July 4th.

The folks at NetCentrics have released a new version of the Getting Things Done Add-in.

I am not a fan of the software. I sent them a ton of feedback on v1 and they were kind enough to include me in the beta as well as incorporate some of my suggestions. However, I’m not going to use the new version, and frankly, I don’t think there is anything they can do that will get me using the software.

Here are my reasons:

1. The software is too overbearing
2. It mucks up Outlook with a zillion views, folders, and other stuff I don’t want.
3. It does not take advantage of Outlook features that already exist. There is plenty of duplication between what they do and what Outlook does
1. for example, Outlook tasks can have a Status field that they don’t take advantage of
4. They don’t attach emails to tasks, they duplicate all the text into the body of the task, and move it to a special hidden folder. This has a tendency to break and leave orphans (in my opinion). This is a deal breaker.
5. You can’t set due dates and reminders for tasks from their creation dialog. Also a deal breaker. Even though GTD says you aren’t supposed to do it, I do it anyway and don’t like when software isn’t flexible enough to meet my needs.
6. There is no good story for sync’ing to Palm as you can’t see your Project/Actions.

If you are using the software today, and you like it then you should upgrade. There are lots of good bug fixes and improvements in there. I for one will continue to use my hacked together, unsupported, only runs for Omar custom software that I wrote for Outlook. At least till the folks at ClearContext make my software irrelevant .

Speaking off, I had a fantastic dinner with the entire ClearContext team last night. They demo’ed some stuff in the next version and then treated me to dinner at House of Prime Rib. It was a good time.

They also showed me their ActiveWords agent. I still haven’t jumped on the ActiveWords train (sorry Buzz) but I tried it twice and just didn’t keep it around. I’ll need to spend some more time understanding the new ClearContext support.

Sony finally released the long awaited 2.0 firmware for the PSP.

This is great. I can now use WiFi to join my home network (I Use WPA, and 1.0 only supported WEP).

The best part is, there is a built in web browser, and it works pretty well! Really cool. It even renders my site.

FireAnt is a big deal for me. It’s the code name for the “plumbing” of Kahuna, the Hotmail Frontdoor rewrite. It’s one of the “Architecture” pieces that my team is responsible for helping build.

Last summer we spent a lot of time at the white-board evaluating a number of ways to deliver a new architecture for Hotmail. We considered a number of things:

1. Modification of the current C/C++ ISAPI architecture to support a hybrid ASP model.
2. .NET rewrite for the DataLayer and BusinessLayer and XML/XSLT for the PresentationLayer
3. Same as #2 but the Presentation layer would be JavaScript, XMLHTTP, and DHTML/CSS. This now has the fancy name, AJAX.

After much deliberating, we chose #3, and started running. For 4 weeks basically 1 PM, a developer and an intern built a prototype, and then the real thing (in case you are in college I’d note how cool it is that we put an intern on the most important technology we we're building). As more people started to move over to the FireAnt project, we got more and more excited about what was happening. You see, writing AJAX code can be a pain, and we didn’t want to spend our days and nights writing a lot of JavaScript and debugging client side Script. Instead we built an infrastructure that dynamically take server side objects (classes and methods) and automatically generates client side JavaScript stubs. The end result is that the client side object model looked exactly like the server side object model. Information was transported across the wire using XMLHTTP and the whole thing happened Asynchronously.

We extended .NET Attributes to mark classes and methods as FireAnt classes/methods and at build time the script is generated. If you think of SOAP support in the .NET Framework, it’s basically similar. As a developer you do not worry about generating SOAP messages, or building a SOAP parser. All you do is mark your method as [WebMethod] and your classes as [Serializable] and the .NET framework takes care of proxying, class generation etc. That’s what we were shooting for.

This was a big deal for us as it allows us to be incredibly productive. Since last summer, we have built a ton of features using FireAnt and the JavaScript Frameworks from Scott Isaacs. Late last fall we went up to Redmond and showed FireAnt to a number of folks in MSN, one of those folks was Steve Rider. It was really exciting to see the looks on folks faces when Walter (our FireAnt “architect”) setup his “Hello World” demo. You could just see that people realized that doing AJAX style development any other way was crazy.

We’ve since showed our stuff to a number of teams inside Microsoft. As a result of our work, Walter and Scott have spent a considerable amount of time with the Whidbey/ASP.NET folks and it’s pretty exciting to see ATLAS come together. If you want to learn more, Walter will be giving a talk at the PDC on what we’ve built. It’s great so see collaboration between our team and the Developer Division as the end result will be a better more scalable version of the .NET Framework for you.

We also just wrapped up another Channel 9 video, with more folks than the last one. It should be a great video when Robert is done editing it.

The folks at smugmug have been busy. In the past week they overhauled some of their templates to be more AJAXy, which should improve album browse performance.

They also added support for geotagging. Very cool.

Meanwhile, Don MacAskill, one of smugmug’s co-founders posts a great response to Download Squad's post calling them an also-ran.

When people ask my wife what she does, sometimes she jokes and says she saves lives. The reality is, she delivers babies, and helps in the process of bringing new life into this world.

A few days ago she came home as I was waking up to go to work and seemed sad. When I asked her why she was sad she told me how a woman came into San Francisco General Hospital complaining of something or another. However, after running some tests, my wife was perplexed as to the results. A few folks wanted to just send her home, thinking she was fine. However, Lora insisted that she stay under observation.

Now, for some framework. San Francisco General is the city county hospital located in the Mission District. It by no means caters to affluent folks, or people who are typically insured. My wife sees a lot of “interesting” things. It’s also San Francisco’s only trauma center. So if you get shot 10 miles away, you are in for a long ambulance ride.

Anyway, what Lora found out was that the patient’s baby was dead, and no one knew how long. When a baby dies, and you don’t evacuate it, it starts to release deadly toxins into the body that will eventually kill you. This person was very close to death. Lora arranged for a late night surgery and the patent is now in the Intensive Care Unit recovering. This is a decision that was entirely her call, no one was there to help her make this choice.

What would have happened had they sent her home? I don’t even know if she had a home.

Why am I writing about this? Sometimes I think my job is so hard, and that the decisions at work that I have to make are so difficult. I get paid quite a bit of money (substantially more than my wife) to make software. It’s entirely possible that the software I work on somehow saves lives. However, the decisions I make on a daily basis do not.

If anything I’m grateful that there are people like Lora willing to make such sacrifices to make decisions that I can never make, and have a truly profound impact on one’s life.

We have this problem in Hotmail. If you walk away from your desk, even for a brief moment, and your PC is left unlocked, someone will walk in, and send mail to a broad distribution list with something silly. Like “I like oranges”, or worse things. Some of them even down right embarrasing.

For some reason this is called “Goating”. Anyway, I find it incredibly annoying. My office has a lock on the door, so I am just in the habbit of keeping my door locked when I walk away.

When I saw Scott’s article I was intrigued. I orderd one of these gizmo’s from ThinkGeek and it arrived tonight. I installed .NET Framework 2.0 and Scott’s software, plugged in the device (no drivers required) and it worked. I walked away from my PC and it locked itself.

One thing I’ve noticed is that this device is a bit sensitive to some kind of interference as my PC will think it’s out of range when I haven’t even moved the dongle.

I think this has amazing potential. I’m bringing it to work tomorrow so I can rig my PC to be “Goat Proof”. Try and mess with my machine now Hotmail people!

I have two Bluetooth headsets for use with my Treo. First I got the Motorola HS850 and then I got the Palm Treo Headset. I was going to write a review but saw that Treonauts has one.

I originally got the Motorola HS850 cause I liked the idea of the closing boom. Generally it’s a fine bluetooth headset. The best feature is that the device is “off” when the boom is closed, meaning you can effectively get weeks of standby time. The bad news is that when you get a phone call, and flip the boom on, you only have a 20% change of being able to answer the call (at least with my Treo 650).

Later on I picked up the Palm Treo Headset since I got it for cheap. It’s an incredible deal if you own a Treo because you get an international charging kit with the headset. The headset also charges using the same charger as the Treo.

The Treo Headset is by far the best headset if you own a Treo as when you dial/answer calls they automatically use the headset if it is within range. The Motorola HS850 does not support this. Furthermore, the Treo headset is more comfortable. The only drawback is that you can’t get weeks of standby time since it’s always on.

Bottom line, if you have a Treo, get the Palm Treo headset.

This is so unreal I’m not even sure what to do.

So there is this app called FolderShare. It’s amazing. More on that later, cause that’s not what I’m excited about. FolderShare just added support for MSN Desktop Search. What does this mean?

Log on to FolderShare from any computer on the planet. Enter text in the search box, and watch as you get back results from anything that is indexed on your machine running MSN Desktop Search. Holy freaking cow! I need more cowbell!

I didn’t think this would be useful till I was looking for a serial number for BlogJet which I have on my laptop but not my home PC. So I went to FolderShare.com, entered “subject:BlogJet” and the result was right there. I could pull up the email, and copy the Key.

Mind you, this email was in my Hotmail account, which I download to my PC using MSN Outlook Connector, which then gets indexed by MSN Deskopt Search. That's a lot of MSN goodness.

Freaking awesome I tell you. How much is this feature worth alone? At least the price of a FolderShare subscription. I know I am going to use this a ton. I can’t stand having multiple computers and being stuck without access to information that’s on another computer.

Not to mention FolderShare is amazing. I’ve replaced Groove File Sync with FolderShare due to the performance issues of running Groove with thousands of files (it would take over my machine for a while and consume a lot of CPU at times).

This is freaking awesome and I have to have one. I’ve always wanted to be able to walk away from my Work PC and have it “Lock” automatically etc. Have Messenger say I’m “Away” when I’m really away… geez.

Well look no further. For $15 and some free software from non other than Scott Hanselman, you can do just that.

They should put this article in the next Make Magazine (Scott just let me now that this is in progress).

update: you can purchase one from ThinkGeek.com. It's more expensive, but I got a cool t-shirt while I was at it.

Well, got all my parts from newegg (they rule) last friday and assembled my PC. Everything was smooth sailing. I have to say, I love my case. It's a perfect Small Formfactor (SFF) case and the fact that it takes a miniATX mobo means it's future proof which is nice. If I were building another desktop or media center PC I'd buy my next case from SilverStone.

You can see a very grainy photo here:

Two words sum up my experience. Intel Rules! The motherboard and processor installed w/o any problem, the instructions clearly indicated what goes where (all the front panel pinouts for USB etc) and the features are great. I have Gibabit Lan, 1394, 8 USB 2.0 Ports, 4 RAM slots, 1 PCIe x16, 2PCI and 1 PCIe, 4 SATA ports with RAID, and 1 IDE port.

The best part is that the BIOS defaulted to support S3 standby (that's a first for me) and what's even better is that it worked. This thing is flawless. Thank you Intel. Plus the BIOS doesn't have 1000 options that I don't need or care about. It's very simple and basic. I'd also add that Intel provides a Driver CD that takes care of installing every single driver that I need w/o any intervention on my part. It can even check the web for updates. Sweet.

Anyway, this thing looks great, is quieter than my Laptop (I have no case fans running, just the CPU fan and PSU on silent). At some point I will need to replace the stock Intel CPU fan, as those things are always worthless. Need to investigate more.

I really don't see why I'd ever shy away from Intel CPU/Mobo combos. This is now my 3rd and I've had nothing but positive experiences. I only wish I had never bothered with the Shuttle/AMD combo, but if I hadn't I never would have found this setup.

Update: I got some questions about how much this all costs. Here is my invoice. This gets you everything you need except hard drives (I already had two 200GB hard drives in a RAID-1 array).

• Case $188.00 
• RADEON 550 256M $79.00 
• DVD+/-RW 16X Sony DRU800A $84.99 
• Intel Pentium D 820 (2.8 GHZ) $245.99 
• Intel 945G D945GTPLKR $126.00 
• PSU Coolmax CXI-300B RT $39.99 
• DDR2 1 GB Kit (two 512 Dimms) $173.43 

Total cost was $937. Figure with 2 200GB drives another $250.

Latley, I've been using Excel a LOT. Right now it powers (along with the people of course) the development process we are using in Hotmail (Modified Scrum). There are features in Excel that I didn't even know about till I started looking at the template that we have here (created by the Engineering Excellence Group). One thing I always strugle with is how to create a Pivot Table. I usually curse at my machine, and go find some one else in my hallway that knows how to create a Pivot Table with the information I want.

Ask no more. O'Reilly has a how to for Pivot Tables. Rock on.

I think I might have to purchase Excel: The Missing Manual.

There are a few things I still use Google for.

1. Stock Quotes inline for search results
2. Mobile Local/Maps
3. Spell Checking in the Google Toolbar
4. Usenet search (if you write code you need this)
5. Movie Time Search

#1 and #2 no longer a reason thanks to MSN Search. However, MSN Mobile folks, I have yet to figure out how to get to the Local link. Where is beta services?

Google, listen up. Your services aren't "sticky" yet. I can and will go to the better product anytime I like. Right now, the MSN Search guys are shipping new bits faster than you. Like the MSN Weather Plugin (rockin), MSN Screen Saver, and Desktop Search.

So last night Lora and I went to SBC Park (I liked it when it was called Pacific Bell Park better) to see Dave Matthews Band. This must have been like the 6th DMB concert we've been to. My first DMB concert was at the Irving Plaza in 1993. Back then it was just UVA kids and a few other enlightened souls. Satellite was the big song back then.

The best thing about this concert? Jem and Black Eyed Peas opened. It was the best part of the concert. SBC is way to big and awkward for Concerts though. Most of the DMB shows I've seen are at outdoor amphitheaters which are better suited. SBC Pack is a place that you need a band like U2 cause they are big enough to put on a real huge and exciting show (and they probably need a football stadium anyway).

Anyway, Jem was just fantastic. Black Eyed Peas were also great, but it was so closed that Fergie wore the most clothing I've ever seen on her .

Oh, it was freaking freezing. Dammed San Francisco Weather.

Special thanks to the folks who downloaded and tested the RC. Scott just announced that 1.8 is now finished. Between the RC and this version I added the ability for DasBlog to ping pretty much any site that supports the ping protocol. Before we only had support for Weblogs and blo.gs. Now we can support anyone that can speak regular and extended ping protocol.

And thanks to Scott for putting the release together. If this were on my plate right now it would not have happened for a while (Kahuna keeping me busy).

Here is my recommendation to you folks running dasBlog:

1. Turn off Referrals. they are useless to look at in posts now. The spammers have won.
1. You can do this by going to your Configuration and unchecking "Save referrals along with entries (not recommended for high traffic sites)"
2. Clean all your dayfeedback files of your referrals. The DasBlogUpgrader can do this for you (do it on a backup!!!).
3. Turn on Use Post Title for Permalinks. GUIDs are soo ugly.

update: added info about how to turn off referral tracking in posts.

MSN Spaces just launched a beta mobile version. It’s really well done and already posted from my Treo. It’s a great, simple mobile experience and I was really impressed. Kudos to the Spaces and the MSN Mobile Team.

Url is: http://mobile.spaces.msn.com/

Well, the fun continued this week. I exchange my Shuttle ST20G5 at Fry’s on Monday morning. It was actually quite humorous to watch the Fry’s folks “test” my PC to really make sure it was broken. I basically had to assemble it for them so it could boot, so that they could see that it could not boot.

Not sure why I exchanged it, rather than returning the whole thing. But I had a glimmer of hope, and I like the form factor. After assembling the new box I could not get S3 to work at all without weird green specs on my DVI display after wake from standby. I twiddled dozens of unecessary BIOS settings that only a real geek would care to even mess with before giving up.

I returned the whole kit and kaboodle to Fry’s this morning. I got a trainee return person and it took 30 minutes, but I got every penny back . Here is what I learned:

1. Never buy a Shuttle PC. They are buggy, the BIOS releases are buggy, and if you read the release notes for the BIOS you’d understand. If you even read the forums for but a brief moment you’d come to the same conclusion.
2. Avoid ATI Chipset based motherboard with on-board graphics. Maybe it was Shuttle’s fault, but I blame ATI as well. The built in video was flakey, the drivers were flakey.

Now, I have built 3 PCees in my life. All were Intel based motherboards, Intel processors and everything worked as advertised. S3 works on my Media Center, old desktop etc. The BIOS upgrades are stable, the manuals are in english, tech support is available, and I just trust that the stuff works. When you buy an AMD, you are getting some third party chipset etc, and I just don’t trust this stuff any more.

So I went back to newegg, and found a nice SFF case that supports microATX allowing me to get a good old Intel Motherboard (yipee). So here is what I got:

• Case: SilverStone SST-SG01
• Processor: Pentium D 820 (Dual Core)
• 1 GB RAM
• Sony DRU800A DVD DL Writer
• Intel D945GT Motherboard
• ATI Radeon X550 Graphics Card

Why am I doing this to myself? I want a Small Form Factor PC, and sadly, none of the big guys make one that can supporr RAID + 2 IDE Drives. I also want a PC that’s quiet and does S3 Standby (Suspend To Ram). That leaves no real option but to build.

This brought a smile to my face:

REDMOND, Wash. — Aug. 9, 2005 — Microsoft Corp. and Scott Richter today announced they reached a full settlement of Microsoft’s claims against Mr. Richter and his company OptInRealBig.com LLC. As part of its effort to fight spam, Microsoft filed a lawsuit against Mr. Richter and his company in December 2003, when he was ranked one of the top spammers in the world. In July 2005, Mr. Richter was removed from the Register of Known Spam Operators maintained by the Spamhaus Project, a leading anti-spam and consumer advocacy organization.

…

Microsoft will direct $5 million of the settlement to expand the company’s Internet safety partnerships with governments and law enforcement worldwide through technical training, investigative and forensic assistance, and the development of new technology tools. The company has pledged an additional $1 million to provide many community centers in New York state broader access to computers for underprivileged children and adults through Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential Program.

Mr. Richter said today he had changed his e-mailing practices in part because Microsoft and the New York Attorney General sued him in December 2003. “In response to Microsoft’s and the New York Attorney General’s lawsuits, we made significant changes to OptInRealBig.com’s e-mailing practices and have paid a heavy price,” Mr. Richter said. “I am committed to sending e-mail only to those who have requested it and to complying fully with all federal and state anti-spam laws.”

And what a nice way to spend 7 million .

This is going to sound silly, but I was really really sad about his death. I remember when I was growing up my father and I would watch him on TV every day (back when you would watch the news with your parents). I remember watching him at the Berlin Wall. I never knew or watched any of the other shows/anchors. Today I find CNN to be frustrating (as are the other networks). When I am overseas, it’s a breath of fresh are to watch the BBC.

Peter was a great anchor because he was a fantastic reporter. I don’t feel that he ever pushed his agenda on anyone, and that’s how I like my news.

I never got to meet him, but I feel like I knew him. So very sad. If only because it’s a gentle reminder that the things I know and have experienced are starting to slip away.

As always, every few years the technology tax must be paid. This past weekend I picked up a Shuttle ST20G5 from Fry’s along with a proc and 2 GB of memory. I spent a bunch o time making a bootable XP SP2 CD with the SATA driver and my Promise RAID ATA driver slipstreamed (no floppy). Thanks to nLite this was a breeze. If you ever need to make a bootable Windows CD with your drivers, custom tweaks etc this is the app to get.

Anyway, I got everything, I mean everything working. And then the fun began. I had to make S3 standby work. I correctly configured S3 in the bios, but then realized that there was a special BIOS setting to allow USB devices to wake the machine from sleep, and it was off by default. Well, I turned it on and no dice. So I went back in the bios, and saw that there was a setting to allow a PS/2 Keyboard to wake it from sleep. So I turned it on and that worked (thanks to the fact that my MS Keyboard has both USB and PS/2). Then I was like, I wonder if this is fixed in the latest bios. So I installed that. Then my Monitor would blank out every 10 or so seconds. So I went back to the original ATI drivers that came with the motherboard. Problem fixed. But, my S3 problem was still there with USB (not PS/2). I should have just called it a day. Then really weird stuff started to happen, like weird video problems and windows telling my that my user profile was busted (could not load the registry).

Argggghhhh!!!! So then I go and re-install Windows. Easy enough since I have a bootable CD with all the goods. While that’s going on, I read up on some forums and find out that the bios I am using is completely unstable, and everyone in the forums is using the original version that shipped with the PC. So I figure, I’ll be safe and roll back. Well after Windows is installed, I do just that and Windows blue screens during the update process. Now my Shuttle is a big fat paper weight and I’m never getting back those hours I just wasted.

So I took everything apart, took the RAM/CPU out (and that dammed thermal grease). Now back to Fry’s to exchange this for a new one so I can back to where I was on Saturday (where I had S3 wake working using PS/2). I like the size and quietness of this thing to much to use anything else at this point. Sigh.

I know I'm being punished.

I agree with Steve, Consolas is the best programming/fixed-width font I’ve used. The ClearType hinting is excellent. I managed to grab the font a while back and it’s one of the first things I install on my XP boxes.

Now the real question is will Word, Excel etc change their default font from Arial to something > Arial. Arial is optimized for printing, not on-screen reading like Tahoma and Verdana. I hate Arial. Plus Arial looks horrible on a Mac.

This is pretty impressive. Actually, two things are. 1) India will be buying 490 planes in the next 20 years, and 2) the 700-200LR Can fly from India to San Francisco non stop (9,000 miles). That's amazing.

OMG OMG OMG!

Treo 670

Wow, this is FANTASTIC (if it’s actually going to ship).

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be inviting some folks into the Hotmail beta. Today is our first attempt at that, and it looks like it was a success. We made a little treasure hunt for people, and by the looks of it, things went well .

Part of our treasure hunt involved using MSN Spaces. I love this post:

“I totally want to check out the beta, enough so that I opened a spaces account just to track back to this article. Hopefully I'll make the list and I can see how much cooler Kahuna is than the current Hotmail, which is looking a bit dated.” [Ryan Blank]

As I said, there will be more ways to get into the beta soon .

Josh Ledgard and Kevin Briody have some good Microsoft tips. [via Furrygoat]

Here is my top 10. Many of these were borrowed from other great folks.

1. Process is no substitute for thinking

Don’t use process as an excuse, or get cornered into a hole because of process. If you use your brain, you’ll find it’s sometimes amazingly powerful at accomplishing hard things.

2. Get out of your office

Seriously, get out of you chair, walk into the hallway and realize the full potential of being located near your entire team. Resist the urge to send them mail when you can just write it down somewhere and bring it up the next time you see them. On top of that, get to know your team. You’ll find you have an amazing set of co-workers who want to ship a kick ass product with you.

3. Use your product (the one your customers will)

There is no excuse for not knowing everything you can about your product. Don’t get stuck in a silo. The most successful folks at Microsoft have an amazing amount of breadth and depth to the product. If all you have is depth, you are going to limit your potential. When some one external to your team asks you a question about your product, try and asnwer it youself. Don't just reply CC'ing the person who owns that aspect of the product. You'll save an email, and learn something if you do.

Finally, you are shipping this thing to people who expect to use it. If you don't, how do you know you are shipping the right product?

4. Fix things that are broken rather than complain about them being broken. Actions speak better than your complaining.

I can’t tell you how much I value people who don’t ask to fix something, they just take the initiative and make the team’s life better. Fix one broken thing a year and you’ll be amazed at the results.

5. Make hard problem look easy. Don’t make easy problems look hard.

If you make a really hard problem look easy you are a rock star. If you make a really easy problems look hard, then you are making my life (or some one else’s) harder than it needs to be. I have my own problems, don’t bring me more of them.

6. Use the right communication tool for the job.

You need to learn how to communicate to the different people at Microsoft. You can’t talk to the planners or the marketing folk the same way you talk to you developers and testers. If you VP is on a thread, don’t reply with some useless thread propagating crap. Take discussions offline, meet with people, GET OUT OF YOUR OFFICE, and use email sparingly. Think twice, I mean three times about adding anyone to a thread. Once you do they are stuck on that thread from hell till it dies a few days later.

7. Learn to make mistakes.

Microsoft is amazingly forgiving about making mistakes. Software development is an Art, not a science. Try new things, go for the gold, be big and bold. You will screw up, don’t lament, learn and move on. Don’t make the same mistake twice.

8. Keep things simple.

Don’t over complicate things because you can.

9. Add value all the time

You are at the world’s largest software company that has some of the best minds and resources in the industry. Try and add value every day (by thinking). Help your team, co-workers, and other teams be the best they can.

10. Use their product

Make it a point to dogfood other team’s products. Get on their discussion or dogfood DLs. Try their new stuff, give them good feedback and bugs. You’ll get to know new people and personalities in the company, and you’ll be helping Microsoft ship better software. Microsoft has an amazing culture of getting and giving good candid feedback. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to help make another team’s stuff better.

Today I am announcing my year end results. Performance was good and I hit my age target of 29. I have consistently hit age targets each year representing a decent 3.5% increase in age. If you look at overally performance over the past 6 years you will see a nice and steady trend. Contrast this to MSFT which is all over the place.

My birthday wish is that MSFT grow in a similar fasion. $1 a year would be nice .

This post about Virtual Earth was just hilarious. Kudos to Steve Lombardi for having a sense of humor about the problem.

Quote:

“On a related note, a lot of you were alarmed to see that we had removed the Apple headquarters off our map. Our full plan is to of course remove each of our competitor’s headquarters from the map, but we just didn’t have time to get to this in the beta. By the time we get to our final release, we’ll have this feature nailed down. ”

At long last, a decent free sync utility. Man I can’t tell you how excited I am about this. With 4 or so computers it’s a pain to have my photos, music etc on all of them. Today I use a very ad-hoc process.

No more! SyncToy rocks. I used it last night to sync 100 GB of WMA files from my desktop to my Media Center in “echo” mode. I love all the different modes it supports like subscribe, echo etc. Meets all my needs. I plan on using it at work to sync all my spec documents with our SharePoint server for offline access and some level of redundancy.

My only complaint with the product is that you cannot type in UNC paths to select folders, you need to browse your network, and there is no command line support. Hopefully these will be resolved in the final version.

I really have to end it to the Windows team. Between this PowerToy and the RAW Thumbnail PowerToy I’ve gotten two awesome upgrades to XP for free.

There is also a good white p