shahine.com/omar/

A long time ago, I started a quest to find a portable music player that matched the iPod in every way. This is now my 4th device in that journey.

That quest is now complete, thanks to the Philips GoGear HDD1630 6GB (also in 30GB).

I can’t begin to explain how impressed I am that a device is finally available that offers:

• Good Sync experience (does not come with any proprietary crappy software, relies on Windows Media Player, and does not push some other agenda on you)
• Good design
• Good out of box experience
• Nice Color screen
• Photo support

The device has the best PlaysForSure support of any non Portable Media Center device. A bunch of devices that claim PlaysForSure can have other hidden surprises like USB 1.1 support (not 2.0), buggy sync experience, no support for subscription audio etc. A good clue if your device really supports Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) or is a mass storage device is if it has subscription audio support. You can still get PlaysForSure support by having a mass storage device since that will technically sync with WMP (like my Samsung YP -F1Z) but you will be dissapointed as I was to find that the experience is buggy at best. So, when buying PlaysForSure make sure it has both regular audio and subscription audio.

MTP support is what allows this device to finally sync such things as:

• Album Art
• Ratings
• Play Count
• Playlists

I’ll post a review in the next few days. This device really shatters the devices that Creative and iRiver make (which is great cause I never had very high hopes for those guys). Creative seems like a hopeless cause to me.

So if you are looking to buy some one a holiday gift and were thinking of an iPod cause it was the only game in town, take a look at the GoGear device. They are just as sleek, sexy, well designed and usable as an iPod (well the Video definitely raises the bar again).

Wierd title, but it's true. http://digg.com is a great site. I was never one to like reading slashdot, so I checked out digg and found that the design, site layout, and content was more to my liking.

I mainly read it from live.com as I find it's the perfect kind of feed for the live.com dashboard style rss reader.

BTW - Why in the bleeping hell does IE allow web pages to steal focus from the address bar? 9 times out of 10 I find myself typing a url when pages like msn.com and live.com steal the focus away from me multiple times. update: appears that all the focus issues were related to the MSN Toolbar. live.com no longer steals focus. I guess I’ll have to use firefox to get back tabbed browsing.

If some one told you to design a stylus retention mechanism, is this what you would come up with? If it was I’d fire you.

As you can see, the re-enforcement is in the wrong place, creating flex in the thin plastic. Over time the plastic wears out and it breaks, making the pen fall out of the case.

I fixed this by taking the device apart, and sticking some rubber at the end of the stylus silo to create enough resistance to keep the pen in place. Shoddy engineering. No wonder carriers test phones for so long. Imagine if 100% of the devices you sold needed to be serviced after 30 days?

If you have an HTC Wizard (k-jam), get ready for this. It will happen to you.

Ray just blogged about something he and his CTO team have cooked up since joining Microsoft. He calls is Simple Sharing Extensions, and it’s a really cool way to solve some hella hard problems by bootstraping on RSS. I got wind of SSE a while back when Ray came down to meet some of us in Hotmail. It was the first time I met Ray and I was incredibly impressed with what he had to say, and the approach he was taking to solving the problem around sharing of calendar and contacts data. Here is why SSE will succeed where other technologies have failed:

1. It doesn’t invent anything that doesn’t already exist. SSE makes use of RSS and XML namespaces.
2. It does not dictate a transport protocol. Anything can be used, including such things as HTTP and P2P file sharing
3. It doesn’t dictate how the RSS fragments are ACL’ed.

It’s quite simple, yet very powerful way to deliver software that can finally allow users to share data in a “mesh” scenario. I really look forward to one day sharing certain events on my calendar with my wife, and allowing her to read/write into my calendar (we both have Exchange accounts in different places as well as MSN Calendar accounts and we can’t do simple calendar sharing).

Congrats to Ray, Jack and George for getting this out there.

I’ve had one of these on my wishlist for a while, and I just saw that Radio Shack is selling them for $29.95 (normally $99.95).

You can find it at radioschack.com by searching for catalog # 63-1085.

Cool device. It gets the weather forcast wirelessley from accuweather.com.

[via ambient411]

A lot of people seem really excited about the new Windows Live Custom Domains. I've seen some great individual posts on blogs about the service. Some folks left me some comments asking questions about the service. Well it turns out that the team has a blog that answers most of these questions.

There is one unfortunate thing about the service and that is the accounts are on classic hotmail (not Kahuna). We'll hopefully address that soon.

Oh, and I'd like to note. Some people have noticed, but this is hopefully one of many SBG (Shipped Before Google) features :-P.

I think Sony has single handeldly re-invented the word, and what it means to harm consumers. Watching the events unfold over the past few weeks has been surreal. It's the first time I've witnessed a blog really uncover a REALLY BAD situation, and turn the screws to a company.

Need to catch up on some cool stuff Kahuna team members have blogged about. Aditya has a few good posts on two subjects near and dear to my heart: FireAnt and Watson.

In his FireAnt post he discusses the rational that went into the wire format that we chose for moving data from the server to the client. Lots of good stuff here on why we went this route. We called our wire format FireAnt Proxy Protocol (or FPP).

In his Watson post he talks about how Kahuna can report both client and server errors (javascript and code exceptions) to the Watson system that most Microsoft Win32 applications use. Watson is simply da bomb. We can get a really good view of what kind of errors our users are hitting, and address them in the next release, or if they are severe enough, in a service pack. I believe that we are the first Microsoft Web Application that uses Watson w/o running any client software on the user's machine. Almost every week we get a report from our QA team about the top Watson issues, and how many "hits" we've seen total, and in the past week. For the next release of Kahuna (M4) we've addressed all the issues we've been able to reproduce. For others we've added more diagnostic code to get more information.

Finally, Aditya announced that he will be moving to Shanghai, to work in our MSN Shanghai Tech Center. We actually have a small team of really smart developers and testers over in Shanghai that are working on various aspects of Kahuna. For those of you that have Kahuna accounts, they are responsible for getting the MSN Calendar into the M3 release of Kahuna which is a project I worked on in my "spare time" while also working on Kahuna M3. I'll be going over to Shanghai in a few weeks to hang with them.

Aditya (who is one of the folks I manage) is one of the co-creaters of FireAnt, the technology that we built Kahuna on. While he'll be missed around the hallways of our campus, he'll be continuing to do some great stuff over in China. It's an amazing opportunity, and I'm really excited about growing and building a strong product development team there.

Reeves has a great review of some photo sharing sites, and why he settled down on smugmug.

When I was in Egypt, I decided to read Flags of our Fathers. It is written by James Bradley who is the son of one of the flag raisers. Before reading this book I knew jack about Iwo Jima. The Iwo Jima photo everyone knows when they see it is of the picture that was taken by Joe Rosenthal. It's apparently the most reproduced image in history, and isn't even a picture of the original flag raising. Nevertheless, the story is incredible.

The book is about the men who are in that picture. It talks about their lives before the war, life as a marine in WWII, and what became of them after the war. I can't begin to describe how I felt while reading this book. It was one of the few times in my life where I felt actual immense gratitude for the sacrifices of those who fought and the many who died in the battle (it was one of the deadliest in American History). I really believe every American should read this book, but for now I'll leave you with a quote that was chiseled outside the cemetery where 3 of the flag raisers lay:

When you go home
Tell them for us and say
For your tomorrow
We gave our today

I've finally gotten around to updating Send to smugmug. Here are the fixes in 1.0.5316.0:

• You can select folders and individual images
• You can change your login to a different smugmug account
• some fixes for pro user album settings
• images loaded in the background
• bad images should not cause error messages
• you can filter uplaoded images, keywords, and ratings from the upload
• lots and lots of small little things fixed

You will receive a notification that there is a new version if you launch the old version, or you can just download from the link above.

This is one of my favorite live sites, and I've been waiting to blog about for a few weeks.

If you have a custom domain (like me) and you want to give out free hosted email accounts to family members and friends (in my case, shahine.com has a few accounts that my family uses) go to http://domains.live.com/.

Windows Live Custom Domains allows you to basically point your MX record to us (Windows Live) and get free Windows Live Mail accounts, messenger accounts, and well anything you can use a passport for. No longer are any @hotmail.com or @msn.com domains necessary. You can get or use your own domain, and then enable all these great services. Plus you maintain control of your domain, so you can have your web site hosted elsewhere, etc. Only your email services are hosted by us. You can also kick people out of your domain, sign up for premium features in our network (like extra storage accounts, outlook live, msn premium etc).

Oh, did I mention, the service is FREE. All you need is access to change your DNS records. Once you do that you can create accounts and give them out for folks to start using.

Reeves has an awesome tutorial on how to Geotag your photos. I just did this for my trip to Egypt and Paris and it’s unbelievably cool.

The hardest part was dealing with lots of indoor/outdoor photos and aligning those to the timeline. You also need to change your PC Timezone to whichever timezone you took the pictures when stamping them.

If you are looking for a good inexpensive GPS device to use with your camera to geotag, I highly recommend the Garmin Foretrex 101. Make sure you also order the serial cable.

Jimmy Grewal’s Weblog » I can’t believe it’s real snow

Imagine, most people in the middle east have never seen snow. I wouldn’t even know how that felt. It must feel sureal.

Flight Test Journal: Mission accomplished! 777-200LR sets world distance record

Mission accomplished! 777-200LR sets world distance record

This is actually pretty cool. Flying more than half way around the world on a single tank of gas .

I really like Backpack. It’s a great web site that lets you create (in about 10 seconds) a personal task/wiki/notes application for yourself. You can do really cool things like:

• share with anyone
• view on your mobile phone (add /mob to the end of your url like http://<username>.backpackit.com/mob/)
• email to your site
• keep track of notes, and share them
• start a wiki like page (called a whiteboard) for collaboration with other folks.

It’s all very lightweight and uses AJAX so it’s very responsive. They also have an API to program against.

One use I’ve found so far is for Lora and I to share a “Family Tasks” page.

They have a pretty good examples page which lets you see the power of the product.

www dot aditya bansod dot net - Thread Killer

I'm testing Omar's Thread Killer Outlook add-in and it's making a world of a difference in my inbox triage. Normally I spend some good percentage of the day dealing with threads that I'm only tangentally interested in. I'd either delete them or file them as new mails on the thread flow to my inbox.

Now when I see a thread that I know I'm not interested or needed in, I simply click on any message in the thread and click the "Kill Thread" button in my toolbar and like magic, I never see it again. Since I've started using it yesterday I've noticed the amount of mail in my inbox drop and I'm seeing much more relevant mail in my Inbox folder now. I've killed about 25 threads, which has saved me from 72 pieces of mail ever hitting my inbox in about 24 hours.

Aditya is one of my beta testers for Thread Killer (more like alpha tester).

I’ve had a similar bliss like experience. I love it when a few lines of code can make such an amazing change. Watch out, when this thing spreads at Microsoft, email is going to get a whole lot easier to deal with. I view this as giving power and control back to folks who have since lost it.

Sadly though, in my process of writing the add-in, I spent 80% of my time trying to get deployment to work. It’s not easy cause you need:

• Outlook 2003 SP2
• .NET Framework 2.0
• Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 Redistributable
• Office 2003 Primary Interop Assemblies
• FullTrust for the add-in location

The last bullet point has been nothing but a hair pulling experience, but thanks to some friendly folks at the Company I got a lot of help on how to fix this.

In a few days I’ll place it internally on toolbox, and if all goes well, place it for download on the web somewhere. I feel like I need to get a cool sound like a shotgun blast to play when you kill a thread.

Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger » Om wonders if Microsoft will kill Mac client of FolderShare

I actually want to see MORE investment in the Mac space, not less. Why? Cause many of the influential are using Macs (you only need to look around at a blog conference or an O’Reilly conference to see that’s true).

Here is a question right back at Robert. What software do the “influential’s” want Microsoft to make for the Mac? Is there something Apple is not doing that they think Microsoft should make instead?

The only way a new application of any sorts will get created is if there is a business model that warrants such an investment. While I was in MacBU we always had to entertain the requests for Access, FrontPage, <insert ms application here>. We also looked at areas where we could create new applications. Unfortunately, Apple already had or released those applications. The bottom line is that you cannot sell a piece of software that competes with an Apple product and make the kind of money it would take to fund that product. Apple can afford to do everything and anything in the software space because it sells more boxes to existing Mac users who tend to buy expensive new laptops every 18 months.

So, chances are if there is a need for something that’s big enough to apply to the broad Mac user base, Apple is already filling that need. If it’s not big enough to apply to the broad Mac users base then chances are there is a shareware developer filling that void.

Wohoooo!!!!!!!

I love FolderShare.

Well as usually I’m late to the party talking about live. I dunno why, but when you live and breathe something that’s been in the making for a while, I have a hard time rushing to write about it on my blog .

A lot of folks have written about Windows Live. Aditya has a good post of what it looks like in our “war room” during a release. Reeves posted a nice Mail related post. For the past few weeks Reeves has been at the helm of this release (since it required a ton of coordination and I was busy trying to ship the next update to Kahuna). Watching it come together and get out the door without any problems was fairly amazing. We had to ship a new version of “classic” hotmail that my good buddy Steve Friesen got out the door, ship an update to Kahuna, and of course, change our domain, passport setup and a million little things. It all worked.

So, what do I think about Windows Live. Well here it is:

• safety.live.com is freaking awesome. Next time my parents/friends/family call me up with computer problems I’m sending them their to run a Tuneup, Virus Scan, Protection Scan etc.
• mail.live.com rules
• the domain, live.com is pretty cool. At only 4 characters it’s easly to type live, control-return and get there in a jiffy.
• ideas.live.com is a neat way to find out about the offerings, and get to the blogs for the various services.
• favorites.live.com is interesting. I need to play with it some more.
• live.com has a mail widget!!! sweet. now to make it my homepage.

Since this is really just the beginning, I think you’ll find some cool stuff coming down the pipe.