shahine.com/omar/

The fine folks at ClearContext released an update to ClearContext 2.0. I’ve been running 2.0 for a while now and LOVE it!

The biggest change is that the toolbars appear in Word Mail (my preferred mail editor). This is fantastic cause now when I reply to an email I can:

• create a task reminder to follow up later
• automatically delete the message I am replying to. This is a HUGE timesaver as I often forget to delete messages and they sit around for a while cluttering my inbox.

I’m looking forward to the final version and 2.1 .

Steve announced our release of Windows Live Mail “M5” aka Milestone 5. What is this you may ask? Well it’s the culmination of work since January 3rd of this year. For those of you not keeping track, Windows Live Mail went into beta with our M3 milestone. So this is our 3rd milestone release. As I’ve mentioned we are using a modified version of Scrum to build Windows Live Mail and it allows us to keep giving you incremental improvements often. The most important part about this is the feedback we get, and the changes we can make pretty close to when we hear the feedback.

We have some ambitious plans in the next few months, one of which is to drastically increase the number of users on the beta.

The release should hit the site this week.

That folder in Windows is called “My Documents” not your documents. Over the years a bunch of applications have decided to set up shop there. I don’t understand this.

On Mac OS X, in addition to My Documents, there is “Application Support” or something of that sort. If your Application needs to store stuff, put it there. Applications should not be allowed to rent space in My documents folder without my permission.

Here are the current offenders:

• AdobeStockPhotos (I don’t use this feature)
• Updater (why does Adobe feel they need to create this folder here?)
• My Data Sources
• My Shapes (I don’t have any shapes)
• My Web Sites (I don’t have any web sites)
• … there are more but I have since deleted them and they have not returned …

At the very least, programs that create this folders on install/first boot should change their behavior to create them on first use of the functionality.

Actually, I just found this guideline from Apple. I wish Windows had something like this. Back in MacBU the Testers were rabid about filing bugs whenever we violated any of the Apple Human Interface Guidelines. I learned and memorized almost all of them real fast… I wish we provided, enforced, and even followed something similar.

Support Files

A support file is any type of file that supports the application but is not required for the application to run. Document templates and sample files are simple examples of support files. However, you might store more application-bound information, such as custom configurations or preset data files for your application’s workspace. In these instances, the information is intrinsically tied to a specific application (as opposed to the user’s data) but is not essential for the application to run.

The preferred location for nearly all support files is in the Application Support directory of the appropriate domain. Which domain you choose to store your support files depends on the intended use of those resources. If the resources apply to all users on the system, such as document templates, place them in /Library/Application Support. If the resources are user-specific, such as workspace configuration files, place them in the current user’s ~/Library/Application Support directory.

Within the Application Support directory, you should always place support files in a custom subdirectory named for your application or company. Normally, you should use the application name, but you might want to use your company name if you have multiple products that share many of the same resources. How you organize the resources in this custom subdirectory is entirely up to you.

Even if a support file is user-specific, your application should not have any trouble accessing it from multiple user sessions. Because of fast user switching and remote logins, it’s possible that the same user could be logged into the computer more than once. Support files should not contain any data that would adversely affect the behavior of multiple user sessions. All sessions should see the exact same behavior.

And of course there is this gem:

Don’t Pollute User Space

It is important to remember that the user domain (/Users) is intended for files created by the user. With the exception of the ~/Library directory, your application should never install files into the user’s home directory. In particular, you should never install files into a user’s Documents directory or into the /Users/Shared directory. These directories should only be modified by the user.

Even if your application provides clip art or sample files that the user would normally manipulate, you should place those files in either the local or user’s Library/Application Support directory by default. The user can move or copy files from this directory as desired. If you are concerned about the user finding these files, you should include a way for the user to browse or access them directly from your application’s user interface.

This is such a cool hack, worthy of being in Make. I just might order one.

A few weeks ago I gave up my trusty Timbuk2 Commute Laptop bag for a new Timbuk2 Track Day Pack. I simply LOVE Timbuk2 products… this back is fantastic and I’m happy to be using a backpack again. I also have their duffel bag for 1–2 day trips.

It’s amazing watching their product line expand in the last 3 years. They used to only have a single product, the original messenger bag you see all over the US on bike messengers.

• ETech
• Gnomedex

I’m pretty excited for both. I managed to go to zero conferences last year.

Looks like Windows Live Mobile Search has given Robert Scoble his Pony for 2006.

On your phone or web browser go to:

1. http://mobile.msn.com/pocketpc/
2. Click Windows Live Search beta
3. Click Web Search (you can bookmark this on your phone)
4. Enter any search term or web site
5. Click on the Mobile link next to any search result

Now you can read the page on your mobile phone. This is called adaptive mobile rendering. It does a great job rendering my blog.

This kind of stuff is insanley cool. If Google did this there would be like 500 articles and blog posts about it. But because we did it I didn't even find out about it till yesterday when the Mobile folks demoe'd it to me.

Update: yes, Google has done this already in their mobile search as well. However, I find that our adaptive mobile rendering is better/easier to read.

Wow…

I was thinking at leaving it at that. I’ve toyed with the idea of getting a wireless card for my laptop. When I had my Sony Vaio TX for a brief time I was intrigued by the built in Cingular EDGE support. However, I was not excited about paying the $50 or so monthly fee for 100K wireless access. I tried to teather my smartphone to my laptop a while back and during a 45 min train ride was only able to connect to my exchange server for about 1 minute.

Also, with such a small mobile laptop (my Fujitsu P7120) I found my self carrying it around more, and paying for one-time wifi connection fees. In the month of January, between wifi use and travel (airport and hotel) I easily spent $40 on less than one day of wifi. The economics just don’t work out there. I see this trend continuing (going to starbucks, paying for hotel and airport wifi).

Well I decided to do some research. Walt Mossberg wrote up a review (subscription required) of the two Cingular wireless cards and the service a few weeks back. He gave the service and the cards very favorable marks (which is a big deal for Walt as he is often very critical of tech products). So, after I migrated from Cingular Blue to Cingular Orange I bit the bullet and ordered service.

There are two things you need to understand about this sort of service. You need to purchase hardware and a wireless plan. If you don’t want to pay an arm and a leg you also need to sign a 2 year contract.

Based on Walt’s article I purchased the Sierra Wireless AirCard 860. After instant discounts and whatnot I got the card for $59 (normally $449.99). The data plan is normally $79.99 a month, but till March 31st there is a $20 discount bringing the cost to $59.99 a month. That’s much better. Through Microsoft I get another 12% knocked off that brining the total to $52.79 a month. Since I just cut our cable TV bill by $50, it was an easy sell to the wife .

Anyway, this is a pretty life changing piece of technology. I can get online ANYWHERE. Most of the time I get the full HSDPA service with about 500K speed with 1 MBit bursts. It will fall back to UMTS, or EDGE/GPRS.

This reminds me of the feeling I had the first time I used an AirPort basestation and Lucent WiFi Card.

Today I created my first mashup. I combined 75% of a Can of Talking Rain Soda Water (sorry, only available at Microsoft), with 1 can of Welch’s Cranberry Juice into a Microsoft issued Orange drinking cup. I now have my own tasty soft drink. Mashup analog style.

You can see the step by step process below. I love this Web 2.0 stuff.

I keep a pretty simple hierarchy for filing messages. I have a couple of top level folders, and dozens of sub folders. For example, I use:

• Projects
• Blog
• Code
• Hotmail
• Project 1
• Project 2
• etc
• People
• Person 1
• Person 2
• etc
• Personal
• Reference
• Deals
• Expire
• Travel

Now each of these folders can have many folders. I also happen to use this as my categorization system for tasks, and similarly, folders in My Documents folder. I basically call this my Productivity Namespace. This namespace also happens to be my ClearContext Topics which allow me to file messages to my folders with a few keystrokes.

However, there are two “special” folders: Reference and Expire. Due to the powerful search software that we have nowadays, when something doesn’t fit into my Productivity Namespace, I simply file it in Reference. This is the “one day I might need this”. However, if I know that some bit of reference info will become obsolete in a few weeks or a few months I place it in “Expire”. Expire has an AutoArchive rule that deletes items in there after 6 months. This gives me enough time to keep it around in case I need it but eventually it goes away, unlike Reference which stays around forever.

With most search tools you can do a search like this:

<search phrase> folder:<folder name>

which is handy for scoping the search to a particular namepsace of mine.

Something I’ve been meaning to blog about for a long time… and speaking of Natural Language.

For many years one of the more powerful and well implemented natural language parsers has been living in the Date/Time control in Outlook.

 And Outlook will translate this to 2/28/06. Now you can try all sorts of things like:

• next week
• friday
• next friday
• end of the week
• end of the month
• tomorrow
• 2 weeks

and so on. I bet you didn’t know about this . When you create a lot of tasks (like I do) this is a very fast way of typing what you want, hitting tab, and usually getting the expected results.

The other night I was playing travel agent and realized what a pain in the neck it is to use the travel sites out there. Most have lamo date/time pickers and require many mouse clicks to simply search for a flight.

Well, Aditya sent me a MagicWord for SlickRun that accomplishes this task very elegantly. All you need to do is type:

fly sfo to jfk march 15 - 20

And you get a ton of search results.

Just create a MagicWord called fly and set the url to:

http://www.mobissimo.com/onebox_process_air.php?onebox=$I$

Love it.

I think I just broke a rib laughing so hard. Mike does a better job than I do explaining the misery of the life of a former PowerBook user.

This paragraph is a Gem!

“Track pad. Extra features like scrolling on one side just cause flashing and beeping freakouts. Uninstalled driver leaves only the worst trackpad known to mankind. This is the one the engineer designed and said to his management "here's the prototype, it doesn't work for shit, but you get the idea." Of course his managers were high fiving and shouting "Ship it!" at the top of their lungs. This is why I carry a mouse with me everywhere I bring Mr. Crashy McCrasher.”

Last week I got an email from Dan Morse, a writer for the washington post. He asked me about my How the Moleskine Rocked My World post. Today he published, Putting Pen to Paper Anew, in today’s post (with quotes from me!). Jerry Brito was also quoted in the article. He was one of the first bloggers who helped me discover the little gem.

Pretty cool. If you are still wondering, I’m still using my Moleskine, albeit I’ve switched to a Small Ruled Reporter Notebook.

What I found interesting in the article was this quote:

“Americans are expected to purchase 2.2 million Moleskines this year, up from 970,000 in 2004, according to Modo & Modo, the notebook's Milan-based designer. The national bookstore chain Barnes & Noble counts Washington as its third-largest Moleskine selling ground, trailing New York and Philadelphia. In all, Washingtonians are expected to buy nearly 70,000 Moleskines this year.”

Wow, I wouldn’t mind experiencing that kind of grown in my business . I think if they go vertical they can sell even more, like a Getting Things Done edition!

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.

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.

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.

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)”

Now this is simply unbelievable… Go Exchange! I never thought I’d see Sony Ericsson as a licensee.

Is there anyone left to license this to?

Now if only some one would ship the Messaging & Security Feature Pack on a Windows Mobile Device. Yes I know it RTM’ed but in the Phone World that is meaningless.

A few days ago I commented on how I found a great Alt-Tab replacement. I had mentioned TopDesk in my post for having cool Expose like functionality.

James Stewart (the author of TopDesk) commented on my post asking why I wasn’t using it (he wasn’t aware that I was actually I registered user, and happen to like it a lot, but I did in fact stop using it). He let me know that I could map Alt-Tab to any of TopDesk’s functionality. I didn’t know that. We chatted over mail and a few days later he sent me a beta build that has the Vista Flip3D Task Switcher that apparently my good buddy Scott Hanselman had suggested to James.

Anyhow, Flip3D mode in TopDesk is THE BOMB. My only complaint (that James knows about) is that Alt-Tab in Flip3D mode does not mimic Alt-Tab z-ordering in Windows exactly. Hopefully he can figure that one out .

TopDesk is my new Alt-Tab . I also map the bottom center hotspot to Hide All Windows and the left middle to Tile All Windows.

After many months of using Windows Desktop Search I un-installed it. Why? Well it started with my new little Fujitsu Lifebook P7120. I never installed Desktop Search on it cause I was afraid of the overhead. Plus it’s just so darn speedy I didn’t want to slow it down and I suspected that Desktop Search manifests itself via lots of “overhead”.

However, I didn’t want to lose out on fast search in Outlook. So I just installed LookOut. It’s still out there and works just great. See the problem with Desktop Search is that it puts its hooks everywhere (it hooks into the Explorer, bunch of system processes, Outlook, and so on… it even replaces the super slow but reliable built in XP search assistant that I use all the time to find things in a specific folder). All I want is to find my email quickly and till Outlook 12 ships with its new fast search, I’m stuck with Outlook 2003’s slow search. I keep my filesystem organized, and use programs such as SlickRun and AppRocket to open folders and launch applications so I don’t need the file system indexer as much.

Anyway, I un-installed WDS from my home desktop. My memory footprint went down about 100 MB. Since WDS runs in other OS processes in addition to having it’s own, it’s my opinion that this just slows things down and causes general instability (just watching it go in FileMon and RegMon will make your head spin). I realize that this is a broad generalized statement to make, but I just grew tired of suspecting it of causing my instability. I’ll wait for Vista before where I hope the Search issue gets solved better.

So for now, I’m back to what I was using over a year ago, and it’s much more lightweight which meets my needs. Nothing against the great folks that work on this product; I was on the dogfood train for a VERY long time helping to test the product. I look forward to using their technology in Vista.

In this case, "the man" is Comcast. I am now on Standard Cable. No longer can I stand their horrible DVR box which can barely record lo-def TV. For the past 2 months my box has been recording shows and every 1-2 minutes inserting audio and video drop-outs and pops. I have replaced the box once, which was very painful to set up all my recordings again, and have had a service guy come out and replace almost all the wiring in my apartment saying my problems were signal related. Something is really broken with Comcast as they wanted to send me a guy again with another replacement box... do they hope if they do this enough times the problems will magically fix themselves? This is a softwar