shahine.com/omar/

I love the name, I love the product. I've been using it since December and it's my 2nd favorite Windows Mobile application right after Windows Live Search.

You can find out more here.

Josh Einstein is a poster child for pushing the envelope with new Microsoft Technologies.

Josh, the creator of TEO (Tablet Enhancements for Outlook) was pushing the envelope with ink and Outlook a few years ago... his latest app is a program that renders your OneNote Notes in a Calendar view inside an application.

What I find interesting is that this program:

• Is the first application I have ever used that is a ClickOnce application.
• The install experience is how it should be. No downloading some temp MSI/ZIP file to some folder that I can't get to later etc
• Takes advantage of the new OneNote 2007 APIs
• Uses the new Vista Control that you see in Media Player and Photo Gallery

All things that I've not used before in any third party applications.

Nice work Josh!

Last year I had an awesome time at ETech. I'll be going again this year, and it looks like it'll be a fun conference. I hope that it's sunny and warm this year in San Diego.

I'm sure I'll be using twitter like everyone else.

Yes, everyone out there has seen Tim Heuer's Foxit PDF Preview Handler. This allows you to preview PDF files in Outlook 2007 or the Vista Preview Pane.

Well I didn't install it cause I stopped using Foxit now that I can install Adobe Acrobat Reader 8 without much of the prior annoyances.

Anyway, Ryan Gregg, has released a PDF Preview Handler that uses Adobe Acrobat's ActiveX Control. I've been using it for a few weeks (Ryan works on the Outlook team and had an internal version for a while) and it's fantastic.

Thanks a bunch Ryan for releasing it.

I have been meaning to blog about BitLocker since I set it up on my new ThinkPad T60. Why did I use BitLocker? In case my laptop is stolen then my hard drive will just look like a bunch of unintelligible 1s and 0s. I would not use BitLocker on a desktop machine, but for a Laptop, especially one with confidential Microsoft info it's a no brainier.

BUT WHERE WAS THE BIG FAT EASY BUTTON?

Setting up BitLocker was a PITA for me. I followed the step by step instructions to enable BitLocker but each time I installed Vista I was told my drive configuration was not suitable. Finally I gave up, created a big fat partition and installed Vista. I then got the new Windows Vista Ultimate Extras BitLocker enhancement and it did all the dirty work for me. Why oh why didn't I know about this first? It would be nice if the Technet article mentioned this easy tool.

Anyhoo, I write this today because Lifhacker has an article comparing BitLocker to Apple's FileVault. Now I dig and respect Lifehacker but Gina totally missed the most important aspect of BitLocker. YOU DON'T NEED A USB Key to use BitLocker. My Laptop came with a Trusted Platform Module (TPM Chip). Most PCees come with one these days. They are usually disabled in the BIOS so you must turn them on (not sure why they are disabled as they are pretty benign when not being used). In fact I would never have considered BitLocker if I had to use a USB key (BitLocker does allow to you use a PIN and or USB Key in addition to the TPM Chip).

Anyway, with a TPM chip the "key" is essentially a chip on the motherboard. However, if the system detects and significant change it will force you to manually enter the key and disable/re-enable BitLocker. This ensures that if some one lifts your laptop and takes out your hard drive it won't be readable. This mode of operation is called Transparent Operation Mode:

Transparent operation mode: This mode leverages the capabilities of the TPM 1.2 hardware to provide for a transparent user experience – the user logs onto Windows Vista as normal. The key used for the disk encryption is sealed (encrypted) by the TPM chip and will only be released to the OS loader code if the early boot files appear to be unmodified. The pre-OS components of BitLocker achieve this by implementing a Static Root of Trust Measurement – a methodology specified by the Trusted Computing Group.

I had to experience this fist hand the other day when some kind of change caused my BIOS to think that my machine changed enough to require me to enter my key (I suspect it was one of the early boot files being modified by an OS update). Now you can insert a USB KeyChain with your key (which didn't work for me, not sure why, need to muck with the bios to find out) or enter it in manually from a print out or in my case the key that was backed up to the Windows MarketPlace Digital Locker (another Vista Ultimate Extra).

So, while it's nice that Gina gave BitLocker the win over FileVault, she neglects the two coolest features:

• Support for the TPM and hardware key
• Support for backup of your key to the Digital Locker on Windows Market Place

BTW, if you do use BitLocker with a TPM I highly recommend that you have a copy of your key somewhere you can get to if all you have is your laptop. In my case I store the key on my Samsung Blackjack using eWallet. I would be pissed if I were on a plane, tried to boot my laptop and I was locked out.

This is genius. My metrosexual self needs hair stuff, and I happen to love Bumble and Bumble Sumo Tech. Only problem is I always forget to re-order it and run out. It's not easy to find and I don't know or frequent the women's beauty shops to know where to find it.

Anyway, I just noticed Amazon now has a new feature called Subscribe and Save.

What Is Subscribe & Save?

When you order through Subscribe & Save, you'll automatically receive a new shipment of the item in intervals you select at a discount on our everyday price. Plus, all subscription orders ship free. We'll charge your credit card for each order only when the item is shipped, and you may cancel at any time.
To start a subscription for this product, choose a quantity and delivery schedule, then click "Subscribe now!" You'll be asked to provide a shipping address, credit card, and billing address. Once the order is placed, your first shipment will be processed and your subscription activated.

I LOVE YOU AMAZON! .

Jott is a great service for GTD type folks. When you are out and about, you call a phone number and leave a message. Within seconds you will get an email with a transcription of your message.

For example, I called  the Jott number (after the registration process) and left a message "Call mom about her flight tomorrow". A few seconds later this appeared:

Very cool indeed.

[via Scoble]

Brilliant... Ordered my t-shirt.

Ok, I happen to like "The Wow" ads that Microsoft is running for Vista. However, in the last week I have seen/heard at least two people say something like "Where is the Wow in this product" and "The wow effect".

I have a bad feeling that this silly phrase will be repeated for a long time to come. I find it annoying.

"The Wow" is clever marketing. It should not be used to describe or promote your feature product IMHO. I'm pretty sure people building Vista weren't thinking about "The Wow" when they were writing specs and code. Maybe I'm wrong though.

Even at Microsoft it seems some people didn't get the memo. I witnessed a meeting today where a nameless person who relied on their Samsung Blackjack missed the meeting.

Windows Mobile needs software auto-update.

Funny how you think you know about ever hidden feature and shortcut. Well Sean tells us about Inline Autocomplete and what it does. I for one had no idea and am glad I found out .

I had the exact same experience as Dennis when I reported a bug in Turbotax.

Basically Turbotax 2003 screwed up my mortgage interest deduction on amortized points. When I sold my condo last year I was eligible to take that mortgage interest deduction for the point that I paid.

However, it never reported that I paid any points in the year that I got the loan, and didn't amortize anything. As a result the calculations were incorrect (only off by a few dollars) but if I corrected it I would not be able to e-file.

Anyway, the emails they sent me were exactly the same. You cannot respond to them.

This has become one of my favorite Vista SideBar Gadgets.

This is just too funny. Vista Speech Recognition is pretty amazing, but I've felt like this on a few occasions.

I LOVE Lenovo. Maybe it's the fact that I LOVE my ThinkPad T60, or the fact that Lenovo folks have great blogs... or maybe even that all their little applications share the same start menu shortcut and grouping and icons. I can't think of any other PC OEM that has employees that blog about their hardware. I find it especially cool. You can tell from their posts that they love their product and they are proud of what they do and who they work for. That makes me feel better about my ThinkPad. They are also honest about things like Crapware.

Having just read their anniversary post on the Lenovo 3000 series I'm inclined to get the J115 for my parents. I'm also inclined to tell my sister to ditch getting the Sony Vaio and get a 3000 series laptop.

You know since giving up on a Mac Laptop years ago, I've owned two Sony's, one Compaq, two Toshiba's, a Dell and a Fujitsu. Lenovo is far and away the better laptop. My Dell had it's motherboard replaced 5 times.

I'm so happy the ThinkPads are available at Microsoft now (sanctioned by our IT department).

Oh, the best idea I've heard in a while is mentioned on the Happy Birthday Lenovo 3000 series. Replace the stupid S-Video port on laptops with an HDMI port. That would at least keep me from going crazy that all PC laptops still have VGA and not DVI on board. If you replace s-video with HDMI then you get the best of both worlds: VGA for legacy compatibility and projectors, and HDMI for digital video out.

I hope some one takes that idea and runs with it.

Head over to the PIX blog to find out more.

Hopefully this first big photo codec release for Vista was a lesson to all and this sort of thing is not repeated. Modifying a RAW file and not having that file work was a bit scary (even scarier is that it appears that I was the first person inside Microsoft to find and report this bug).

It worries me that Nikon's QA isn't all that. No one there dogfooded this product or uses Adobe software?

Anyway, I'm glad it's fixed and the Microsoft and Nikon folks worked together to address the problem quickly.

I admit, I'm an Intel man. I love their motherboards, core 2 duo, and so on. However, after reading this I'm a bit perplexed. What the hell is Intel doing waiting for SP1? I mean common.

I may just have to consider AMD next time around.

I'd also like to point out that the nVidia drivers for Vista are crap and featureless. I can't even change resolutions or add custom resolutions using their control panel. Meanwhile ATI (now part of AMD) has awesome Vista drivers.

When I read the AMD memo it just made me proud of the work that folks at Microsoft have done to get Vista out.

I'm writing this post on all the vista features that I love as I find them, but it's taking forever because I keep finding new things. Like did you know that robocopy is built into Vista? Kick ass!

Reeves has a rather humorous post all geeks can relate to.

You decide to update some piece of software or hardware that is working perfectly fine as it is. You do it because you want that new feature, bug fix, firmware update or whatever. You do it in a hurry, like 5 min before you need to walk out the door... and then you go Noooooooo!!!!! Because something went horribly wrong. Or you do it the night before you need to get up at 5 am for a flight somewhere... you know what I mean. You screw the thing up so bad you don't get any sleep and you hate yourself vowing never to do anything like that again.

I do disagree with Reeves' first point "If it ain't broke, don't fix it.". Um, that's not how we are built... .

I finally FINALLY got around to setting up my own source control server. I haven't been using one for all my little projects and it's been driving me crazy.

I thought it would be difficult. With dasBlog we use the excellent TortoiseSVN project to manage our Subversion source repository so I figured I'd see if I could use that.

I asked around on the dasBlog developers mailing list and a number of folks are using SVN with it's built in server and protocol support.

Problem is, setup was a bit complicated. But to make things easier some one has put together SVN 1-Click Setup. It is in fact a one click installer you run on your server.

IT ROCKS.

I set up DynDns on my kick ass D-Link DGL-4100 Broadband Gaming Router and added the correct port and now I can checkin and checkout from anywhere.

BTW, I installed it on my Vista Media Center since it runs pretty much 24/7.

Now I can sleep better at night, and another checkbox on the @Someday/Maybe list. Wohoo!

I knew there was a reason IE 7 has a wacky File Menu location.

It's something that someone designed into Vista. I accidentally pressed Alt in the Shell today and was greeted with this:

Hmm, not as ugly or weird as IE 7's, but at least I know where to point the finger now.

A few days ago my wife asked me to help her with some research data she is collecting that she has in an excel spreadsheet.

What I saw amazed me. It repeated all the headers within the table so that when she was scrolling around she could still enter data. She was in the process of averaging some columns etc.

So first thing I deleted all the text. Then I formatted the table. Next I showed Lora how to filter data based on columns and asked he what kind of info she needed.

So I showed her how to create a Pivot Table. In Excel 2007 mere mortals can create Pivot Tables, they don't need a Ph.D.

Anyway, today I showed her how to create a complex pivot table. When I was done she almost cried.

I asked her how she did this sort of thing before. She said she didn't want to talk about it . I assume that means manually.

Ouch.

They should teach people how to use Pivot Tables in college.

Anyway, I think Lora is pretty darned happy with this new knowledge.

Of course, I learned how to create Pivot Tables from the master, Dick Craddock.

WebGuide kicks the pants of Orb IMHO. The Vista SideBar Gadget lets me control my media center (view scheduled recordings, watch tv, listen to music, remote control my media center) from within my home on our kitchen PC or remotely at work.

This is a really well done piece of software. It's the holy grail of local, remote control, and streaming support for Media Center (Vista and MCE 2005).

For example, here is me controlling the audio on my MCE box from a web browser on my Kitchen PC. I can play files locally or control the Media Center via the web based remote control.

Here is a screen shot of the Vista SideBar with a list of my current recordings:

And the show playing in Windows Media Player

The setup software will configure your UPnP router to open the correct ports though. Nice.

[via Chris Lanier]

So a few days go I decided to build and deploy an add-in written using VSTO 2005 Second Edition on a Vista Machine. Needless to say this didn't work. I kept getting this error:

"The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2869"

I emailed trusty Misha and of course he helped to solve my problem.

There are two things going on.

1. UAC is getting in the way and Visual Studio 2005 can't build an MSI out of the box that works correctly when your installer needs elevated privileges. VSTO add-ins need elevated privileges because they have to make change to Code Access Security.
2. Exceptions that are thrown during the install process are being obscured. Misha covers this in his post on the topic.

The fix for issue number 1 is to head over to Aaron Stebner's WebLog and follow his instructions for setting the NoImpersonate flag for your Custom Actions that set up CAS (in VSTO world this would be the SetSecurity project from the VSTO deployment article.

The fix for issue #2 is covered in Misha's post.

So, how do you make this magic all work with one single build step?

1. Download the Windows SDK Components for Windows Installer Developers.
2. Grab wirunsql.vbs and place it in your Setup directory.
3. Grab CustomAction_NoImpersonate.js from Aaron's post and place it in your Setup directory.
4. Open the project in Visual Studio 2005
5. Press F4 to display the Properties window
6. Click on the name of your setup/deployment project in the Solution Explorer
7. Click on the PostBuildEvent item in the Properties window to cause a button labeled "..." to appear
8. Click on the "..." button to display the Post-build Event Command Line dialog
9. Add the following command line in the Post-build event command line text box: cscript.exe "$(ProjectDir)CustomAction_NoImpersonate.js" "$(BuiltOuputPath)"
   cscript.exe "$(ProjectDir)WiRunSQL.vbs" "$(BuiltOuputPath)" "INSERT INTO `Error` (`Error`, `Message`) VALUES (1001, 'Error [1]: [2]')"
10. Build your setup project

     

My readership went from ~2,000 readers to ~3,000.

Here is what things looked like on Feb 15th.

And on Feb 16th.

Looks like FeedBurner is now reporting on Google Reader's subscribers. Cool.

Now that I am running Vista on all my machines I'm much more aware of all the hard drive clanking going on around me. On XP my machines would eventually get to a "resting point" where the machine would stop doing stuff.

On Vista it seems like "stuff" is always happening. I'm beginning to wonder just how much Mean Time To Failure is a number we might pay attention to for hard disks.

Anyway, my buddy Mike Fullerton posted a nice entry on how to find out just what the heck your hard drive is doing.

The big offenders on my computer?

1. FolderShare
2. Windows Live OneCare
3. SearchIndexer
4. Sidebar
5. Outlook

#3 and #5 seem to tag team together in a WWE Smackdown on the hard drive.

As much as I LOVE Slickrun, I have yet to install it on Vista. Why? Well because of the awesome start menu.

Now that Start++ is out, it brings some of the Slickrun functionality to Vista... must... try... it... out.

[via Tim Marman]