Here's another interesting article from Eric Sink on sneaking seemingly small features into the software development process. Do we have another Joel Spolsky in the making? :)
On another note, looks like I'm not the only one that noticed that BillG was using a paper notepad instead of a Tablet PC.
Rob Howard posted details of his recent BillG Review. A BillG review at Microsoft is a thing of near mythical proportions*. Rob gives a bit more information in his first post about the review.
Anyway, that's not the important part. What I noticed from Rob's description of the meeting was that Bill Gates was using a regular yellow notepad - not a Tablet PC with Microsoft OneNote:
"The first thing I notice as the meeting starts is that Bill is left-handed. He also didn't bring a computer in with him, but instead is taking notes on a yellow pad of paper. I had heard this before - Bill takes amazingly detailed notes during meetings. I image he has to, given all the information directed at him. The other thing I noticed during the course of the meeting is how he takes his notes. He doesn't take notes from top-to-bottom, but rather logically divides the page into quadrants, each reserved for a different thought. For example, it appeared that all his questions were placed at the bottom of the page."
I've heard Microsoft talk quite a bit about how they eat their own dogfood. I've also heard that the Tablet PC is Bill Gates' pet project - he was the one who conceived the product and drove it through to production when most of the industry was saying it was a stupid idea. So the question is, why isn't he using his Tablet PC, but he wants us to?
I know the answer. If he's using the same beta version of OneNote that I am, the behaviour of the ink "gloms" is just as annoying to him as it is to me. It essentially makes the application useless - and drove me quickly back to the bare-bones Journal. I've heard that they're changing this behaviour in the final release.
Let's hope that the OneNote developer team's goal is to produce a product that will make Bill Gates switch to using his Tablet PC exclusively...
* I first heard about it in the book I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year With Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier - an older book from the pre-Internet / CD-ROM era, but one that provides rich insights into life inside Microsoft.
Christopher can talk your ear off now - especially about dinosaurs. He likes to pretend he's one of the paleontologists that he sees in his dinosaur documentaries; he'll try and string together every word and phrase that he's heard, mixed with some of his own.
Here's a video that I took of him tonight describing his piece of Play-Doh that he likes to pretend is a fossil:
Dialup (~2.5MB): Download File
High Speed (~22MB): Download File
I read an interesting entry on .NET Abstractions from Eric Sink's weblog. He owns SourceGear, makers of SourceOffSite and most recently, SourceGear Vault - a promising-looking replacement for Visual SourceSafe. (Prediction: I think you'll see Microsoft buying them soon to replace the outdated VSS.)
I noticed that Joel Spolsky linked to this article today as well, since it ties into his writings on Leaky Abstractions.
I turned 32 yesterday and all I got were these pants. Comfy. :)
Anyway, the lady at the Air Canada counter had to look at my birth certificate 3 times and ask Janice 5 times to confirm that I wasn't 17. Does that mean I'll look 35 when I'm 50?
The part I don't like is when people come to the door and ask me, "Is your dad home?"
I mentioned a few days ago that my laptop was due for a reinstall and that I would try Windows Server 2003 as my laptop operating system. Well I did just that on Thursday night. Things were going just swell until I was in a meeting on Friday morning. The built-in wireless adapter really drains battery power and my battery was running down fast. Rather than disrupt the meeting by grabbing my adapter, I decided to change the wireless adapter driver to support "power save" mode. The default mode was power save off, so I simply switched it on. Bad idea.
My network connection went down - no way to renew the DHCP address. Tried everything. Turned power save mode back on. Still no go. "Ok, I'll just switch to (uggh) a wired connection." Same problem there! "Wha?? That stupid setting must have messed up my DHCP config." Rebooted, unistalled network adapters, performed voodoo ceremony on my laptop, sacrificed a chicken, still no luck. So I figured, "Just run system restore and restore to last known good config" - it wasn't there. Server version, remember.
Anyway, I didn't hear much of what happened in the meeting for the next 2 1/2 hours. I was too busy scrambling to get my connection back. I'm completely out of commission if I don't have a network connection. (What'd we ever do before networking?)
As soon as the meeting finished I tried overinstalling Windows Server 2003 - that took several hours. Wow! It worked - my network connection was back up; but my screen wouldn't go above 640x480. I rebooted. Excellent, got my 1024x768 resolution back up. What the... network connection broken again. ARRRRRRRGH.
I finally decide that someone has ordained that now is not the time to run a server OS on my laptop and humbly submitted to the will of Bill. I flattened the laptop and reinstalled Windows XP Pro. Bliss again, at last.
While I was at it, I decided to finally upgrade Janice's home desktop machine to brand new hardware. I spent all of Friday night and Saturday morning rebuilding both systems.
While the problem started shortly after my fresh install of Windows Server 2003, I don't blame the problem on the OS. I believe I would've had the same problem with the driver on XP, since the driver is the same one and the core OS is pretty much the same. I'm not about to try changing the setting on XP now to test it though. :) I moved back to XP because after a day of computer wrestling I needed to retreat back to a known safe harbour.
Anyway, things are grand now. My love/hate relationship with computers has swung toward love again.
Hmmm... Even though I'm using SpamNet* for my spam filtering now, when I reinstalled Outlook 2003 over the weekend, I decide to give the "new and improved" built-in junk mail filter from Microsoft a try to see if it really has improved. I set the threshold to agressively scan for spam and told it to put suspected spam in the "Junk E-mail" folder. When I looked in the folder this morning, lo and behold there was a Microsoft Security Bulletin filtered as spam! This seems to go against their Trustworthy Computing initiative in a bad way. My line of business requires that we act immediately on all security bulletins; missing one security bulletin is a very serious issue. Thankfully, I have other sources of being notified of security issues.
I'll be submitting a report to the Office 2003 Beta team to see what they have to say about this. I guess Microsoft should build something into their filtering algorithm to at least say that anything coming from their security email address is on the "white list".
* I mentioned SpamNet in a previous posting. Since that time, version 1.0 has been officially released. With the release they've now implemented a monthly fee of $4.99 USD to use the service. I kind of expected that they might charge for the product at some point and, to be honest, I'm glad. I've found that totally free spam filtering solutions eventually run into the problem of such huge demand on the service that it either becomes uselessly slow, or just folds for financial reasons. I think they've done the right thing by pricing the service at a reasonable rate - I'll easily save that amount in the amount of time it used to take to filter out spam manually. Based on the success I've had in using SpamNet, I'm going to be signing up as soon as the 30 day trial is out.
This commercial is absolutely amazing. When I first saw it, I tried to imagine how they had filmed it. I couldn't imagine that it had all been done in a single take.
Apparently it was. After 606 tries, they got the take that ended up as the commercial. :)
What a crazy day today. I spent most of the day and night rebuilding my laptop and home desktop. I'm just about finished with my laptop now, but there's a lot of work to do on the desktop. Time for some sleep.
Brad Wilson says (to Microsoft):
Can you please fix your search so you don't make me go off to Google to search you? If need be, buy a Google search appliance and integrate it in. Eating your own dogfood is an interesting policy, until you make me eat it too. :-p
I agree. Microsoft has said in recent days that they intend to produce a better search engine than Google (don't remember where I saw that). I guess one quick way would be to buy Google. :)
Aaaaaaaanyway... in the meantime, here are a couple of tips for searching Microsoft related material:
To search the www.microsoft.com site from Google, search for site:www.microsoft.com {search query}.
To search the msdn.microsoft.com site from Google, search for site:msdn.microsoft.com {search query}.
And have you noticed how difficult Microsoft's recent product naming schemes have made it to search for those products and related material? For example, how you search for .NET? In Google that will bring you up all kinds of sites in the .net root domain - not what you wanted, I'm sure. How do you search for C#?
Here's a great way, using Google, to narrow your search down to just Microsoft-related material:
http://www.google.ca/microsoft.html
(Incidentally, they have similar for Mac, Linux, and BSD)
I learned all this and more from a book I purchased over the weekend called Google Hacks.
Windows Server 2003 (and Visual Studio .NET 2003) shipped today. The release candidates that we've been using for months now have been rock solid performers.
One of Microsoft's best decisions was for them to finally ditch the Windows 9x codebase and move all of their development forward on the NT code. Personally, I've never ever run any version of Windows 9x (nor would I ever). I started using Windows NT 3.5* back in '94 and have never looked back.
My laptop is due for a reinstall any day now (I install so many different pieces of beta code that things get really crufty after about 6 months), so I'm going to make the switch to WS 2003. From all the reports I've seen, it runs even faster than XP and can be made to take the XP look and feel by simply enabling the Theme service.
* see here for some cool NT history
I'm testing two new tools:
w.bloggar - freeware software for posting to various web log software, including Movable Type. Great piece of software from what I've seen so far.
Windows Media Player Blogging plugin - I finally switched from WinAmp 3.0 (which I've wanted to for a while - slow as cold molasses...) to WMP 9.0 for this feature. It does what you see below; namely, automatically inserts the song you're currently listening to.
... and all I can say is Wow!.
He let me preview 3 tracks - no vocals yet, except on one track (more on that in a sec), and not mixed down and EQed. The quality is already exceptional and of course they're oozing with Devin's creative ability.
What completely floored me though was hearing Luke sing on one of the tracks. That boy has an incredible voice! Excellent control and confidence. I let Janice hear it and, of course, she cried. I'd love to hear a full CD of Luke, let alone Devin. :)
Keep it up Devin. Can't wait to hear the finished product.
According to this article on Discover.com, a company called Changing World Technologies has invented a process to convert just about anything into oil. From the article:
The process is designed to handle almost any waste product imaginable, including turkey offal, tires, plastic bottles, harbor-dredged muck, old computers, municipal garbage, cornstalks, paper-pulp effluent, infectious medical waste, oil-refinery residues, even biological weapons such as anthrax spores. According to Appel, waste goes in one end and comes out the other as three products, all valuable and environmentally benign: high-quality oil, clean-burning gas, and purified minerals that can be used as fuels, fertilizers, or specialty chemicals for manufacturing.
The article further states that this system could completely reduce U.S. dependency on imported oil. Another quote:
Just converting all the U.S. agricultural waste into oil and gas would yield the energy equivalent of 4 billion barrels of oil annually. In 2001 the United States imported 4.2 billion barrels of oil.
Sounds too good to be true. I'm going to have to see what the scientific community is saying about this. If it is true, it could be a very significant breakthrough.
Came across this cool looking DHTML text box editor that has the look of Office 2003.
Hours of family amusement. Look at them for a while and tell me you didn't laugh. :)
I finished reading my latest sci-fi book late last evening. Before I pick up the next in the series I'm going to stop and read a book that we ordered from Amazon a month ago; one that I should have read it before traveling to Florida; one that, of course, Janice read as soon as we got it.
Time for me to start pulling my weight in making sure I know as much as I can about Christopher's allergies. I've been guilty of leaving too much in Janice's hands.
The book is called The Parent's Guide to Food Allergies. Here's an excerpt from the Foreword:
While the majority of children "outgrow" allergies to foods such as milk, egg, and soy, one of the most alarming trends in the past decade is the increasing number of severe allergic reactions (anaphylaxis) that in the vast majority of cases result from food allergies to peanuts and nuts. In fact, several studies have shown that anaphylaxis due to food allergy is the leading cause of severe allergic reactions treated in hospital emergency rooms.
To complicate matters further, we now live in such a busy world that fast food and processed foods - filled with the milk, eggs, wheat, peanuts, nuts, and soy that are responsible for so many allergic reactions - comprise the bulk of many a young child's diet. And anywhere you go, food is all around: it is the hub of virtually every social activity from birthday parties and school celebrations to a day at the ballpark, an afternoon at the movies, or even after-school soccer practice.
For parents of food allergic children who know that just a small bite of the wrong food can spell big trouble, the vigilance must be constant: every ingredient label must be carefully scrutinized; every activity must be carefully monitored. It can drive even the most reasonable families to distraction...
In Florida, the only safe place that we could go to eat "out" was still good 'ol MacDonalds. They're the only restaurant chain that you can count on to properly label their food and ensure the greatest safety against cross-contamination of foods. Even then, our menu is pretty much limited to nuggets, fries and burgers that don't contain mayo (egg).
One good thing about the U.S. is that their ingredients labeling is far better than Canadian labeling. At least they seem to tell you what type of lecithin and vegetable oils are used, and will make statements like "May have come in contact with peanuts", etc in bold print. (That may have something to do with how Americans are generally much more litigous than Canadians; I guess there are upsides to that.) Instead of eating out we bought groceries and ate most of our meals at the condo.
Anyway, I'll likely be making more comments here as I find interesting things in the book.
It's a beautiful day for a car wash. The temperature is a whopping 5°, but the sun is shining. Nice enough to break out the hose and get at least the Tribute washed.
I'm copying over the video of Christopher reading the dinosaur book from a few months ago to the new site. Since I took this video, his dinosaur vocabulary has increased dramatically - he can tell you what family a lot of dinosaurs belong to, whether they're carnivore/herbivore, and what period (Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous) they're from. He's also taken up interest in prehistoric mammals. :)
I counted 32 different dinosaurs that he's able to recognize and name from one book alone.
Dialup (~1MB): Download file
High Speed (~3MB): Download file
Very High Speed (~10MB): Download file
In case you want to follow along with him, I've printed a list of dinosaur names in the same order that he names them.
Tyrannosaurus rex, Allosaurus, Baryonyx, Giganotosaurus, Velociraptor, Herrerasaurus, Troodon, Coelophysis, Gallimimus, Struthiomimus, Diplodocus, Hypsilophodon, Barosaurus, Iguanodon, Parasaurolophus, Heterodontosaurus, Compsognathus, Brachiosaurus, Barosaurus, Dimorphodon, Eudimorphodon, Cearadactylus, Pteranodon, Sordes, Elasmosaurus, Mosasaurus, Triceratops, Styracosaurus, Pentaceratops, Stegosaurus, Gastonia, Minmi, Edmontonia, Baryonyx, Tyrannosaurus rex, Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus rex, Barosaurus
Christopher ate some pretzels for the first time tonight. He instinctively put two in his mouth and pretended he was a Walrus. Devin, did you teach him this!? :)
"Daddy, all my friends are in Springdale."
"Luke, Timothy, Benjamin and Jessica."
"Luke talks to me. He really talks to me."
"Timothy doesn't talk to me. He just plays dinkies."
Conversation with Poppy earlier today:
Poppy: Nanny and Poppy came all way from Springdale to see you.
Christopher: You come and say goodbye and you're gone again. And that's the end of that story.
Christopher was in Bowring Park this afternoon. The weather has improved a bit. It's 3° and sunny.
With Nanny and Poppy
With Nanny, Poppy, and Shirley
Swans
With Poppy
I'm desperately looking for a web-based photo gallery software written in ASP.NET that I can install on one of my own hosting servers. I have thousands of photos that I'd like to be able to make available to my family and friends without having to use a third party service.
I've considered writing something on my own, but just don't have any spare time to do so. Google and Usenet searches have turned up nothing of note. I did find one example called PhotoBOB that's pretty much what I'm looking for but they haven't made the source code available yet.
It doesn't have to be free, but I do need the source so I can install it myself. I have access to plenty of Windows or Linux servers that I can host it on.
If anyone knows of a solution, let me know. I'll accept a perl-based solution as well, but would prefer to be able to host it on the .NET framework. (I've seen one for PHP, but it requires (uggh) mySQL.)
Finally! I've found an anti-spam solution that works for me. It's called SpamNet. If you use Outlook and want to catch over 95% of spam that comes in your inbox, this is the answer.
(It works with Outlook 2003 Beta2 as well, in case you're wondering. It also works whether you use POP or Exchange Server - haven't tried it with IMAP, but presume it works. They also say that they're working on a version for Outlook Express.)
In the past few weeks, it has caught over 700 spam from me. On an average Saturday I would regularly get over 100 spam. Now with SpamNet, I get about 2 - 4.
It works by users "voting" on spam. When you get a spam that SpamNet doesn't catch, you click the "Block" button. It creates a unique signature of the email and sends it to a central server. Once a certain number of users flag the same message as spam, it gets added to their database of confirmed spam. From that point forward, all users of SpamNet receive the benefit of having that email deleted for them.
Actually it doesn't (by default) actually delete the spam. It puts them in a "Spam" folder. You can go in and review and "Unblock" false-positives. So far the only false-positives I've had are a few unimportant newsletters that I subscribe to. Once you unblock a message from the same address twice, SpamNet is smart enough to ask you if you want to add it to your "whitelist" so it doesn't get blocked by you in the future.
Overall great software that has saved me a tremendous amount of time and frustration.
Speaking of Outlook 2003, one of my favorite new features is that it blocks ALL images in email by default. No more having graphic porno spam pop up in your preview window when you open your mail client! You have to click an extra field to have the images downloaded if you choose. Great new feature!
Update 04/18: The best part is, SpamNet if FREE.
Update 04/28: Version 1.0 was just released. It's no longer free, but a reasonable $4.99 USD / mo.
Pete Laing sent me an interesting URL last summer that got me started on a journey to improve my knowledge of history.
That article did a lot to change my attitude towards America's role in the world. After reading that article, I continued to read this and this - and of course I bookmarked Policy Review Online.
I realized at this point that my knowledge of World War II history (and history in general) was abyssmal - primarily due to the fact that the education system that I came through didn't want to teach me history. (Of course, I also take responsibility for not having taken enough initiative to understand history since finishing school.) I started by reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and went from there.
Having been on this journey for the last year has really helped me put the current war into perspective much better. I have a lot of thoughts about war, history, morality, democracy, the future, culture, and more that I hope to be able to share as I move forward with this weblog.
Keep watching this space.
I've been threatening to purchase another PDA again soon. I never use my old Casio Windows CE device that I bought when I was at Comdex '99, and I've sworn to not buy another until they came up with a good combo of a PDA and cell phone.
BUT, I've been looking at the new Toshiba Pocket PC based devices with built in wireless and wondering if...
Nah. I just don't need it...
I was talking to C (Christopher) a couple of nights ago about Poppy visiting. Out of the blue he said, "Poppy doesn't speak French like Aunt Shirley".
Anyone who knows Shirley will get the humour in that. :)
Janice's parent's (and Shirley) arrived safe and sound today from Springdale. The travelling weather was good. Christopher is playing with "Poppy" as I type. They'll be leaving again on Monday.
This works out great, as I'm playing guitar for two meetings on Sunday. We're having our first city church meeting on Sunday night. We'll be meeting once a month with people from many churches in the city. This week, the minister from St. Thomas Anglican church is speaking. Really looking forward to it.
Came across this link on another weblog:
Keeping all of our databases updated is becoming a pretty intensive task, and I dont't see it getting any easier. Martin Fowler's article on Evolutionary Database Design has some good techniques. How does everyone else manage their database changes?
The Good News:
I read an article in Time today that said researchers are close to a significant breakthrough with a medicine to drastically lower the effects of peanut contact for people with extreme allergies.
The Bad News:
Several pharmaceutical companies are battling out who owns the "rights" to the drug and are holding up the entire process.
Nice to know that the pharmaceutical companies have Christopher's best health in mind.
I'm going to look for a clean way to implement a link on the main page to the book(s) I'm currently reading - maybe with a link to Amazon.
For now though, I'll just post an entry describing what I'm currently reading:
Isaac Asimov - Foundation's Edge.
This is the fourth in an excellent book series that I've been reading for the last few months.
I'm also still working my way through the following books as I get time:
Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influences on Nazi Ideology
The Civilization of the Middle Ages
I'm reading these as a follow up to The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in an attempt to understand more deeply this historical context of factors that contributed to WWII.
Maybe I'll comment more fully on this in a later post.
Recently read:
Kiln People
Second Foundation
Seduced by Hitler: The Choices of a Nation and the Ethics of Survival
Next in queue:
A Deepness in the Sky
Cubase SX Power!
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
Thought it was funny that Yahoo's outgoing CEO's surname is "Koogle".
I'm still watching the Microsoft site for the Virtual Server (MVS) beta. They recently purchased Connectix to get this technology to embed in Windows Server 2003.
It was supposed to have been released for preview on the 15th, but so far no signs of it. I don't know where it's supposed to be uploaded - the Connectix site? MSDN Subscriber Downloads? Microsoft.com? Anyway, I'll keep checking them all.
UPDATE 04/17: Still no sign of it. :(
This is my first ever blog entry (if you don't count my first try - using something called "Manila" I think - a couple of years ago before I realized what a "blog" was).