Company Store + Visitor Center

Last week I took my family to the Microsoft Museum and Company Store.  I hadn’t been to either in a while; certainly not since it was renovated earlier this year.  The Museum (ahem, it’s actually called the Visitor Center now) is much more interactive (high-techy) than it used to be.  And now that I take a look at the pictures on the website, very Star Trek: Enterprise-ish:

The hallway that you first walk into has cameras set up and some kind of facial recognition software that draws stuff on your head (hats, etc) à la Realize Your Potential ads. I tried to mess it up by using my hands to form a oval or my sister’s purse, but that didn’t work out too well.. 😐 Other attractions were the Tablets and Pocket PCs and XBox 360s. And that’s about it. But yes, I think you could spend all day there playing with gadgets.

At the Company Store, I bought a copy of Windows Live OneCare for my Dad. I had heard good things about it and his subscription to Norton Antivirus had expired anyway. When he tried to install it back home, it turns out that it wouldn’t let him because it’s only available for US customers.. ARGH!@ They need to make North American versions of stuff. Super annoying for people outside of a country when some product is only available in a country you’re not a part of. Ugh.

Windows Live for Ganstas!

A Product Designer (RonG) sent this in an internal e-mail thread discussion last week, and it just cracked me up.  I checked with our legal department and got the green light to post it.  For some strange reason, I think it’s just pure genius.  In its unedited glory:

For Windows Live gang sign:

With your right hand hold up your first 3 fingers knuckles facing forward. With your thumb hold your pinkie behind your hand so they are hidden. That forms the W when it is seen from the front.

With your left hand make a fist with knuckles facing forward. Raise your first finger straight up and extend your thumb straight out to your left. You have formed the L.

Now push both hands together so they touching and look like two fists side by side. That is the sign. When someone sees you, they will see the W and the L.

Yes, totally unofficial and blah blah blah.  Usual disclaimer please.

I can totally picture geeks flashing these WL gang signs on the street (or computer labs or what-have-you..)  Hahaha..  Someone please make an emoticon out of it.

Intern Experiences

I was going to jump in on the "discussion"/disagreement between whether or not the stats claimed by Windows Live Spaces are "real" blogs.  (Heck, I can’t even decide which posts to link to.. just go to this post and read forward.)  Just what is a blog anyway?

It’s fun reading all the flame wars that happen in the virtual realm of things (it happens everyday on Slashdot), but it takes a lot of energy out of you too.  Arguing about numbers really isn’t that interesting anyhow–I myself do have reservations on how WL Spaces calls itself #1, but I’ll leave that for later.  I’m not an expert anyway.

Anyway, I like making trips down memory lane better.  So spurred by Dare’s "Intern Experiences" post, here’s my impressions of being an intern (twice) in MSN.

For the first internship, I think those "initial feelings of awe" really never wore off.  It was my first time far away from home (it was 5h by flight instead of 5h by car to school), first time touching any ‘real-world’ software, and surrounded by Waterloo interns that were on their second (if not third) internship–and they were all 21+.  😐

The truth is that an internship isn’t just about the work you do.  Sure, it’s a 3-4 month long interview, but a big portion of your time here is spent enjoying the weather (unless it’s a fall/winter/spring internship), meeting other interns from other schools, driving your rental car, exploring the Pacific Northwest, having evenings and weekends free to spend the cash you’re earning, etc.

So I was having a hard time coming up with work-related stuff to write about in this post.  There was that time a couple of Messenger interns and I pulled an (almost) all-nighter pulling together stats and other stuff from an informal survey we sent out to friends and other interns for a presentation on MSN Messenger competition and on how Messenger just couldn’t stand up to the college crowd.  That was fun.  People on Messenger didn’t understand that no one in college used MSN.

But the *one* thing that I did as an intern that had lasting impact on me?  It hit me this morning as I was driving to work.  It was obvious.  It was the same spiel I give to everyone when I talk about my internships.

During my second internship, I worked on a feature known as "TOU."  I think Danny may have said something (in tongue-in-cheek fashion) to the effect of, "I hear that you’ll be working on something that will actually make us money!" on my first day.  It wasn’t a bad project.  But it never shipped.  It came close several times, but it wasn’t to be.  In fact, it took 3 years before the code was actually removed by Steve a month or so back.

The ‘cool’ part, though, was a subset of that feature, known as "Service IMs."  Essentially I managed to hack in a way for our Operations folks to send an instant message to every single online user.  Call it spam (or spim) or whatever you will, but that was power.  In fact, the feature was so useful, that they shipped it as part of a service pack to upgrade everyone to MSN Messenger v5.  (Remember those IMs from .NET Messenger Service Staff?)  Annoying, yes.. but it was still a better experience than suddenly getting a pop-up telling you that you had to upgrade right then and there or forego a connection to the network.  Friends would tell me how super annoying that ‘feature’ was (since it kept IM’ing you everytime on sign-in if you didn’t upgrade) and I would gleefully let them know that I did that.  The ability to send unsolicited IMs to hundreds of millions of people worldwide?  Hell yeah!

So what would I do if I was a mentoring an intern now?  I guess I’d try to get him (99% of devs are male) a self-contained project (so he could hack away at it) that was cool (so he would have fun), had customer-exposure (so he could point it out to all his friends–this is difficult when working on a back-end service), would ship soon (ditto), and allowed him to understand the architecture and complexities behind running one of the biggest services on the planet.  Working on the thing from design to implementation to testing to shipping would certainly be nice, but is often difficult due to the length of a 3-4 month internship.  I would also try my best to hide any cynicism from my intern.  I did a horrible job of that with one of the interns last year (who came back a second time, funny enough; but will be coming back as a PM for his third internship.. oops).  I think I’d have a pretty high bar too; if he didn’t impress me, I wouldn’t waste my effort.

Interns tend to have their heads in the clouds (definitely true for me), so it’s not that tough to impress–especially first-time interns.

Interesting tid-bit/tip: I have it from an inside source that I came *this* close =><= to not getting hired as a full time employee (and things would be very different today).  HR had their reservations about me, due to me not answering a question to her satisfaction.  What I would give to see that interview feedback today.  Just goes to show that even if an internship (or two) are 3-4 month long interviews, exit interviews are still important.

Strong Angel

This was described to me yesterday by one of the folks on the Concept Development Team: Strong Angel III: Integrated Disaster Response Demonstration [Wikipedia].  For one week, they simulate a pandemic response mixed with a cyber-attack.  Take a look at the Wireless Infrastructure page:

The overarching theme for SAIII’s communications activities is an assumption that due to an H5N1 Avian Flu pandemic that is sweeping the nation and the world all of the local San Diego telecommunications and power utility service providers personnel are either dead, sick, or worrying about their families…..and are therefore not on the job at work maintaining critical regional power and telecommunications services. In a short time both the power grid and the telecommunications infrastructure begin to fail. Since this is happening in multiple cities around the country, as in Katrina, the Federal Government has their hands full and the local San Diego community realizes it is up to them to respond (with help from others represented by the SAIII group in this case) to the disaster as best they can without expectation for the US Government to come to their aid any time soon. We call this “local heavy lifting”. The local community cries out for the private sector, NGOs and other capable organizations both locally and nationally to come to their aid.

The result is the appearance of a large number of vendor teams that agree to provide a wide-ranging variety of rapidly deployed communications technologies that includes WiFi clouds (802.11), WiMAX point-to-point longhaul wireless (802.16), satellite Internet connectivity (VSAT, BGAN, etc), push-to-talk radio integration systems, rapidly deployed cellular communications capabilities, and more. All of these technologies, most primarily based on TCP/IP and satellite communications (for Internet reachback), end up being the only source of voice and data communications in the region — since the local normal Internet infrastructure goes down along with the local telecommunications infrastructure.

My first reaction was, "Wow, that’s really cool!"; but you really hope it never comes to that situation in the first place.  It sounds like a really great demonstration of technology in action in a time of crisis–all these companies and organizations coming together to work on this.

So what is Microsoft doing in all this?  Besides our involvement via the Humanitarian Systems and SPOT (FM Radio), from the Objectives:

Embracing diversity

22. Demonstrate shared situational awareness in a heterogeneous collection of disaster management tools.

• Use, for example, SSE to synchronize and cross-subscribe between several disaster management tools simultaneously (e.g. the Hub, RIJAN, RAINS, DMIS, MNE4)
• Write information from each to the other
• Synthesize consolidated information onto a single display.

Simple Sharing feeds for information flow

35. RSS Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) feed of information from a remote site, to SA-III, and to the local EOC.

SSE!! + Groove’s Pony Express?  The latter link is worth reading in its entirety.  But if you’re pressed for time:

For SA-III, we are taking an approach that we believe will be vastly more flexible and inclusive, and one which would be more readily developed into a practical, real-world solution. By way of context, recall that the scenario for SA-III assumes that the city of San Diego is under quarantine, limiting mobility, and Internet access is periodically unavailable. The Pony Express, in this case, will involve a laptop running IIS, SQL Server, and an SSE service. Two of these units will be stood up, and each will be co-located in a vehicle with adequate power and a mesh WiFi router. A range of SSE-enabled applications, running on various platforms and devices, will be configured to cross-subscribe directly with each of these "SSE Mobile Relays", and each of the Relays will be cross-subscribed with each other. Users of SSE-enabled applications within each quarantine zone will create data structures such as Requests and Assessments. When a Mobile Relay comes within WiFi range, their devices will replicate with the Relay. The pair of Relays, having replicated with users distributed throughout their respective quarantine zones, will approach one another on either side of the quarantine boundary that they are not permitted to traverse. When in WiFi range of one another, the two WiFi clouds emitted from the vehicles will mesh across quarantine zones, and their cross-subscribed SSE Mobile Relays will replicate with one another. The two Relays may then return to their respective rounds, delivering to their users the Requests and Assessments collected in the opposite quarantine zone. …

Dude, that‘s cool!  Essentially you strap a laptop in an SUV and drive it around so that two endpoints can synchronize with each other via SSE in the absence of a LAN or WAN.  Wow!!  I’ve been digging into the guts of SSE over the past month (and I think I finally "get it").  And to see it being applied in this way is just so overwhelmingly cool.  I just can’t get over how amazing this is.

Peekaboo

Wow this is hilarious: Windows Live Drive Info: Deleted Post From Team Member.  I don’t know the guy, but I don’t think I’ll risk commenting on it.  Let’s just say that I don’t have a good impression of him–four spelling mistakes in a single post?!  Spell-check exists for a reason.  (I was recently called pedantic by my old boss.)   I do love the quote, "a small team of rengade [sic] hardcore architect/developer/test types," though.

I feel like I should post something raunchy and then yank it just to see who’s reading.

Anniversary

As of today, August 16, 2006, I’ve been working at Microsoft as a full time employee for exactly two years. Two years! In two more weeks it’ll be four years since I first came to campus as an intern. I suppose that I can’t claim to be a new grad anymore even though it certainly still feels that way. I remember first starting out, and looking at people that had been here two years and saying, "Wow you’ve been here forever."

Certainly, a lot has changed since I first stepped foot on campus. I’m currently occupying my fifth office (yes, I’ve kept track) and will be in my sixth by the end of next week (and back to having my own office again).

What else?  Surprisingly not much.  I can quite accurately split my career into (almost) half year chunks:

1. Aug ’04 – Dec ’04 : ramp up on Messenger
2. Dec ’04 – Mar ’05 : backend support for Winks and DDPs (Dynamic Display Pictures)
3. Apr ’05 – Dec ’05 : leverage MSN Search manageability technology
4. Jan ’06 – Mar ’06 : burned out
5. Apr ’06 – Today : new team!

I worked on other stuff too, but those were the "major" milestones.

I believe people normally bring in bags of M&Ms to mark the occasion.  I’m just going to let it pass silently.

I think this upcoming third year should be most interesting.

Writing about Writer

[ Yes, this post is written with Windows Live Writer 1.0.109. ]

So everybody seems to be buzzing about the newly released Windows Live Writer Beta.  I had stumbled across the team’s Sharepoint site a month or so ago (don’t recall how; I do remember the message, "THIS IS INTERNAL ONLY!! DO NOT BLOG ABOUT WRITER!!" in big red font).  I perused through their FAQ and schedule and found it to be fairly interesting.  With all the hype surrounding AJAX-y websites, it’s easy to forget that desktop apps are still much more functional and responsive than the best of the web apps.  The only problem with desktop apps this day and age is that they don’t roam your data and settings.  So the ‘Post Draft to Weblog’ feature seems very handy, even if it is a manual process.

I wasn’t going to download it (like I need another little app that does some form of word processing).  Even when I was browsing their team site I was skeptical about the niche that they had set out to fill.  Blogging sites all have their own rich edit blogging control, all with different features and capabilities.  It’s not that I don’t see the need for an app like Writer, it’s just that, in a way, I feel there’s not much to do: text box + some font choices + interop with every blogging tool known.  Maybe throw in a little spell-check.  I don’t know of any app that does this, and maybe there’s a reason for that.  Anyway, I wasn’t going to download it.  Notepad works just fine for me.  *But* after seeing so many blogs I read mention it, I decided to give it a whirl.

Pros:
– I love how it downloads the layout/format for Windows Live Spaces.  ‘Web Preview’ is very cool.
– That’s got to be the least invasive prompt for a Passport Windows Live ID that I’ve ever seen.  Nice!  Smart move trying to get people to sign up with Windows Live Spaces who aren’t already hooked in.

Cons:
– wow, it’s already 4.75 MB.
– (minor bug) MSI wraps long lines while installing so that line appears hidden under the progress bar.
– it’s a little feature-less, but it is a beta after all (whatever that means).  At least it’s stable. 🙂  And responsive.  (Although that 68 MB it’s using on my machine is dwarfing Messenger–currently at 37 MB–and that’s quite an achievement.)
– need spell-check on the fly.  A spell-check button is so 90s.  I want my red squigglies!  (Sorry, Blogger.)  I guess the trade-off in not loading MS Word here is that although you don’t get all those fancy features, it’s not as slow/memory intensive as Word (not to mention the licensing issues).  (Speaking of spell-check, it has never ceased to amaze me how many spell-checkers incorporated into blogs will catch some form of the word ‘blog’ as a spelling mistake.)
– the blue-ish UI is ok at first, but I really could do without it.  I can’t believe I’m suggesting this, but I’m sure a lot of people would appreciate skins.
– the ‘Category’ picker isn’t exactly easily discoverable.  And I can’t seem to create a new one.  And if the category name’s too long it just cuts it off.
– It’s yet another app.  I need a one-stop-shop app.

Hmm, lots of ‘cons’.  I just like to nitpick.  It’s actually a pretty nifty little app.  And it hasn’t crashed on me yet!  I might keep it around for a bit.  I’ll try using it with Blogger next.

Orkut is Retarded

I was trying to think of a more PC title, but I couldn’t come up with one. I apologize to anyone that is offended by it.

Ever since the dawn of Friendster way back when, I have signed up on every major social network service there is: Friendster, Wallop, Orkut, Facebook, and now Windows Live. (Well, not exactly true; I haven’t tried MySpace, or 360°, or Dogdeball, or Dogster–but I don’t have a dog..) No, I’m not one of those people that log into Facebook every day to look at my friends’ friends (I find that a little creepy) or to leave messages on other people’s "walls." I am more one of those people that sign up just to get a feel for it, and then maybe check it every once in a while when friends tell me to sign on to see something. Speaking of which, I haven’t been able to find an option in Facebook to notify me via e-mail if someone sends me a message, meaning I take months to reply to a message.

If I recall correctly, Orkut was the first one to allow you to "rate" your friendship, which totally made sense to me. I don’t care what you say, you can’t possibly have 200+ friends. Not good friends anyway. 200+ acquaintences? Sure; but not 200+ friends. I’m not certain if any of the other networks have added this capability (I could swear that Windows Live Friends were going to have this, but I can’t seem to find it anywhere so it must just be me.)

Anyway, Orkut had things going for it, until it flopped. Except in Brazil. Where Orkut in some language (Portuguese?) means orgasm or something sexual (I read this somewhere, but can’t find a reference right now).

Lately, I’ve been getting a ton of "friend request" emails from Orkut. I don’t know these people. So I want to stop these e-mails. Apparently you can do this by going to http://www.orkut.com/Block.aspx. Oh, but you have to sign-in first. Of course. It prompts me for my Google Account credentials. After entering that in, it redirects me to LoginMigrationReverse.aspx:

Link your orkut account to your Google Account

All orkut users must now use Google Accounts to sign in. Please enter your orkut username and password below to link your orkut login to your Google Account. Once you’ve done so, you’ll be able to use your Google Account to sign in to orkut and numerous other Google services. If you have any questions, please visit our FAQ.

Um. I haven’t signed in to Orkut in years (wow it’s really been that long). I don’t remember my orkut username/password. Oh wait, there’s a Forgot your password? link. Sure. Follow the directions: enter my e-mail, pass through a captcha, and Google’ll send me an e-mail with a link to rest the password. For my Google Account.

Uhhh no. My Google account is fine. I don’t need to reset that password. I want to reset the damn Orkut password. I go through this process three or four times. Dammit. I WANT TO RESET THE DAMN ORKUT PASSWORD. Apparently there’s no way to do this.

Oh hold up; it looks like I’m not the only one with this issue. And it looks like that person was left in the dark as well. Here too. ARGH!

Yes, I realize that I can just block all mail.orkut.com e-mails. But I actually get legit mails too. Just last week there was a person in India who e-mailed me via Orkut to ask for some comp bio advice, which I freely dispensed.

The only conclusion I can come up with? Orkut (and Google, since it’s really the GOOG account that’s the issue) is retarded.

Frustrating. #@&#@&%@

Spaces, Live!

Spaces.Live.com is live!  I think they’re still in the process of rolling out and working out the kinks, so it’s a little slow at the moment, but it’s looking good!

 

 I’ll add more here later once it stabilizes.. it’s already crashed IE on me once…

 

– Dangit, these ad banners are annoying.  I can’t wait until AdCenter gives us contextual ads.

– I love that Spaces are no longer constrained to the left side of my screen.  It’s much more roomy now.