‘Live Mesh’ Unveiled!

Finally!

In April 2006, I decided to leave my job on Messenger Server to join a completely new start-up team within Microsoft. It was a pretty big change for me, as I went from a well established team with millions of users, to being one of the first three developers on a team with nothing but a dream of what was to be. I couldn’t talk about what the team’s charter was, as it was all under wraps, even internally within the company. My business card had the somewhat cryptic team name.

Exactly two years and three weeks later, we are finally launching a Tech Preview and I can finally talk about (some of) the stuff I’ve been working on for the past two years. What a relief! I can’t believe it’s been such a long time.

I won’t talk about what I think Live Mesh is yet. You’ll find a great deal of information on the Team Blog, as well as videos on Channel 9 this week (Ray’s interview is a good one). I can’t do justice to what Mesh is by excerpting, so please go read our GM Amit’s post. It gives a good idea as to what exactly Mesh is.

We’re only launching a Tech Preview at the moment, so there’s a limited number of invites. Hopefully you’re well connected enough to get someone to share with you. If you’re already provisioned in the system, feel free to share stuff with me by inviting me to a “LiveFolder.”  I’d love to see what people are using Mesh for!

Mesh it up!!

Revamped

So 2⅔ years after creating this blog on a whim, I have decided that I should finally update the colour theme and layout.  Though I liked the red and black contrast with the flame background, I realize that it made for horrible reading on the eyes.  (If you missed it, it kind of looked like this, except the fonts were smaller.)

It was pretty fugly.

I can’t say that I really cared, since I could count my audience on one hand, and most of them were reading in a feed reader anyway.  I’ve picked another one of the default Spaces themes that’s a little easier on the eyes, and tweaked it ever so slightly.  Of course, I’ve kept the flames as my profile image too.  What do you think?  I’ll probably continue tweaking over the next several weeks (like adding a module or two).

I hear rolling thunder.

Date Time

I do many more things than batch scripts all day, and someday (soon) I’ll blog about some of that stuff, but for now, this will have to suffice.

I had several lines of batch code I created several years ago that created a unique filename from the current date/time with the help of two environment variables:

C:> echo %DATE% %TIME%
Tue 04/08/2008 22:48:43.84

So the code I had:

set NOW=%DATE% %TIME: =0%
set NOW=%NOW::=-%
set NOW=%NOW:.=-%

set YEAR=%NOW:~10,4%
set MONTH=%NOW:~4,2%
set DAY=%NOW:~7,2%
set NOW=%YEAR%-%MONTH%-%DAY%_%NOW:~15%

gave a nice:

C:> echo %NOW%
2008-04-08_22-48-43-84

which would allow you to sort files by filename in chronological order.  It worked quite well and I had used it for years.  Recently though, I started seeing some weird behaviour from some people.

C:> echo %NOW%
Tue-8/-00_22-48-43-84

This left me scratching my head for a while, until I asked one of these people to run the following on their machine:

C:> echo %DATE% %TIME%
04/08/2008 Tue 22:48:43:84

Gosh darn those locale settings!  It’s not enough to handle just this specific case, as in Canada for instance, dates are written DD/MM/YYYY as opposed to the US’s MM/DD/YYYY.  So I went online and found all sorts of strange ways to figure out the format of the date.  The best way I read of, to get locale was by crawling through the registry.  I wasn’t particularly motivated to do this, so left it at that.  Fortunately this particular script got deprecated in favour of new one I wrote that didn’t require date/time uniqueness.  Saved!