Today is the signoff day. The component that I've worked on testing for almost two years now is shipping. Over the next few months, we will see if the move to kernel for part of the stack pays off and if security pushes we have done have made a difference. The test will not be how soon the first security break will be, but in the severity and frequency of such breaks. Meanwhile, I get to go party some at noon :)
9:33:22 AM  

This guy wants your help to become the ultimate safeway shopper.
3:52:48 PM  

Hug a Java Developer Today. [Objective]
Chris Hollander responses in a much camler way then I did to Russell Beattie's fiery rant.
12:37:25 PM  

Ugh.. My weblog has been way to work focused recently. I try to talk about something else for a bit.... Well something aside from the war.... Um... I picked up my copy of the new zelda last night! I also ate dinner at Restaurant Zoe via the 25 for $25 program. I had the Mixed Greens Salad, the Smoked Beef Hanger Steak and the Chocolate Mousse. All was excellent. Also they sell half bottles of wine for half price on mondays.
2:07:31 PM  

Of COURSE I Hate Microsoft. ...  Furthermore, if you work for - or with - Microsoft, you need to do a reality check. I've said this before, but the question still remains: how do you sleep at night? How do you take pride in your work? Do you like copying other people's innovations? Do you like working with felons? If you're just making a buck, hey, more power to you. If you're one of those gung-ho borged-out drones... Well, all you're doing is making the whole computing industry a worse place to work in. And you KNOW it.  ...  [Russell Beattie Notebook]

I sleep just fine at night. My work is to make the components I work with more featureful, secure and stable. While most of what I work on is just operating system plumbing (http.sys, and now winhttp and wininet) it's hard to ignore the innovation that are built into it them. The basic concept of a kernel switch of a http namespace is not somewhere I've seen elsewhere, even though it such a simple useful idea. I see enough of what's going on around the company to stay convinced that there is plenty of new stuff that is exciting, cool and orginal. The technology and products that Microsoft makes is good enough that other copy it, and irreplacable enough that even you use it. I take pride when I talk to someone who likes windows XP. I take pride in things like windows error reporting. I feel shame in things like the "Sign up for a passport popup notifications". It's a big company doing cool thing; some bad, most good. I've only worked here for three and half years, so I missed most of the stuff that generated the antitrust trials, so maybe the comapny back then was the definition of evil, but today I can't find something to be pissed about other then which bug I think should be fixed before we ship, and what feature won't be done in time for the next release that I was really looking forward to.
11:15:21 AM  

Scoble: ActiveWords doesn't do what Chris said it does. It doesn't change words. You program in your own words. There is no user interface. You need to type in words and hit a hot key (or push space twice, or do something that you tell the system you want to do). I talk about this here. [comment page on Doubt's Log]

Ok, Lets leave activewords out of it... but reading Scoble's response, I want to comment:  First, Smarttags in IE wasn't meant to be on by default. It was turned on in a ealy beta as a way to get some coverage in the wild for the feature, but it wasn't meant to ship that way. Second, I still don't buy the "getting in between the author and the reader" arguement, since plugins that do so will get turned off by the reader. Utilities stay and get used only to the degree that they add value for the end user. If the user is reading your site, it's a safe bet that they want to read your content and he/she won't tolerate something that distorts it. Third, I miss the potential of the idea. It's every other week or so, a place that the technology would be useful for me pops up. Yesterday, it was stuff like a dictionary lookup on words I don't know the definition to. A week ago it was generating entries into my calandar when a date and time is specified. The week before it was making keyhole's earthviewer go to an address, coordinates, or a city+state when one shows up on a web page. Today I imagine that I could have started this weblog entry by a smarttag that understand individual items on scoble's weblog, understand what blog software I use, and gives me an option similar to radio's "post" link. I'm still a bit disappointed that some peoples' reactions were so violently against it that they couldn't see the good stuff, and try to find a middle ground that makes everyone happy.
2:27:04 PM  

imagine if every word....  in 15 words or less, can someone explain how this product is less offensive to the world than this one?  ActiveWords changes every single word on my screen into a link to someone elses content... Is there a platform for extensibility?  Can I distribute my own extension to activeWords, that directs users to my content when they click on a certain word? As a corporation, how much will it cost me to develop custom, internal ActiveWords? the SmartTag SDK is free, and anyone can use it to create smartTags that can be distributed to everyone else for free.....By chrisca208@msn.com. [Objective]

One came from Microsoft and the other doesn't.
It doesn't matter if it was a technology for other people to build on. It doesn't matter that it was on or off by the choice of the end user. Nothing in the design could have mitigated the fear that people had of Microsoft's power over the browser, especially at a time when the anti-trust case was still looming. A coworker and I started wondering today if the same lessons and dilemas that the US is occuring with Iraq is applicable to Microsoft. There is power in going multilateral and building organizations. There are problems when you don't. Also such organizations can get old and become too slow to be as useful or torn apart by differing intrests. Prehaps the trick is to take a "collition of the willing", bypass the stop energy and form a new organization. I expect that there is delicate balance between being a useful place to get work done, and a shell that is one player hiding under a different name. Sometimes you can not get anyone to take your side even if it is working fine for most; at that point you need to rethink what you are doing, and come back at it in a different direction.
1:16:35 PM  

The New Request Processing Architecture of IIS 6.0/Win2K3. [Sam Gentile's Blog]
Sam tells how IIS uses http.sys. My side note is that you too can use port 80 while IIS is running via the new Win2k3 Http API. ;)
5:53:02 PM  

Office 2003 and XML. zachlipton writes "Internet World is reporting that initial reports from Office 2003 beta testers don't look good for those hoping to share documents with ... [Slashdot]

/. somehow expects that office using xml will somehow make their own word replacements have the same features as word. Where the hell do they get these ideas? I expect that at some point people will develop a pretty decent xsl(t) that will help convert with the most minimal lossy-ness, but (if the office team keeps doing thier jobs) there will always be a more feature office then what the free-be office clone gives you.

11:44:25 AM  

RIP: Windows XP?. "The successor to Windows XP (due in 2004, and rapidly slipping to 2005) is currently code named Longhorn, and it will not be compatible with your existing software, hardware or methods. Microsoft has already stated that backward compatibility will not be a design feature."... [Lockergnome's Bits and Bytes] My comment? Chris, this guy doesn't have good information. Ignore him. [The Scobleizer Weblog]

I think it's more accurate to say that the jury is out on this point. A lot of old stuff will probably still work, but there are a lot of architectual changes going on, and there will be compatability problems as a result. I hope the majority of the breaking changes should be visible around PDC time. Also the usual compatailbity technologies help reduce problems as they occur. If it's any consolation, I'm a Longhorn selfhoster, and I scream bloody murder if any app I use breaks. ;)
11:20:41 AM