Doubt's log

Ultimate Safeway Shopper

Wed, 26 Mar 2003 23:52:48 GMT

This guy wants your help to become the ultimate safeway shopper.

Water for the Fire

Wed, 26 Mar 2003 20:37:25 GMT

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

Too much work related crap

Tue, 25 Mar 2003 22:07:31 GMT

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.

I sleep like a log at night

Tue, 25 Mar 2003 19:15:21 GMT

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.

Scoble explains how activewords is different, I reflect on what it could have been

Thu, 20 Mar 2003 22:27:04 GMT

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.

Because Microsoft tried to go it alone?

Tue, 18 Mar 2003 21:16:35 GMT

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.

HTTP API / http.sys / Sam talks about IIS6

Tue, 18 Mar 2003 01:53:02 GMT

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. ;)