myShoggoth

Buddy display pictures in the contact list

On the main Windows Live Messenger window, to the right of the word wheel, to the right of the add contact button, there's a button with an up and down arrow.

Click that and check the 'Show Details' option.  It takes up more space but it gives lots of information about each buddy, plus shows a nice sized version of their display picture.

By the way, if you don't use the wordwheel yet try it out a few times.   I think you'll find it becomes your preferred method of finding buddies.  Type their name name, email address, or similar information about them and once it gets down to just them, hit return to start IMing.

For the English version the wordwheel is the text input box that has "Find a contact or number..." in greyed text by default.

Talking to interns and new grads

Today we had a big event for interns and recent grads to come see what product groups were working on, hear Ballmer talk and answer questions, and eat.  Not necessarily in that order for timing nor importance.

I went with one of the team PMs to represent Windows Live Messenger and had a blast, but I'm totally exhausted.  About four hours of talking to people about the product, where we are, where we're going, and what it is like to work on Messenger.  I was impressed by the questions and comments, there were a lot of smart people there.  My job was to get people excited about Microsoft, excited about Windows Live, and excited about Messenger.  Not necessarily in that order.

Also, my voice is gone and my throat hurts.  I guess I talked too much.

Making setup cause fewer reboots

I mentioned a while back that my role on the Windows Live Messenger team is a bit ambiguous, but largely it consists of: Find and solve nasty hard problems.

One that I was asked by our management to figure out once and for all was the tendency of Messenger's install to prompt people for reboot.  It happened more often than not as was causing a lot of people a lot of angst, not the least of which our own team.  The problem had not been really tackled, and there was no real likelihood of it getting better anytime soon.

This was one of very many things I was working on, but it came to a head not too long before we were ready to ship WLM 8.0.  We figured out a few changes that would get a large majority of the cases we knew would cause reboots, but not all of them.

So what's going on?

I explained in an article many years back about why setup can cause reboots and why it happens so often.  Probably in more detail than most people care about.  In Messenger's case we have a few tie ins with other apps, for instance our COM APIs that are used in Outlook, Outlook Express, IE, and other apps, as well as an IM Protocol Handler (so that you can click on this and start an IM conversation with me!  Well, to avoid spam I only get IMs from my buddies, and I only accept buddy invites from people I know, sorry), and the plugin to Windows Media Player that let's us know what song you're listening to and populate your personal status message with it.

During setup we make Messenger close, but we don't want to go closing any other apps automatically (although it is always recommended that you close all applications before running any setup to avoid these kinds of issues) and we couldn't be sure to get them all even if we did.  So those programs may still be using the DLLs that we want to update during our setup, which would normally cause a reboot.  We came up with a clever trick to avoid that.

There are still some cases where if you're doing just the right things it can still happen.  You can avoid this by doing what we recommend:  Close your apps before running setup, once you're done fire them up again and everything should be fine.  I'm working on deeper fixes for a future release to try to make us causing a reboot prompt a very rare occurance indeed.

Wish me luck.  I think I'm on the right track

Proving my worth to Technorati

Over at http://www.technorati.com/ they have a way for you to 'claim' a blog.  One of the things you need to do is make a post with a specific link so they can verify that the person claiming the blog at least has permission enough to make a post with a link or their choice.

So here it is:  Technorati Profile

I feel all tingly, is that expected?

Space and backups

We've been thinking about hard drive space and backups recently, due to recent losses and my wife's photography habit eating up all our file server storage.  How to make sure that important memories aren't lost and that we have enough room to store all sorts of new ones, while at the same time letting her go wild as she improves her skills?

We went back and forth on some ideas, and I ended up settling on a multi-tiered system that is probably overkill but should be good protection:

1. We run a Small Business Server that does the file sharing, print serving, etc.  It currently has something like 120 GB worth of space on it, which is disappearing at an alarming rate.  In fact I found out she'd been holding onto around 20 GB worth of new photos (there's a little less than 20 GB left on the server) because she saw the space was running out.  Dangit.
2. I have a nightly full backup running to my main desktop machine which has a 250 GB hard drive.  Each backup is around 50 GB large, and even with the games and other big things I have installed on that computer there's still enough room for two backups plus a bunch more stuff.
3. We're thinking about getting two USB/Firewire drives, where once a month or more we copy the most recent full backup to that drive and store it in the (mostly fireproof) safe.
4. Once a year when we go to visit my parents we take that drive with us and drop it off with them, bringing home the other one and using it for the monthly/safe backup.
5. For older stuff we burn DVDs to archive them and store those in the safe.  Once this happens I can change the backup schedule to only do full full backups once a week or something, and do backups excluding archived directories daily.  If needed.

This seems like a pretty reliable and redundant system that shouldn't take too much time or effort to maintain.  One of our friends found out we were thinking about this sort of thing and pointed us to a Fry's ad which had some big hard drives as loss leaders.  We saw that one was a 400 GB SATA/300 (which is what I've got in my desktop) so we went down immediately to the one in Renton on the off chance they had any left.

They had two.

Now we do.

The server only has SATA/150 so my plan is to take the 250 GB SATA/150 drive out of my desktop and put it in to the fileserver to give us a ton of new room there, and put the two new 400 GB SATA/300s into the desktop and continue to use it as the backup destination for the file server.

We haven't determined which USB/Firewire drives we'll get for the second level of backups yet, that's next on the agenda.

myshoggoth.com

[Note: The posts from both sites are being aggregated here, so this could be confusing but I am keeping them for historical purposes.]

Today I finally put up the post on http://www.myshoggoth.com/ saying that I had stopped posting there and moved my site to here.  Very long overdue, hopefully the small number of people who had RSS subscriptions to that site will come over and not be too mad at me.

It was very annoyingly difficult to make that post, though.  I tried to install CityDesk on my work tablet and my home desktop, and in each case I got an installation error where it looked like CityDesk was trying to install and/or overwrite a file in the %windir%\system32 directory that the OS had locked down.  Can you say DLL Hell?  I'm assuming they were trying to do some things through custom actions in the installer because MSI tends to handle that sort of thing well by itself.

It also would not boot.  This clearly had something to do with custom actions trying to regsvr32 a couple of the files installed in the CityDesk directory, which is why it is always better to declare the COM registrations directly in the MSI tables natively rather than doing self registration, especially via a custom action.

It just help validate my decision to move away from CityDesk, since that program has obviously been mothballed for the long term and has enough issues that it won't last without more work.

Moving Sites

[Note: This is no longer the case, but I like to keep the post around for historical reasons plus the reasons]

New content is all at http://myshoggoth.spaces.msn.com/!

It has been far longer than it should have been before I posted this, but in my (partial) defense one of the big reasons it has taken this long is also the reason I'm moving.

http://www.myshoggoth.com/ will stick around for the forseeable future as an archive of the content I have here.  My new stuff is all getting posted to http://myshoggoth.spaces.msn.com/.  I've got a pointer over there to here, but hadn't gotten around to reinstalling CityDesk and putting up the pointer from here to there yet.  There's an RSS feed and so on there, if you're subscribed to this one I encourage you to to subscribe over there instead as I don't expect to add any content here.

I'm hoping in the future to migrate all the content from this site there and redirect, but there's no really easy way to do it yet and I haven't had time to investigate how it could be done using Spaces APIs.

Among the reasons I moved:

• CityDesk appears to be completely mothballed, and it isn't up to the task of what I really want it to do longer term.
• As much as I like local win32 software and the publish model for websites, it does not scale and having a web based editing system for the type of content I normally post is much better.  I can always use an offline editor for bigger posts.
• MSN Spaces is under heavy development and although not perfect, it is improving rapidly.
• I really like the way Windows Live Messenger and Spaces work together.
• Spaces supports comments without me having to do a lot of work.
• Passport based authentication, so if you have one you don't need yet another signup.

I posted here that I'd like to be less big-articley and more freeform with my blog in the future.  CityDesk didn't help make that happen, and basically got in the way by having a big heavyweight process to update the site.  With Spaces I can easily jump over (just hit a button in Windows Live Messenger!), add a post, and easily go edit it later when my wife points out assorted spelling and grammatical mistakes.

Addition:  This isn't worth adding another post about, but I'm claiming this blog in my technorati profile so I need to add this link to prove to them I own it: Technorati Profile

Grief sucks

I guess I was right about dealing with piper's death better than Lysander's because of closure; he went missing and we can only guess what may have happened to him.  That meant I spent the next three weeks or more after his disappearance walking and postering the neighborhood, and checking the local animal shelter to see if he was picked up or reported missing.  My wife is the victim of one of my trips there, where I saw a cat that looked enough like him that I called her and asked her to come in and verify that I was right.  She came in, took one look at the cat and turned to me with a pitying expression.  It was very obviously not him, but I was desperate.

In this case I know exactly what happened to piper, when where why and what.  That's its own kind of horror, and one reason I'm up at 3:30am is that when I tried to sleep my mind locked on sitting in the vet room with her on my lap after the big sedative had been injected.  It was a horrible experience, and yet I can't imagine not having been there with her for it nor being able to make any other decision than we made.

Still feel guilty and that we let her down.

And of course we lost a friend earlier last month (what a crappy month).  Losing Gregory took us by surprise, but there was certainly closure (espiecally after the impromptu wake with many of his other friends, some of whom I hadn't heard from in years) and no guilt.  I hate losing him, but we have plenty of good memories and his death was purely bad luck in bad circumstances, not anyone's fault.

Many people in the world now think poorly of religion and the religious, this last month has made me wonder if it wasn't a survival adaptation required by self-awareness.  Societies which developed religions that gave them a framework for dealing with the frailties of life were able to better compete against those who did not.

Fall of the McMansion

My wife was reading articles (the most cited one in the Wall Street Journal) about the fall in demand for McMansions last night, and it got us talking about our own experiences with home ownership and what we want vs. what we thought we'd want.

Before I took my job with Microsoft and moved out to this area we were in a house in the Highlands Ranch development south of Denver, Colorado.  We had a much larger house than we needed (although it wasn't nearly big enough to qualify as a McMansion), and there was just no way we could afford a house of a similar size in the much more expensive Seattle area.  So we ended up buying a house that was a lot smaller for a lot more money, and although it was nice I couldn't help but think it would be way too small for us.

Instead we're now looking at the house and thinking it might still be a bit too big, but not by much and we could certain stay here long term and be happy.  We think back to our first house and its huge size and wonder what we were thinking.  We've also been working on steadily reducing the amount of crap we have, shedding excess possessions where we used to accumulate.

So we're probably smack dab in the target audience of the "Not So Big House" movement, although we're much more likely to incorporate those ideas into our current place rather than move.

And now... the Indigo Girls

The concerts are coming rapid fire now.  This evening we're going to go to the zoo again to watch the Indigo Girls.  Frankly we're not really fans, but when my wife was buying tickets for other shows a lot of the people waiting were getting tickets to this show, so she got tickets for them as well.  She figured she could do research on them, figure out whether we'd be interested, and sell off the tickets if it wasn't our style.

Well, here we are.  We've done enough research to know it will very likely be a fun and enjoyable show, so we're going to go.  I enjoy at least some of most styles of music, but even for me this might be enough folk music to keep me for a very long time.

Maybe I should check to see who's next on our list.  I know we have some coming up that I'm really looking forward to (including Oscar Peterson!).