Mark Groves' Weblog: Computers and Internet

Windows Live Writer

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 16:26:51 GMT

I decided to try out the new blog writing tool that just came out in beta form Windows Live Writer. So far it seems pretty good, I need to try it both with my MSDN blog also, but so far I like the potential.

Maybe I will try out the image layout features when I get a change later this week. I got to take a good number of photographs this last weekend while away on a short vacation (more on that in a later post).

I will have to see how Live Writer compares with Word 2007, the spell checking inline within Word is a great feature for us engineer types.

Windows Live Messenger Invites

Fri, 06 Jan 2006 21:42:05 GMT

I have 5 Beta invites for Windows Live Messenger 8.0...

If you want one let me know, I will need your email address so please leave it in the comment (no need if I have your address).

Remember this is a Beta, so it may not be the most stable piece of software yet, but it's your chance to help make it better before it ships.

You can also email me if you don't feel comfortable putting your email out there: mgroves84-at-gmail-dot-com

I am a statistic

Wed, 29 Jun 2005 21:35:50 GMT

I took the Media Lab bloggers survey. If you blog, you should also consider taking it.

Talking about Scott's Place: Spaces releases a new rich text editor

Tue, 28 Jun 2005 02:34:56 GMT

Very cool, now I really don't need to keep switching back and forth between IE and Firefox when I want to do some HTML editing, and don't have to add all those extra JavaScript links. I found this on Abbie's new Space.

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Scott's Place: Spaces releases a new rich text editor

The new and improved RTE offers all the existing functionality plus:

Better WYSIWYG in Internet Explorer. You are now editing your message in the theme of your space. Try using a theme with the semi-translucent background images and see how it bleeds through the toolbar
Support for fonts, paragraph style, and font sizes
Default to single-spacing for new blog entries
Background (IE only) and foreground color
Search hyperlinks (IE only)- Select some terms, click the magnifying-glass like toolbar button and a search link is created for those terms
You can specify "No Follow" when inserting hyperlinks (IE Only). No Follow is very useful when you want to link to another site but do not want that link followed and indexed by search engines.
Cut, copy, and paste on the toolbar (no need to remember those keyboard short-cuts)
Complete toolbar customization. You can modify the toolbar options and they will be saved for the next time you edit (same machine only)
HTML Mode - I am also proud to announce the official retirement of the Edit It. You can now switch the editor in HTML mode and type HTML directly
And, drum-roll please - FireFox support! You now get the RTE functionality in FireFox (minus the true "theme-ing")

For you HTML-ers out there, we also updated the HTML filters to support many more tags. You can now create Tables, <H>eaders, and more when in HTML mode.

Tabbed Browsing in IE

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 15:55:58 GMT

It's here, well ok, so IE 7 is not out yet, but the new version of the MSN Toolbar allows for Tabbed Browsing.

Check it out:

Growth

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 14:06:47 GMT

I thought today's Dilbert said it all about bloggers:

Spaces Update!

Thu, 07 Apr 2005 14:08:40 GMT

I wanted to thank the MSN Spaces team for their hard work, the update to the site is great. I still have not got to play with all the new item, but the added photo storage is nice, now 30 MB. Also like the new themes.

Well off to figure out what all has changed.

P.S. it also looks like this is no longer a Beta product.

VB6 Try Catch

Fri, 18 Mar 2005 17:40:02 GMT

Ok, since I changed my site name to Try/Catch most of the Google searches that end up hitting my site are "VB6 Try Catch" for what ever reason VB 6 developers want to know how to use Try Catch blocks within their VB6 applications. So I figured since people keep visiting my site for this information I should at least give it to them. Here are the steps to implement Try Catch error handling within your VB 6 application:

1) Start Menu -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Add or Remove Programs
2) Find Microsoft Visual Studio 6
3) Remove Visual Studio 6
4) Install Microsoft Visual Studio 2003 (or 2005 beta)
5) Deselect VB.Net
6) Select C#
7) Learn C#, erase all memory of VB 6 syntax.

New site name

Sun, 06 Mar 2005 18:49:34 GMT

I needed a new name for my site, Mark's World was just not cutting it. So I figured since I will be spending quite some time over the next few months designing out the next generation architecture for my companies software product, I should find a techie theme. So there you have it:

try{
...
}
catch{
...
}
Believe me there is a reason I am not it marketing!

What's been going on with Hotmail?

Wed, 02 Mar 2005 17:43:02 GMT

The last few days have been terrible, Hotmail service has been flaky at best. Now I would not normally bitch about a free service, but I do actually pay for the increased hard drive space. Some type of notification to users, at least paying users, would be nice to know what is going on. Lack of information, to me, just makes me lose confidence in the system.

Gmail Invites

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 16:47:08 GMT

I have 50 Gmail invites available (along with a million other people), if you would like one please comment on this post and I will be happy to give you one.

I have been a very happy user of hotmail for several years, I have the 2GB upgrade (although I wish I could use that 2GB for my Spaces site). I don't have any plans to leave hotmail, just thought it would be interesting to see what Google has to offer.

My BlogMap

Tue, 08 Feb 2005 21:22:00 GMT

This is very cool, Chandu Thota has create a map of where you blog from. Basically you just add your zip code and it generates a little map for your area:

RSS button mayhem

Thu, 03 Feb 2005 15:46:34 GMT

Looks like we finally got the RSS button everyone has been wanting for on Spaces. It is a little hard to find down at the bottom of the page, but it is there. Good work!

Mike Torres:

It took 4 months of daily deliberation and two fist fights in the cafeteria right next to where the butterflies were standing, but we finally caved. We now have an RSS button on the page. If you look hard, you just might find it!
(OK, so that is a total lie. It took 6 minutes, not 4 months. And no one lost any teeth. But most of the time people think Microsoft is this place full of people that "don't get it", so I figured I would play along for a minute)
We also released a bunch of little fixes today (primarily under the hood) - hopefully they will continue to improve the overall experience on MSN Spaces.
Oh, and we have a favicon now too. Not mind-blowing by any means, but it makes your space look cooler when someone is reading it in an aggregator, or in a browser that supports it in the address bar (like Safari, which I am using right now.) OK, time to get some sleep.

Cool way to get a Free iPod

Thu, 03 Feb 2005 00:01:41 GMT

http://ipodrelay.blogspot.com/ is doing a random referral program to get the required referrals you need to get a free iPod from www.freeipods.com.

Check out http://ipodrelay.blogspot.com/ should be a quick and easy way to get fill the requirements. Got to love the randomness of this. Who knows could get a free iPod with no work.

Go Whiteboy!

Fri, 21 Jan 2005 02:48:47 GMT

I found this on William's Space. This is just way too funny. Next thing you know this kid is going to be on American Idol.

Watch This - > Aicha

Famous

Thu, 20 Jan 2005 15:43:12 GMT

I just found out that my space has been linked to by Spaces Royalty. Abbie has already made a name for herself within the spaces community, and with 1.5 million users and climbing, I have to say that is impressive. Thanks Abbie I appreciate the link.

Google Results

Wed, 19 Jan 2005 15:07:14 GMT

It's interesting, in spaces you can see what search terms people uses to read a blog entry. What I find funny is how highly ranked a blog entry from me can get. I'm not sure how that works, but I can't imagine that my write-up on Windows Media Connect, for example, would be the number four entry in Google, when even before any Microsoft Site.

Gizmodo : G-Money and Me: Bill Gates Interview

Sat, 08 Jan 2005 16:12:22 GMT

Gizmodo interviews Bill G. It's nice to hear Bill talk about Blogs, and Spaces.

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Gizmodo : G-Money and Me: Bill Gates Interview

Social Software

Fri, 31 Dec 2004 22:55:57 GMT

Dare has a great post on the challenges of Social Software. I do see one of the largest challenges relates to the venders willingness to cross boundaries. This causes each vendor to continually to build up their horizontal offerings to keep their members. This does not add value to the ecosystem since each vendor has to create the same application that the last vendor just created. The power of created a real 'killer' app is lost on creating many mediocre applications.

That's where you see that power of sites like MSN, Yahoo, etc, their attempt is to offer just about everything one could want. But that is obviously a difficult job, considering that people want many different things. I do see this improving over the next several years, with the adoption of web services, and vendors bridging the gap between each other. I do believe some of this will start with individuals, not vendors, I can see a day when a developer links Amazon's web service, with Google's, etc. to create an application that is meaningful to them. So long story short we have a ways to go.

Getting rid of the buttons on the MSN Deskbar

Tue, 14 Dec 2004 16:47:37 GMT

Great little hack on the Deskbar search tool from MSN. This will remove all the buttons on the Deskbar Toolbar.

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aSpaceByGus: Getting rid of the buttons on the MSN Deskbar

Find this folder in your registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MSN Apps\DB

Next, add a DWORD value with the name of "Buttons" and change the value of "Buttons" to "1". On your toolbar, uncheck the MSN Deskbar to clear it from your toolbar then re-check it to add it again without the buttons.

So far I really really like MSN's desktop search. It took a while to index everything, but that is understandable. But once that was done, it has allowed me to get rid of both Google's desktop search and Lookout search in outlook.

MSN Desktop Search in Beta

Mon, 13 Dec 2004 20:41:01 GMT

MSN Desktop search (beta) has just been release http://beta.toolbar.msn.com/. I will have to see how well it works. I used the Google Desktop search for a while, but was unhappy with it since it only indexed a few select file types on my hard drive. I wanted to be able to index one note files, etc.

This is the first time I tried the MSN Toolbar, it seems pretty nice, it even has the shortcut to "Blog it on My Space". I'm not sure how the MSN Search Engine compares with Google, but I'll give it a try.

Talking about Is MSN Spaces for everyone?

Sun, 05 Dec 2004 18:16:17 GMT

Mike one of the Program Managers of Spaces, explains Spaces audience. I think he does a great job explaining how software product development works. I work for a software product company, and you can't wait till things are perfect, you will never ship.

I also think who cares about the "blogging elite"? This is a classic crossing the chasm problem. The early adopters feel somehow slighted when the product (or concept) that they have supported is now being used by their mom. It happened with email, it definitely happened with the web, this is just another step in that direction. And I think it is great. What's wrong with not knowing how to hack style sheets to get something you want to say out?

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Is MSN Spaces for everyone?

There have been some rumblings amongst the "blogging elite" (whatever the heck that is) about some of our "shortcomings" that I thought I would address, albeit in a roundabout way.
MSN Spaces is a beta, as evidenced by that (currently weird looking) beta text at the top of the page. We had a feature list not too long ago that encompassed 1000% of what we could get done in time for a release. When we had to make hard cuts, we sometimes used the 80/20 rule, and we sometimes didn't. It isn't an exact science. So when I say things like "yes, I want that feature too", you can believe me. Things don't always get postponed because we don't find value in them, they sometimes get postponed because we would have shipped in 2007 if we wanted everything to be perfect. And by then, there would be 500 more things we would want to do. You can't have it both ways ;) And guess what? This is going to happen again and again. That's software.
So when faced with the question of whether or not the 100 or so "A-list" bloggers would consider switching to MSN Spaces in December 2004, the resounding answer was "probably not, but that is OK." And just about everybody we talked to (including A-listers - which really is a ridiculous term) agreed with this approach given the alternative.
So, who do I want to see using MSN Spaces? I want my mom and dad to use Spaces. I want my sister to have a space for her friends. I want my in-laws to use Spaces to share holiday photos with all of us privately using Messenger-only access. I want my old classmates to find me via my Space (this has already happened twice in two days.) I want the (appx) 150 million MSN Messenger users to feel as if they have a place to express their feelings to the 10-15 people they care most about. I want the (appx) 187 million Hotmail users to view Spaces as yet another way to keep in touch with loved ones for free. I want college kids to post pictures of their classmates falling asleep in class from their mobile phones, and instantly have all their friends alerted in MSN Messenger - even if they are in another country. I want people to use Spaces in ways we hadn't even thought of (note: not surprisingly, this is also already happening.)
That was our bar - real people, real experiences. And we are ecstatic with the progress we have made. People are excited about the level of integration into MSN Messenger with real-time notification and contact cards. People are excited that we support RSS 2.0 and Trackbacks. People are excited about the fact that MSN employees are finally blogging (we were before, we just didn't get linked to!) and engaging in an open discussion with our users. We dig that when you search Google News for "MSN Spaces", you get 350 articles - it shows that there are a LOT of people out there who are paying attention to what we are doing, even if it isn't always "for them". Even the VP of Engineering at Google stopped by - found randomly via Updated Spaces on our homepage. Pretty cool.
However, we aren't finished. Not by a long shot. So keep speaking up... please