Akram Hussein - Life & Technical Discussions

Microsoft “I am a PC” campaign just rolled out on Windows.com, I just love those new Ads so much better than the previous ones. Anyway thought I would join and Say I am a PC and I work in Windows used by over 1 BILLIION users world wide!

A very nice gesture I found is that you can go ahead and upload your photo or video and join the I’ am a PC campaign. Here click the link below and be proud of being a PC. Way to go Microsoft!!!

http://imapc.lifewithoutwalls.com/

I heard once that a company allows for their employees to use 20% of their time to work on whatever project they like!

Well that is definitely true in kindergarten they give you a lot of time to use it on whatever project you want and everybody will be very supportive :).

However when it comes to an actual organization it is very hard to see employees not aligned with their company objectives or just coming up with ideas that make no sense. It is not even healthy for an organization to have very super smart guys and that's it. Even I think in my own opinion there should be a mix of very smart and average smart people in order to be successful or else you will have team members quarreling on who has the smartest idea :), and I guess I am one of those average smart guys.

Anyway that's not the point, but the idea is you don't need to work at a company just because they let you do what you want for 20% of the time, because at Microsoft actually I do that and still do my job. Well I don't use 20% of my time doing projects that doesn't align with my team vision, but at least I find something that would be a win for my organization and a win for me.

Microsoft is one huge diverse organization, where each team has his own unique culture but at the same time they inherit some from the great culture of the whole company. I love the fact that you are the owner of your destiny at the company and you can shape your own future if you have the passion to do so.

So How can you save 20% of your time? Well first you need to organize your time very well and this is a key to making sure you have 20% of your time to use at projects that fuels your aspirations in technology.

1. First start by planning your week.

Every Monday I come to office and first thing I do is to create a Task in Outlook and I basically like to call it by week number "21/2008" and there I categorize the work I need to do. Well I put everything even the stuff I want to research and explore. I sometimes find no time to do all that stuff so I make sure I plan for the highest priority work first.

2. Make sure you actually look at your weekly plan every day

The key to successfully acting on a plan is to monitor it. Everyday open your weekly plan, update it with information and make sure you work on the items you have identified. Well sometimes I was just wondering at my office after long day of meetings and asking my self what should be doing? Well then I open my weekly plan :)

It really helps out to have this kind of planning during the week, just a simple task in outlook that you can look at every day to make sure you're on the right track.

3. Make a reminder at the end of the week and measure your performance.

At the end of each week this task has a reminder. I take a look at my week and see what I have or haven't achieved, and start planning the next week if possible. Sometimes I find my self swamped with work that I couldn't deliver so I make sure that doesn't happen the week after. Continuously learning from your weekly plans really excels your ability to accurately plan and estimate your abilities to complete your work.

4. Submit your weekly report if you have to.

Usually I like to have a weekly report even if my manager didn't ask for it. Oops I actually forgot mine this week:).

Having those weekly reports really helps when you go out to your review and say hmmm what have I actually done during the year :). It also helps to provide visibility at what you have been working on.

5. Measure how successful you were on achieving your plans at the end of the year.

Well I actually have a task in outlook called FY08, which I measure against the full year. I then say have I done what I was planning for my self in FY08? well it is really so rewarding when you find that you have achieved all your objectives and even more because you planned to do so.

The planning process of my time helped me actually save 20% of my time and sometimes more to work on projects that would benefit me and my organization. I can't say it was 100% perfect, cause sometimes I investigated technologies that weren't even related to my work, but lets say I still enjoyed it, and it pays off later.

So it doesn't need to be stated in the company employee handbook that you can use 20% of your time on anything, you can actually make it happen at Microsoft just with the right set of time planning activities and definitely a manager who understands.

The contrast between software and basic human aspects of life has quite a resemblance that it struck me while writing a piece of code. I just kept seeing code in a different way when I gave a deep thought around how software is an extension from our human nature.

Definitely I am not the first to come up with this, but just the deep thinking I did made me realize that for any piece of software to be successful it needs to take into consideration certain aspects that are part of our every day life.

So I started thinking of those basic human aspects that maps to a living piece of software!

Interaction: Pretty basic input and output but also it extends to touch, voice and even sign language! Well it is pretty normal to see research around those areas trying to bring interaction closer to our human nature rather than developing a new way for interacting with computers.

Trustworthiness: If all people were trustworthy this wouldn't be even a topic we would be discussing. But the fact is not all humans are trustworthy, and this is why we need to protect software with sensitive information from being abused. It's amazing really the amount of work done in security and all this because people really don't trust each other :). The whole security infrastructure in place in our world today is due to our inability to be honest and trustworthy among our selves.

Consumption: We all need to consume food in order to survive, also software needs to consume data in order to provide an output. All applications consume data in different forms in order to achieve the tasks it is required to do, and the processing of this data what makes each application unique in its nature. I would stretch that also to say that any self moving object would need something to consume to produce energy, Cars, Airplanes, etc...

Waste: Even waste and I won't go into the human detail here :), but think of the garbage collector in .NET, any data consumed needs a garbage collection or else you will end up with memory leaks in your code.

Maintenance: Code that cannot be maintained or updated is definitely doomed to break and users would stop using it. Same thing applies to us, you always need to see a doctor or at least when you are sick you need some sort of maintenance.

Learning: This is definitely one interesting area that software hasn't yet totally achieved yet. Although there has been a lot of work in the field of Artificial intelligence, still there hasn't been a piece of software that would think and act based on intuition. However, we have seen similar stuff in vista where it knows which applications you use most and it makes loading them faster (aka superfetch). In the future I guess this will be an area to explore by software applications.

There could be still other human aspects that I haven't covered here, however it was just so interesting to explore the various aspects of our human side and how it resembles our own creation (software).

At All things digital conference D6, the multi touch feature was demo' d, introducing a Microsoft surface experience on the tablet PC.

I always believed that 2008 will be about touch technology and I bet apple new OSX will try to include something similar. Anyway I truly believe this will set the stage for a lot of touch applications to come!

Ok, I went home installed live mesh on my Home PC, and then wondered how will I be able to remote into my home PC from work if I didn't setup my router to open RDP port. Well Live Mesh doesn't require any port to be open, even it is not listening on any port, and that drove me to dive in and try to find what's the story here. Well I went right away to work and tried to connect to my Home PC and WOW it worked through my router and firewall I was able to remotely connect into my home PC without the need to go into my router and configure any settings etc..

Ok I scratched my head and kept trying all my old tricks to find what is going on, did some netstat and used tcpvcon from sysinternals and found that there is some HTTPS traffic going on. Well I didn't go into the detail, and not really sure but I guess there is actually some HTTPS tunneling going on allowing me to Remote in to my machine without the need to listen to a specific port or configure a router at my home. Pretty amazing stuff !

Well excellent job Live Mesh team for really flushing out a common user experience that we all fall into when trying to remote in to our machines, and making it as seamless as possible. Now that's Magic!

I have been using it for over a year now, and was hoping it would get out to the public. Office labs released search commands for Office 2007. An amazing tool that really helped me find my way through a ribbon at times when I was lost between all those icons :). Enjoy!

I guess my previous post was kind of setting the stage for this one. It is really amazing today to see such a product coming to life by Microsoft, and showing the world that we deliver on our strategies and goals for software + services for the consumer. Live Mesh is really a great product and a platform at the same time, that I see started from the consumer and solving a user problem to a whole platform and solution across the board. I really love the idea that innovation was based on solving a user problem instead of thinking first of the platform.

I can't really compare this to the cloud services offered by Amazon S3, EC2 etc.. or Google App Platform since currently the problem space seems different. However, Microsoft really developed a cloud based App for the consumer that extends the desktop to the cloud, and probably will have use for the business or the enterprise.

The major difference I see here is that Live Mesh delivers a consumer solution that extend beyond just the consumer and would allow developers to build software + services applications that would make use of the semi connected environment. It also shows the power of Microsoft to deliver on their cloud services, which I believe is coming out with great services like Silverlight Streaming Service and SQL Data Services.

Further, it really sends the message out to analysts or pessimists who said Microsoft is too big for its size to compete with companies like Google. Yes we may be to big, but today I am really proud to see such an agile model pushing features like live mesh out to the public in a well thought off story to the customer.

I recommend anyone interested to look at the live mesh blog, and especially the videos on live mesh here. Last I heard it was limited invite to test it out so i wouldn't waste time go sign up while you can :).

Honestly, I am not saying that because I get paid by Microsoft! but 2 years ago or almost less than that when all those new concepts came out like Software as a Service (SaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS) I never saw this working for small - medium and enterprise businesses.

To start with you have to assume that you are always connected, and in an ideal world you would. However, believe me it is not always the case, there was a whole region that had to live with no Internet for almost 2 weeks. Just can you imagine if a business that hosted all their applications online would have to do. Basically I don't see an alternative except to shutdown :).

So it is clear still for years to come the Internet that we take for granted here, is not usually the case everywhere else. Further disasters do happen and although we have Geo-located services still those regions that get affected will have to stay in the dark, until they get back online.

Another fact is that still applications need to exist on the desktop at least for a while. I can't imagine using Gmail without using its notifier, or be able to pop out office and work on my documents without being connected. Still there are times when you are not connected, and the Internet is not free for everyone :).

Further still there is the problem of trust and security. Can a business fully trust another company to store and handle its information. Well maybe, but in my opinion you need to prepare a good SLA, and if this is not the case then say goodbye to the idea of having a business build their Apps on your platform.

Looking at Amazon S3 and Google App platform they are truly two amazing platforms for start ups now. It really offloads a lot of the startup costs that would be required to a host a service today. However, Microsoft also has a strategy and in my opinion it is a better one :). Yes I truly believe Microsoft do understand the enterprise and also the consumer mostly :). Looking today at some of the rolled services like Microsoft Online Services or the hosted services like Exchange,SQL and biztalk I see there is a clear strategy to provide SMBs with a set of services that they can offload their current infrastructure.

Today any business can take the step of using some of the hosted services like Share point, Exchange and Live communication server and use the best practices and models that are already built for them with no startup, setup or IT infrastructure costs.

From the consumer based services side Microsoft is providing amazing services like Silverlight streaming, and the whole Live Platform. Any developer today can start his own YouTube and build rich interactive applications with no worries on where and how rich media will be hosted.

Finally, for the end customer Let's also not forget software plus services like Zune Marketplace and XBOX Live that really provide an End to End consumer experience based on the S+S strategy.

My own personal opinion is that you can't change the way people work or develop in one single shot, it has to go into steps and it has to go through an evolution. Software + Services is the next step before we start depending fully on the cloud!

Microsoft research released an amazing prototype handwriting application that redefines the way you take notes on your tablet or ultra mobile PC. I have been using it for the past week and just can't tell you how easy and fun taking notes has been for me.

InkSeine starts from the fact that you don't just take notes but usually you also refer and link to sources from your PC or the Internet. So if you are taking notes probably you would refer to some URL on the Internet, or some document or email. Further it has an interesting clipping tool that allows you to capture any area on your screen and paste it in your notes.

I find InkSeine is a revolutionary way to take notes on the go and in meetings that may require not just writing but also linking to different sources on your machine or on the Internet.

InkSeine is available to the public and you can go ahead and download it from the InkSeine Microsoft research site and definitely send your feedback.

Here is an image from the InkSeine MS research website and it shows a sample note linking to different documents, emails, and web results. The interface is fairly simple and there are instant tips that will help you get around. I guess if you have used onenote or any note taking application this would be just another walk in the park for you. Enjoy!

I have just bought an ultra mobile tablet PC from Fujitsu for my father. Of course I was exploring every aspect of it just before wrapping it as a gift :). I never really liked those tiny keyboards or using the touch as a form of user input. However, after several hours I was addicted, as I was just writing my way through emails, browsing the Internet and even some sample coding :).

The handwriting in vista is just one amazing feature that I never realized until recently. I have one awful handwriting that sometimes I fail to read :) and vista was just learning its way through it. The average number of mistakes were very minor and the detection is just awesome. I kept thinking where are the competitors in all that.

I started searching on the net for news about apple and their plans for a tablet or a mobile computer soon. Found some old news and even some recent ones, however by looking at the market today I see it is all about touch!

The touch technology after the iphone is more appealing to the consumer today than any other time. More companies are going for touch phones and seeking to be positioned against the iphone. However what about the touch for the personal computer? Well looking at vista and what it provides, I see the 2008 battle ground for Microsoft and Apple will be the tablet and mobile computing.

Microsoft have invested heavily in touch technology in their surface technology and in the tablet features in vista. Apple on the other hand surprised the market with the iphone, and further there are rumors floating around apple developing a tablet mac.

The next 2 years is definitely a new battleground for both companies and possibly we could see a new announcement from apple around their handwriting recognition technology.

Online services for the consumer has been just booming in the past 4 years but today Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and others are just taking online services to a whole new level. It is not just about the average consumer to consume those services it also spreads out to the enterprise and also to various vertical sectors. Imagine a university leveraging today's free online services to offload their infrastructure for applications like email, Instant messaging, blogging, and student communication.

If you haven't heard but Microsoft and Google are the top competitors now in that area. They both are trying to make sure their services are not just spread for the average consumer but also specific to the education sector.

I just love this approach that Microsoft took for Live @ Edu to collectively offer a single solution to universities and having products like Hotmail, Live Spaces, and IM being offered as a collective package.

Today also Office Live is creating new opportunities for live services for the small and medium businesses. You can go ahead create your own domain, host your emails, share files and create a collaborative work environment for free in just minutes :).

However, I still see new opportunities for those set of services to grow beyond email, social networking and Instant messaging. The Google initiative to go beyond that started now with Android, a set of API's for the mobile platform, and definitely the services that are today used over the web will extend to the mobile.

There are also other initiative to promote those services through Developers and solution providers. Google started the open social API, that is now providing an opportunity to developers to enable solutions over different social networking platforms. Honestly, I like that approach getting all social networks together through a set of API's.

So where is Microsoft in all that? Well definitely I would say Dev @ Live started something similar but they need to push it further to bring together developers around a common platform. I love the new live API's, but still they are separate services, it would just be great to have it all as a single package of API's around a common objective rather than dispersed API's for each service.

Anyway there still more to come from the Live team, so I shall wait and see what is coming next for the developers and where would those free consumable API's lead developers too.

I just started using the new windows live suite 2.0 and trying out each application and service and thinking how there is amazing coordination now between the software on the desktop and the services offered on the cloud. Using Windows Live Mail application with hotmail, gmail and all my other services just enabled me to connect each email I account I had into a single application!. Further i just download the new Outlook Connector 2007 for hotmail and it is just amazing. Allowing me to have a single location for email without the need to go through 2 different applications.

So let me go over one of the scenarios that I am really using today.

1. All contacts are now stored in a single store on the cloud.

2. All my emails are accessed from a single application.

3. I can sync my mobile now with outlook and ensure that all my contacts there are synced on what is stored in my Hotmail.

I just think this is an amazing end to end experience for the user that enables the vision of software + services. Now if I go on a vacation and lets say i lose my phone, i just buy a new one and sync with Live Contacts no need to keep them stored or in sync with my home PC.

Now there is a single application that i can use to access all my emails without the worry to log on each mail service and check it individually, and even i can use my favorite mail client outlook 2007 and not have to download an extra one.

The only missing piece to all that is live calendar, which was launched recently but still it is not available through outlook 2007 or windows live mail application.

Another scenario also i find amazing is the integration with Photo gallery and spaces. Photo gallery makes it so easy to just share photos with friends and family with a single "click" to publish. :).

Honestly, i am not a fan of live spaces too complicated and too many customizations that i am not sure i want all that. But after the photo publishing feature, I just got on fire :). I get to share photos from my desktop with my parents and family without the need to go and open spaces and upload then send it over. it is all done with a flick of a second :). Also I tend to like a lot the slide show for spaces really did a good job here.

I hope i can see more and more software  + services this coming year that would use the cloud as a secure store that would replace our current local data stores.

Today Skydrive gets a refresh with new updates and features. Skydrive team blog posted a list of those updates and most important is that now you have 1 GB of storage (YES!). Further you get to share those files with anyone even if he/she doesn't have a Live ID. Well thats really something, I just find it now more easily to share with my friends and family who don't have a hotmail or use their LiveID. More details also can be found on the liveside blog post here.  

Anyway still I am waiting for one more feature and that is having my skydrive behave as my offline files in vista, and it would work with my sync center. Further it would be just awesome if they can also provide me with an icon on my desktop that i can go to my skydrive without having to use the web interface and it would behave the same way as my normal disk drives. Lets hope this would be an idea they get in their next refresh. Great Work!

After all the hype around Google gears offline web applications began to emerge as an alternative to desktop apps, and further a new HTML 5.0 specification which is still in progress is defining a new model for persistent storage. HTML 5.0 defines two forms of offline storage for web applications, the first is already implemented in Firefox which is the DOM storage which is an alternative storage for cookies that allows for string key / value pairs to be stored for up to 5MB per domain, and the second is a local SQL database storageJ. Unfortunately the DOM storage is not available in IE 7, however IE is using another storage model called userData Behavior which allows for 1MB per domain. Both models provide a way to store more data beyond cookies which is limited in size and also has performance issues since it is traversed with every call between the client and the server.

The DOM storage provides sessionStorage and globalStorage. SessionStorage allows sites to add data to the session, and is accessible to any page from the domain opened in the window. The latter storage mechanism is designed to span multiple windows, and last beyond the current session and this is known as globalStorage. One of the first applications that made use of the DOM storage specification in Firefox 2.0 and beyond is halfnote which is a note taking application that allows users to save their notes on the local store and make it available even when there is limited internet connectivity, which is somehow like Google gears.

However, what about gears localServer? I haven't dug really into Firefox implementation of that but I noticed that the HTML 5.0 specification has defined a section for offline applications and custom browser protocol handlers. HTML 5.0 defines that browsers can now know the state of the client whether the browser is online or not through the navigator.onLine attribute. Further browsers can now plug-in custom protocol and content handlers that can handle certain protocols like http or ftp even if the application is offline, and by that it can allow for some specific websites to be handled locally without the need to go online.

Now the most interesting part is that future browsers might allow for client side database storage, and of course I don't know when or if it is going to be supported in either IE or Firefox but I suspect they wouldJ. Now HTML 5.0 specification defines a way for browsers to use client side DB, that is SQL based and allows for reading and storing data using SQL queries. Now that is confusing, why would Google go through such an investment when HTML 5.0 is working on a specification for browsers can to make use of such technology? Well I don't have the answer to that, but definitely the next 2 years are going to be very interesting and will probably provide a new generation of Web 3.0 applications!!

Finally before I go, just to let you know that Firefox allows currently for SQL storage since it has a SQLlite engine already provided! Well not really as you would expect, this storage is only allowed for trusted Firefox extensions only, and not web pages. Moreover, it is still undergoing changes so probably if you start building on it; it might change in the future. However, if you're interested you can read the specification here.

Ok i know how confusing the branding was, and ya Windows Live Mail is not hotmail :) it is a desktop application to access any kind of email either POP3, IMAP or HTTP like hotmail etc... So why use it, and what is office live and custom domains where do they all fit into the picture.

 Let me then tell ya the scenarios around Windows Live Mail and how I was so happy to use the 3 services in conjunction together. So i have 4 or 5 other email accounts with a mix of pop3 and http and of course i never check them that often so i wanted an application beside outlook 2007 that is much more lightweight to check all those emails in one place. Here Windows Live Mail comes into the picture ;) basically it is the next version of outlook express, it has RSS integration which is awesome, news groups using NNTP and most of all it can support any number of accounts in one client. Further it is so light weight takes around mili seconds to start up, outlook 2007 takes almost 5 minutes on 2 gig machine :) Finally, it integrates so well with messenger, office live and custom domains.

So lets speak a little bit about what you can do with Custom Domains. Well lets say you create your own domain and you want a secure email service along with it, something that can provide you with a 2 gig storage and a superb anti-spam filter, outlook like interface then you should go for custom domains with hotmail :). So you configure custom domains and you point your DNS MX Record to hotmail and voilà you got an email account with your domain but using hotmail service. I am using it now and it is amazing, now i can access my custom domain email just from any where and all spam and phishing is handled by hotmail

 By the way i also use gmail and i am comparing the spam filters and i get the same spam content in both but hotmail completely blocks it while gmail is still showing it in my inbox.

Anyway now what about Office Live. So lets say you have your own company and you have 5 - 25 employees or more but it is a small business and you want a website, business applications, calendar, contacts and most important you want EMAIL. so you sign up with office live YES free of charge and you get 25 accounts 2 GB storage for each email with hotmail services :)

 Now get your office live account, custom domain account, hotmail and use them with Windows Live Mail you get a full desktop email application with all hotmail services but in an offline capable application. Isn't that amazing :)

And if you wonder if you can receive and "send" yes it works i tried it yesterday and it is amazing now i can access all my emails in one place and use my hotmail and custom domain account to send and receive through Windows Live Mail. Even better i have Windows Live Mail in 3 different desktops and i don't have to worry about storage cause hotmail is an online service handling all the storage for me :) and what everything is online for me :)

Now a bunch of things i would love ot see in the future of Windows Live Mail, is integration with windows live photo gallery, and windows live folders. It would be my all in one application just from there i can access my photos and folders that are all in sync with a reliable online service.