Akram Hussein - Life & Technical Discussions

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!

I guess now is the right time to start blogging about the new live search! For all of you who want to know more i encourage you to visit the live search team blog, it has the full details, and also links to the new search engine results.

So Why you should use live search?

The new live search is really now all about Relevance, and getting the results you want. Of course so does google, but the real value is around the ability to target your search across different interests. Those are interests from Health, Entertainment, Shopping, Celeberaties, Local, and Video.

Live search index is really way deeper just searching for "toyota camry" got me over 6.5 million results while google just got me slightly over 3 million.

Here go try it yourselves

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=toyota+camry&form=QBRE

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=toyota+camry

Further the video search the preview idea I just love it, as it gives you way greater flexibility by allowing you to see it before you click it! I guess no search engine today got something similar.

Sample video search for Halo 3

http://search.live.com/video/results.aspx?q=Halo%203&FORM=BVNR

Finally, just before i go, if you have a family usually health is always on your mind, i just spend hours trying to figure out a certain symptom that has just developed with my child, and it takes you almost quite sometime until you find the right one. I guess there is nothing better than live search when it comes to your health search.

Just imagine searching for cold or flu symptoms and you get a complete view of health information from the web, articles and complete categorization for health information.

https://health.live.com/results.aspx?qu=cold%20flu

I guess it is time for you all to try it, and if you really got feedback and want to discuss it i encourage you to go to the live search blog, they know all about it and i am just like you just another user who love the new search :).

P.S:  if some of you are still getting the old live search interface i recommend you go to the live search team blog, they got links there to the new search engine and try it.

So what’s all this hype around Live Search Leak! well it seems a lot of the news sites picked it up and also transferred false information around it being picked up from a test server. So here is the full story so everyone would know this wasn't a leak from our intranet, I guess if I was that dumb i wouldn't be hired in the first place!

So at almost 11 PM from my Home PC trying to search the internet the new live search just popped up, of course i thought the roll out has just begun but then i checked and made sure I wasn't connected to the intranet. I was fortunate to be one of the few lucky users who have externally been rolled out a beta version of live search. Anyway of course i got excited and started blogging about it, and even was trying to convince my wife to start using live now since it has all those kewl features :). Anyway she was still not convinced but I will someday :).  

The one thing I really appreciate and everyone i guess should know how mature this company really is, no one would ever just pull your post, block or even fire you like some other companies. There is a lot of trust Microsoft put in their employees and this is just one of the things i adore about this company. In fact it was a very kindly mail asking not to say it was rolled out or released since still it is not. I pulled out the post right away when i found that the old live search is still working on my company PC, and that could just been a test roll out that I was lucky enough to handle.

 Anyway i got home early tried it and still the new live search is working, it appears to be i was one of the very very few who had live search rolled out as a test for them :), unfortunately it is not working now anymore :( but I enjoyed it definitely and i can't wait for it to be released!!, and what i have shown is just a fraction of what live search has to offer.

Hi,

  Just to notify everyone i apologize for the information it seems they are still in beta and it was like a test roll out so i am pulling off the blog post.

 Thanks

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.

I have been thinking alot lately about the evolution of services and how operating systems will make use of them. I was just thinking, what if windows was provided as a service!. Well can you imagine if you can just buy the core OS for something cheaper than 50$ then you start adding on features that you want when you need them :).

Well what if parental control for example was a paid service rather than a feature in vista, well how many of us don't have kids or even they are not yet at an age that requires such a feature. Wouldn't it be nice to just pay for the services you actually want? Well it is just an idea that struck me what if also those services were open to third parties to develop :) well i am just thinking if this could be the future of a full service oriented OS.

Anyway this is just an idea i had and wanted to see what others might think, so send your feedback and let me know what you think.