JoeN's Blog

Taming Email

JoeN — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:02:23 GMT

Every once and a while I look at trying to optimize how I handle email. After 10 years at Microsoft I have a few tricks but I like to the force myself out there and change things every once in a while.

This time I used a number of techniques from Scott Hanselman’s excellent post - “The Three Most Important Outlook Rules for Processing Mail” to help kick start my efforts. The Meeting Invite rule is my personal favorite. My current position here in Shanghai has me working with at least five different product teams and this means a lot of email to process as well as a lot of meeting invites. Scott’s rules are variations on ones I have been using but he did a great write up and they are well worth having a look at.

Not really connected to email rules, but another habit I changed was not reading RSS feeds inside Outlook. RSS support in Outlook is a great feature but I felt that I wasn’t didn’t have the enough discipline to not read them all the time. I now use FeedDemon to read my RSS feeds and my life has a little more balance (+ FeedDemon has some great features).

A great visualization

JoeN — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:55:01 GMT

Stumbled across a great article in FlowingData about the about the 5 Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year – 2009.

I liked all of them but I particularly liked “The Jobless Rate for People Like You”. A beautiful interactive graph – especially the ability to discover the other lines and what they mean. I definitely need to find a way to add something like this into my work.

SlickRun (Anson told me so)…

JoeN — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 12:40:52 GMT

SlickRun is a great utility written by two of my friends at Microsoft (Anson and Eric).

Anson has been using this forever and has tried several times to get me to use it. I never really got into it but the other day I downloaded it and have finally realized why it is so cool. Quickly added to my list of essential software to have on my machines.

Anson - I’m sorry it has taken me so long to understand:-) Eric is also the author of the extremely popular Fiddler.

Great demo of MEF

JoeN — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 14:33:01 GMT

As a PM in Microsoft’s Developer Division, I always try to make sure that my presentations are relevant and accessible by developers.

Mike Taulty does a great job of describing MEF (a great new technology in the .NET Framework) in a very clear and programmer friendly way. MEF is a very flexible piece of technology and one danger in presenting flexible technologies is that you jump into the details too early and lose the audience.

Mike does an excellent job of describing MEF to developers. Things I liked:

The example used is easy to understand
Mike’s pace is easy to follow (he has clearly practiced the flow)
Mike’s use of VS is excellent, he knows his way around Visual Studio and it shows.

The series so far:

Bootable VHDs in Windows 7 made easy

JoeN — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 04:48:34 GMT

Scott Hanselman has a great series of posts about how to enable booting from VHDs in Windows 7. As a PM at Microsoft, you often need to do demos of software in various stages of development. This can present a problem in terms of hardware as most PMs don’t want to manage and travel with multiple laptops.

If you want to the use one laptop, the traditional approach is to use Virtual PC to run a VHD. This works but performance (especially on a laptop) was an issue. You could definitely improve performance through various techniques but it can get complicated.

Windows 7 changes this dramatically as “Boot from VHD” is built directly into the OS. Not only do you get great performance but you also get access to the “hosting” file system. If you have any requirements around running beta software (or another OS) you should look at this feature.

Scott has some very easy to follow directions to get started:

This is the new standard on my PM team and I have been using it as well – check it out.

Commuting and Podcasts

JoeN — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 13:59:22 GMT

I have quite a long commute to work which means that my Zune HD is an essential part of my day Personally I think that the Zune HD is an awesome experience - the hardware and software are simply outstanding and everyone that I have shown the device to has been very impressed. I have a Zune Original and it’s more important to me than my phone!

I currently subscribe and listen to about 25+ podcasts which keeps me quite busy (but also happy) during my commute. When people hear that I have a lot of podcasts they usually ask what they are. Well here they are:

Must Haves

WNYC Radio Lab (zune) – amazing topics, people and production values. Every episode is delicious to listen to!
This American Life (zune) – a classic show with great topics and people.
NPR: Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me (zune) – a fun look back at the week in the US
Ted Talks (zune) – an amazing conference with a huge variety of talented speakers from anywhere and everywhere.

General News

Marketplace (zune). Good general overview of what is happening in the American market.
NBC Nightly News (zune). General nightly news in the US.
NPR: Foreign Dispatch (zune). Weekly wrap up of the best foreign news from NPR.
Planet Money (zune). Interesting coverage of money related issues

Work Related

You can’t go past Channel 9 for information about Microsoft technologies.
Manager Tools (zune) for some great information about how to be a better manager.

Entertainment

Sometimes I just want to relax and laugh, so I listen/watch:

The Rotten Tomatoes Show (zune) great writing and funny hosts. This podcast helps me decide what movies I will watch.
The Bugle (zune) for a good dose of British style humor.
Creativity Top 5 (zune) - cool ads that have appeared.
Best Ads on TV (zune)– cool ads on TV (many are from Australia)
The Digg Reel (zune) – crazy videos floating around the Internet
The Soup Podcast (zune) – snippets of TV culture.

Miscellaneous

This I Believe (zune). Revealing insights from people about what they hold dear.
Vanguard News (zune). A twist on the news.

Gadgets

The Engadget Show (zune) – the podcast has just started (and it shows) but some good content on gadgets.

Music for the Gym

Two of the podcasts below were not specifically done for working out at the gym, but they really work well there!

[House Music] Pureibiza Podcast Taku Nakahara (zune). The one I currently listen to when working out.
Bar Grooves
FitMusic (zune). DJ Mystery is the one to look for

What’s happening in Australia

7:30 Report. Local reports on Australian news.
Media Watch. A revealing critique of Australian media.

New Year, New Campus, Starting up again…

JoeN — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 14:34:46 GMT

It’s been a long time since I last blogged, but with the New Year I have decided to start up again. I want to blog about things I find interesting especially about things outside of the direct products I work on – more along the lines of personal productivity as well as general presentation related information.

A little update about what has been happening with me. After having a good run with the XNA Community Platform team, I left and went back to the Developer Division and helped start up the tools for Windows Azure. It was a great experience working with the Azure team as they developed the platform, building tools for a moving platform has some unique challenges:-).

In the middle of 2008, I made a fairly big change and moved to work for Microsoft’s Developer Division in Shanghai (part of STB China). I am now the DevDiv China GPM working with all our teams here delivering technology as part of Visual Studio 2010. This of course was a big change for my family and I quickly learnt that a family of 5 with three boys is often commented on as you walk down the street (“san ge erzi!”).

To restart the blog I thought I might share some pictures of the new campus we have moved into. After a long wait we have finally got a brand new Microsoft specific campus in Shanghai:

Here I am taking some photos:

Some pictures of one of the entrances and lobby:

Here is my office and the view from the window:

XNA GSE Game: The Dishwasher : Dead Samurai

JoeN — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 19:25:00 GMT

One of the guys on the team just forwarded a great video from a GSE game "The Dishwasher : Dead Samurai".

It looks amazing and I love the visual style. It's great to see games like this popping up from the community.

I think the Dream Build Play competition is going to be generate quite a few interesting games!

Back to planning:-)

Which Visual Studio version will you use?

JoeN — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 23:49:05 GMT

I didn't get a lot of responses to my previous XNA Game Studio Express blog entry (perhaps because I let this blog die to inactivity:-() but I thought I'd try to spice things up with a different Visual Studio focused question.

As we finish up the refresh release to XNA Game Studio Express, we are looking at the next major version and some decisions that need to be made. I wanted to get some impressions from people around a particular topic that I am currently looking at.

As many of you know, Visual Studio is releasing a new version at the end of this year (codenamed Orcas). One of the major features we are planning to add in the next major version of XNA Game Studio Express is the ability to create games in all SKUs of Visual Studio (Express, Standard, Pro, etc). With Orcas coming, the next obvious question is which release of Visual Studio should/can we support.

I have the following basic questions:

How quickly do you personally move to new versions of Visual Studio?
What's the impact you would feel if we only supported the Orcas version of Visual Studio with our new functionality?
What's the impact if we supported only VS 2005, and added Orcas support later (in a refresh release a few months after Orcas ships)?

Joe

20 seconds of pain!

JoeN — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 22:33:06 GMT

I've been suffering from a very painful audio problem on Vista. Towards the end of all my songs the sound would suddenly start to skip and the sound would be very jittery for the last 20 seconds or so.

Initially I put it down to driver issues but after installing new ones, the issue still occurred. I got annoyed and eventually stopped playing a lot of music at work in my office. I finally had enough the other day and a quick Live search later a resolution appeared "turn off sound enhancements":

http://help.lockergnome.com/vista/windows-media-player-skips-ftopict36704.html

No more skipping and I'm much happier!