Omar Shahine's WebLog

For the past 5 weeks (other than a trip to Alaska planned a year ago) I have been living work, breathing work, and dreaming about work (not by design). And today the news is out . Hotmail is aggresively moving to make storage a non issue any more ...

I have released my Media Center Front Display Panel SDK . You can find API documentation here . This is an SDK that I created to give you a managed API and State Aggregator to get notified of state from the Media Center State Aggregator Service. If...

Jeff Key recently posted on WMA/AAC/iTunes etc etc. I personally don't care about any of this and here is why: I have an iPod I have a Windows Media Center PC I have a few Windows XP machines I have a few Macs I want to be able to listen...

I've read numerous documents and books and seen various references on how to refer to private member variables in a class . I have been inconsistent myself depending on what I'm doing and I'm wondering what some others out there use or recommend. Here...

The last time I owned a Palm device was in 2000. Since then I have used a variety of Pocket PC devices, and for the last few years I've tried one Pocket PC Phone and owned two Smartphones. My friends laugh at me cause the most important function of my...

This week at work we had a small change to our cups. For the last 6 years I have been drinking from an orange cup. This week they were green :-).

That title is one of the main reasons I seriously considered a Treo 650 (and ultimately got one). If you wish to purchase a Pocket PC Phone in the US, you have four choices (that I am aware of). HP H6315 (T-Mobile) Audiovox 4100 (AT&T) ...

Holy cow, how did I miss this gem? [Tony Schreiner] New Pet Peeves Fixed The disappearing status bar bug should be gone for good. We also fixed most of the scenarios where the URL you were typing in the address bar would get stomped or disrupted...

Well I plan on spending the next few days getting together a beta of dasBlog 1.7 . I've been slowly doing some work on dasBlog the past few months (emphasis on slowly). To be honest I was pretty close to closing up shop on dasBlog and eventually writing...

Who ever said Microsoft doesn't innovate is just full of it. I just picked up the Microsoft Fingerprint Reader . This thing is so utterly cool. The software it comes with is awesome. Basically it works like this. You install some software, reboot...

I find it creepy that it's a million times easier to write managed code against iTunes than Windows Media Player. That just seems wrong. A few weeks ago when I was playing with the iRiver H320 I wanted to sync meta data from WMP to the iRiver so that...

As an owner of the Toshiba 3500 Tablet PC I am blown away by the new M200. this is a review of the improvements and differences. Specs This Toshiba has no shortage of great specs. Intel P4 Centrino 1.7 ghz, 1 GB of RAM, 7200 RPM Hard Drive, nVidia...

One of my biggest gripes about Windows and Office is that when you click on a word, excel, or PowerPoint doc (or acrobat doc) in Internet Explorer, those documents render in the browser pane. This is one of the biggest usability issues I face with Windows...

It appears that New York State is filing a class action suit against cell phone carriers for their practices regarding locking cell phones (preventing you from switching carriers and keeping your phone). I’m not sure how I feel about this. For...

Recently, Peter wrote on his blog : “Why do so few of the great usability features of Microsoft's Mac software ever make it to the Windows platform? The Mac applications always seem so much ahead of their Windows counterparts. And they...

My personal e-mail account has just gotten hammered with spam. Not sure what to do anymore. I get about 30 messages a day that don't get filtered away, and I simply can't be bothered to figure out what is going on. I've been toying with the idea of using...

Well, I'm a bit late to the party... but as Scott announced , dasBlog 1.7 is finished. There are numerous and substantial improvements in this version. Some of them were done months ago, and the most substantial came in the last 2 months as Scott and...

Why doesn't Shutdown work? Shutting down Windows and Shutting down Outlook requires user intervention 80% of the time for me. Yes I run Add-ins in Outlook, so what? I also run software in Windows. I don't care that an Add-in might be holding an Outlook...

Here is why Yahoo Music is cool. Yes I work for MSN, and sure I wish MSN Music had this same feature, but I'm super excited that Yahoo Music launched their business. Why? THEY ARE BUILT ON OUR PLATFORM! Let me explain. A few months ago I wrote this...

OH MY, this is so cool . http://maps.google.com (via Julien Couvreur). I don't get how they make money on this one yet. Of course, I just created a SlickRun (the sweetest application launcher) shortcut for this: magicword=map filename=iexplore...

Mark Luckofsky's post is sure making its rounds on the web and inside Microsoft. Joshua Allen posted some of the most insightful comments in reaction to that post. I don't think I could have said it better myself. You know, when I joined Microsoft...

It's probably not obvious that you can do this, but I thought I would let you all in on a little secret. Some of you probably aren't lucky* enough to have access to a service like Intellimirror Folder Redirection (where your My Documents folder can...

A lot of people don’t know that the DOCTYPE switch in your web page can have a profound impact on how your page layout works. For example, the CSS Box Model will look different in WinIE 6 depending on the DOCTYPE switch. If you are doing web design...

http://reviews.cnet.com/HP_f2304/4505-3174_7-30871933.html note to self. Start saving.

Want to use Windows Media Player to watch QuickTime movies without the Apple player (which I find has a poor user interface, and non standard windows controls)? http://www.free-codecs.com/download/QuickTime_Alternative.htm The best part is that...