Darryl Burling @ Work : Off Topic

Blog moved to burling.co.nz

dburling — Thu, 15 May 2008 01:34:17 GMT

When I first started at Microsoft I had my own blog on my own site. However, after a few months I started blogging here anyway and removed the blog from my own site.

Recently I've dusted off the old site and started afresh with a nice new blogging engine that I really like and with a nice design that I also like.

If you are interested in following my adventures, please subscribe to the main feed at http://burling.co.nz. If you would just like to get the work related blog posts, subscribe to the feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/darrylburling - this is my work specific blog.

If you are already subscribed to the work feed - you'll not have to do anything - nor will you be reading this through a feed reader.

Hopefully the main feed will be more interesting to you, but you have the choice.

A peek inside the OSS Labs at Microsoft

dburling — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 14:10:42 GMT

There is a bunch of photos on Port25 taken inside the OSS labs at Microsoft. This is an interesting look at whats going on behind the scenes. It is reasonably well known that we have a OSS lab, but this opens it up a little more.

If you are interested in a little more behind the scenes, you'll want to read Steve's introductory post which gives a little more information.

Interesting. Link here.

Changes in DPE (and a new blog to follow)

dburling — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 05:33:44 GMT

As you may know Sean has moved on to Redmond which means we have a new manager here in DPE New Zealand.

Scott Wylie is now the Director of the Developer and Platform Strategy team here in New Zealand. Scott has been in Microsoft New Zealand for longer than almost anyone else in Microsoft New Zealand. This is good news. He understands how Microsoft works and has a long career of great success both in management and on the ground having started in a technical role.

One of the things Scott is famous for (at least in the NZ sub) is his musical abilities. He is in a band that plays frequently - President Gas. Check out their website here. Scott is well loved at our kick off event that we have each year, where he normally picks up the guitar and belts out a few good numbers...

Anyway, Scott is pretty excited to be in DPE New Zealand, and has started blogging. So subscribe to his feed, read his first post and make him feel welcome! If you are coming to the launch events, make sure you bump into him and say Hi.

Random Stats

dburling — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 01:59:59 GMT

I was looking at my stats today from my blog and found some interesting things. Note that these are only the last 500 visitors - so this is not necessarily a dead accurate representation of the stats.

Firstly - Operating Systems:

Visitor %	Operating System
58.00%	Windows XP
32.00%	Windows Vista
3.20%	Unknown
2.20%	Windows 2000
1.60%	Windows 2003
1.40%	Linux
1.00%	Mac OS X
0.40%	Windows 98
0.20%	Windows

Screen Resolution:

Visitor %	Resolution
37.74%	1280x1024
27.55%	Unknown
24.95%	1024x768
5.42%	1600x1200
3.04%	1152x864
1.30%	800x600

Browser:

Perc.	Browser Name	Version
47.60%	MSIE	7
28.00%	Firefox	2.0.0
17.40%	MSIE	6
1.60%	Safari	1.2
1.60%	Opera	9.22
1.40%	Mozilla	5
0.40%	Firefox	3.0b1
0.40%	Opera	9.24
0.20%	Opera	9.23
0.20%	Firefox	1.4
0.20%	MSIE	6
0.20%	Netscape	7.2
0.20%	Firefox	1.5.0
0.20%	Firefox	1.0.7
0.20%
0.20%	MSIE	5

Which equates to 29% on Firefox and 65% on IE with the others taking the remaining. Its interesting that most Firefox users are pretty efficient at staying on the latest version.

Most popular page - this one - more popular than the fonrt page!

Interesting.

Dead hard drive, dead power supply

dburling — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 04:21:58 GMT

I've had a tough time over the last week or so. Last Monday my Hard Drive in my new HP laptop died, taking all its data with it. Fortunately, unlike some, I have been using foldershare (which has been down quite a bit lately) to replicate most of my key data around. The key data I lost in this instance is mail (PST's - you'd think we have unlimited mailbox sizes wouldn't you?) and the remainder of my screencasts that I'd recorded earlier.

So I've got to do the rest of those again...

Then the company that supplies our laptops didn't have a spare, so I had to purchase one outright (which was actually pretty cheap in the end), so I got that fitted on Monday, in time for me to travel to Auckland and Invercargill on Tuesday/Wednesday to present at a conference and at the first ever Invercargill .Net UG meeting.

Then on Friday morning the power supply in my (two month old) home computer died, just as I need to use it for a heap of work at home that needs to be done (great timing!).

New power supply should arrive tomorrow, in the meantime I'm using my UMPC for everything at home - which is not ideal, but working OK.

Anyway, hopefully I'll have more screencasts up later this week. I'll also post my slides from the Visual Studio tour late this week too.

Things I love about the new Live Writer

dburling — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 00:43:00 GMT

I really like live writer. I love online/offline applications that have both a software and an online component - I get the best of the experience with the best of the reach. Anyway, I've already talked about that and that's not what this post is about.

I really like some of the new features of Live Writer.

My favorites are spell checking (which was notably missing in the previous version), the new category picker (why can't I create a category though?), the icon next to the weblog (its the little things too) and my personal fav is the "Set publish date" feature.

I tend to post in spurts and its always bothered me that they turn up in a cluster and then I appear to take a holiday from blogging for a week. Now I can "manage" that better :-)

The only problem is that with a blogging engine based somewhere in the US and me based here in NZ time zone, there is a bit of guessing as to when the post needs to be set to appear...

Working at Microsoft and meetings

dburling — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 20:26:00 GMT

A few weeks ago I came to the realization that at Microsoft we have relatively few meetings. I know - it is probably something I should have picked up ages ago, but its not until you are insanely busy that you notice it - or maybe I've just got a grip...

Anywho, this one thing stands out as a huge differentiator about working at Microsoft compared to pretty much any organization I've worked at in the past. I've worked for big multi national companies before as well as small start up companies and can say that Microsoft seems to have as few as start ups.

That's not to say we don't have meetings - we have performance review meetings (normally 1:1's) and a variety of other meetings related to customers or whatever, but there are none of the long drawn out project meetings that other companies seem to have

Why is this? I've been thinking about this, and I think part of the reason for it is that Microsoft has an internal culture of trust. Each of us have very specific outcomes that we need to drive and we are held responsible for those outcomes. Failing to achieve those outcomes means you have broken trust and this obviously affects relationships in the team. As a result the general culture at Microsoft is to deliver on what you promised and a high level of accountability based on integrity. This one underlying cultural component allows us to do away with many of the project based meetings that you'd typically have.

To bring this home, as we are running Tech Ed we are working across geographical boundaries (Australia, New Zealand, USA, UK) to put together the event, and this means the occasional phone call, and once a week conference calls, but those calls are short (normally less than 30 minutes) and agendas are normally to the point. To a large extent everyone knows exactly what they need to do and have clear deadlines and simply deliver to the deadline. Any questions are handled with a quick and simple phone call and a quick decision.

For example on Wednesday we had our first Tech Ed NZ stakeholder meeting. It was 45 minutes long had around 13 people in attendance and really served more as a status report than anything else.

That's not to say that we haven't started Tech Ed planning. At the meeting we were told that we have only 150 tickets left (buy one today if you want to go at all), and the speakers and tracks are around 99% locked down (more on this later).

Its great to work at an organization where everyone knows what they need to do and just go and do it. It saves loads of time and things get done efficiently.

Switching RSS Feeds - please follow me :-)

dburling — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 23:36:00 GMT

If you subscribe directly to my RSS feed either here or at www.burling.co.nz, please redirect your feed reader to http://feeds.feedburner.com/darrylburling. If you've been using my aggregated feed from www.burling.co.nz, this is now managed by the new RSS feed, and I recommend switching over to the new RSS feed.

Over the next few weeks I'll be switching off the old RSS feeds to make life simpler for anyone who might actually want to follow what I write :-).

Forza Motorsport 2

dburling — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 01:25:36 GMT

In case you have an XBox 360 and dont know whats coming with Forza 2... check this out.

I like car racing, but this is a little over the top for my budget :-)