John Lawrence (MSFT) : General

Too much email, not enough life

johnlawr — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 08:46:00 GMT

Via Itzy I came across this poem from Steve Palvina.

Will you invest your time in what really matters to you, or will your tombstone ultimately read like this:

Here lies John, who passed away
While answering his email one day.
No friend, no child, no loving mate
Could keep poor John from working late.
With each new mail, he worked like hell
To click ”reply” instead of “del.”
A prompt response he’d always give
But somehow he forgot to live.

Ouch. Sounds horribly like me.

A fellow email blood pressure sufferer

johnlawr — Sat, 04 Mar 2006 12:10:00 GMT

I just read David Anderson's post on how he just decided to Take Back His Life after his email inbox caused his email blood pressure to skyrocket.

David, you were getting 400 emails a day at the peak of the Beta 3 period for Team Foundation Server. I apologise - I was probably the sender of a large number of them...

I know exactly how you feel - in fact if I only received 20 emails an hour I think I'd be happy. I started getting this quantity of email when I first joined the team and rapidly realized I wasn't going to be able to cope using my previous strategies. Thanks to some advice from Chris Shaffer, our Test Manager, I discovered Getting Things Done and managed to get - and keep - things under control.

As a process for managing mail, this worked well - but for in parallel for a few years I have felt like I've been fighting with Outlook. It would take 10-15 minutes to open up and become responsive, and every so often would start giving me errors telling me it couldn't open or display folders because it was out of resources.

Two weeks ago I finally cracked. It reached the point where this was happening all the time. It became more and more difficult to manage my email and get things done - compounded by the fact that these issues had stopped autoarchive and email rules working, so my exchange mailbox reached it's max size and I couldn't even send mail any more. This was the point that my email blood pressure finally cracked - I felt more stress than I've felt in years.

I could no longer manage my email. And no-one knew why. We are lucky here to have a great internal support system - we first assumed that it was my client, but after reproing the issue on 4 machines (and baffling a friend of mine on the Outlook team) finally realized that we'd have to rebuild my exchange store.

After a week of basically being incommunicado, Outlook was back, I caught up - and I am so much happier. Outlook actually really performs quite well indeed and I now realize that for the past several years I've been working with one of my primary tools working at about 20% efficiency. If only I'd discovered this sooner, I wonder how much better my work/life balance might have been.

Windows more secure than Linux?

johnlawr — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 07:05:00 GMT

Sam Jarawan just sent me a link to a Tom’s Hardware report that discusses some research from a Linux enthusiast that suggests that windows is more secure than Linux:

A Linux enthusiast at the RSA Conference in San Francisco has reluctantly concluded that Microsoft produces more secure code than its open source rivals.

In an academic study due to be released next month Dr Richard Ford, from the Florida Institute of Technology, and Dr Herbert Thompson, from application security firm Security Innovation, analysed vulnerabilities and patching and were forced to conclude that Windows Server 2003 is more secure than Red Hat Linux.

It might seem like this has been a long time coming, but the changes at Microsoft over the last few years to put Security at the top of our agendas are paying off. Michael Howard’s initiatives have made a dramatic difference to development across the entire company.

Halo 2 statistics support RSS feeds

johnlawr — Wed, 10 Nov 2004 23:05:00 GMT

After all the discussion on Work Item Tracking and RSS based notification, it’s interesting to see that Bungie is supporting RSS feeds for your Halo 2 statistics.

Here is my personal Halo 2 statistics feed (you can see that I’m not very good yet…)

Oh, and by the way – in case you hadn’t heard - Halo 2 is awesome J.

Bill Zentmayer is blogging

johnlawr — Wed, 18 Aug 2004 07:46:00 GMT

I just spotted that Bill Zentmayer has a blog. Bill and I worked together with one of the SpeechServer 2004 early adopters last year. I'm looking forward to seeing what he does in his new role as an architect/evangelist - hopefully for Team System, amongst other things.

New log analysis tools in Microsoft Speech Application SDK

johnlawr — Mon, 22 Mar 2004 16:44:00 GMT

As I mentioned in my last post, we've been working on some tools to analyze and report against the copious logs that are generated by the Microsoft Speech Server.

What started as a bit of a stretch goal for us to at least have something in the product to be able to look at these log files has turned into a full blown effort, and we've ended up with some pretty rich functionality (although there is always more we could to in vNext).

The MSS logs are generated on the server using Enterprise Instrumentation Framework (EIF). This has the advantage of being very low impact on the server runtime - the performance hit on even logging vast quantities of events is very low. It's also highly flexible in terms of being able to configure what events get added to the logs, and it supports multiple different log syncs.

However, for log analysis tools this makes for a different story. In order to reduce runtime overhead, the logs are stored in a binary format which is great for writing to sequentially, but for the kind of random access queries we'd like to be able to perform on the logs, it is less than ideal. Additionally, the flexibility of the format in terms of configuration and the complexity of the schema used for all the different types of events that can get logged by the server has made it hard to design robust tools with which to analyze the logs.

In order to do anything useful we decided that we'd have to get the log data into a more appropriate format for querying and reporting against, so we've put together a command line tool and parallel Data Transformation Services task to import the data into a database. On top of this we have two main components:

CallViewer: a standalone tool to run queries against the speech server logs. This tool can be used to find calls matching a specific set of criteria, and then to see the events you're most interested in within those calls. A typical use would be to see summaries of all of the Question & Answer cycles within a call. It's easy to get a quick overview of the 'shape' of an individual call - what the system said, how the user responded etc., and then to actually hear a recording of what the user actually said to the system.
Speech Application Reports: A set of standard reports designed to display an overview of Microsoft Speech Server usage and how well specific applications being hosted on the server are performing. We've developed this on top of the newly launched SQL Server Reporting Services. (I believe we may be the first Microsoft server offering shipping with reporting built on top of this framework). This is a pretty extensible framework, and our goal has been to provide a baseline set of reports which would be easy to augment with custom reports by customers and ISVs.

I'm hoping that some of our partners in the speech industry would see this as a real opportunity to add value to the MSS community. Tuning of speech applications during test and pilot stages is one of the most important phases of speech application development, so providing further reports to help application authors determine what users are struggling with, or which parts of their application need the most work could be very valuable indeed.

However, I'm pretty happy that we've plugged a huge hole in our end-to-end development story by providing these tools out of the box with the Speech Application SDK.

Open developer position on my Speech SDK Tools team

johnlawr — Fri, 20 Feb 2004 01:50:00 GMT

I've got an open position I'm trying to fill for a reasonably experienced developer - so what better way to let people know than through my blog!

Here's a snippet describing what I'm looking for:

The Speech SDK team is looking for an experienced software development engineer to design, build and deliver the next generation of speech authoring tools and APIs. This is a unique opportunity to participate in the new product cycle from feature definition to final delivery. We're looking for an established developer with 4+ years of software development experience in C++ or C#, with familiarity in technologies such as ATL, COM, XML and general Windows UI development work. Demonstrated experience of working through a product cycle in a team environment is a must. The position requires a Bachelors degree in Computer Science, or equivalent technical experience.

If that sounds like you, then use the contact link on my main blog page - I'd love to hear from you!

Welcome to my new home

johnlawr — Wed, 17 Dec 2003 22:54:00 GMT

My old blog at http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/johnlawr isn't going to be updated any more, so for foreseeable future you'll find my blog entries here at ASP.Net.

For new readers - a brief introduction. I'm a Dev Lead on the Microsoft Speech Application SDK - which is the SDK used to develop applications for the forthcoming Microsoft Speech Server (rapidly approaching general release). I generally use this blog to talk about speech stuff in general, and highlight news and other pieces of information about Microsoft speech technologies.