Jonathan Hardwick : Rants and Raves

Windows Vista Sidebar - like MSR Sideshow, only better

jonathanh — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 08:45:00 GMT

Four years ago a wonderful application called Sideshow came out of Microsoft Research. It was the standard docking-bar-full-of-applets-on-the-side-of-your-screen (way before Apple Widgets and Konfabulator), but the part they really nailed was how natural it was to use. Not surprising, since it was created by user interface researchers!

MSR Sideshow applets (or “tickets”) used the concept of “peripheral awareness”, keeping just the highlights of information in the periphery of your vision – how many emails in your inbox, whether the roads home were still congested, your current bug count, that kind of stuff. Then, if you moved your mouse over one of the Sideshow applets, it would slide out a little window with just a bit more information – for example, the subject lines of all unread emails. Move the mouse away, and the window disappeared again, and you could get back to work. But click on it, and even more information appeared – for example, clicking on an email subject line would open the email itself.

Once you’d used Sideshow, it was very difficult to live without it. Sadly some bozo leaked the bits, at which point a VP put his foot down and had yanked it from the internal servers. I had a private install that I kept going for a year or two before losing the bits in a machine swap, and a cut-down version shipped in the MSN 8 Dashboard, but with no way to write your own applets it was a crippled shadow of its former self. Then the Longhorn team started teasing us with the new Sidebar – would it ship, wouldn’t it ship?

So it was great to see that not only is Windows Vista Sidebar going to ship, its applets will be able to work in three different contexts – on your desktop, on custom web pages, and on peripheral devices! Granted, the usual marketing naming makeover means that applets are now called “gadgets”, and they hijacked the Sideshow name to mean just the display on peripheral devices, but the core of it remains the same. Our computing lives are going to get easier! :)

To learn more:

http://microsoftgadgets.com/ is the best single source of information, and has a Gadgets blog feed
Sean Alexander from the Windows Sidebar team has a Sidebar category on his personal blog
The original MSR paper: “Sideshow: Providing Peripheral Awareness of Important Information”
Update: Channel 9 has a great video of the Sidebar team showing off their baby

A community-based marketing experiment - Microsoft gets on board the Cluetrain!

jonathanh — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 18:18:00 GMT

The Visual Studio 2005 evangelists have created a new community marketing experiment: High Five Wikisheets. Microsoft marketing has taken some flak in the past (ahem), but this wiki seems to be pure Cluetrain Manifesto material. Risky, radical, and all about the conversation. I love it :)

I first heard about the idea a couple of weeks ago, when I was looped into a discussion between Craig Neable and the Channel 9 team. Craig and his boss Carter Maslan work every day with developers who are trying to sell their bosses on the benefits of .NET. I figure this normally means a lot of “push” marketing – preparing datasheets and case studies and competitive analyses. Then Carter had the slightly-crazy idea that the developers themselves know why they want Visual Studio 2005, so why not give them the floor? Or, in his own words:

Nowadays, some of the best “Marketing” is happening in a Cluetrain Manifesto style expository conversation taking place at scale in community blogs – 1000s of them. The problem is blogs stink at synthesizing and summarizing those conversations at any given moment. Where can I go for a synopsis of the top reasons to move to VS 2005? Does that synopsis reflect the breadth and depth of the community’s actual project experience How could Marketing datasheets become succinct and accurate reflections of the real-life project experiences of the community?

Craig bounced a few namespace ideas off me, some of which I teased him for unmercifully (sorry Craig!), and then we got down to playing with prototypes. To kick things off, Craig and Carter have added the reasons they think companies will love Visual Studio 2005, but now the High Five Wikisheets are open to developers everywhere. Got a great reason that convinced your boss to switch? They want to hear it. Convinced that Visual Studio 2005 adds no value? They want to hear that too. Spotted a connection between two different scenarios? Refactor the wiki — or just join in the conversation on Channel 9!

Now, I wonder what Rick Segal and Seth Godin think?

Technorati tags: Cluetrain, Marketing, Microsoft, Wikis

What's the longest Microsoft product name?

jonathanh — Fri, 05 Aug 2005 17:45:00 GMT

We've done the "silly Microsoft product names" thing before, but in an internal discussion Larry Osterman upped the stakes with the following contender:

"Microsoft Windows Server Base Operating Systems Management Pack for Microsoft Operations Manager 2005"

One of the reasons I admire Larry is that when something like this annoys him, he immediately blogs it — including the fact that I trumped his suggestion with the following tongue-twister:

"Microsoft® WinFX™ Software Development Kit for Microsoft® Pre-Release Windows Operating System Code-Named "Longhorn", Beta 1 Web Setup"

This Microsoft product name weighs in at a whopping 134 characters, including two ®'s and one ™. A product name, in fact, that only a zombie branding manager could love! (All its friend — including Chris Sells and Mike Gunderloy — just call it the WinFX SDK)

Can anyone beat this? Is this really the longest Microsoft product name ever? And what's the longest (or silliest) Microsoft product name that you've had to suffer through?

I love the smell of a banhammer in the morning

jonathanh — Sun, 17 Jul 2005 19:50:00 GMT

It's no secret that there's been an increasing amount of cheating on Halo 2. Evidently when Bungie released the new downloadable maps they weren't far enough ahead in the developer-vs-cracker arms race, and modded versions started showing up on XBox Live that let cheaters move at Mach 1, get sniper auto-headshot kills of anyone visible, etcetera. Fun for n00bs, annoying as hell for grumpy old gamers like me.

Over on http://bungie.net/ they're promising great things for the forthcoming "auto-ban all crackers, cheaters, and modders" Halo 2 update, but in the meantime it's good to see that the current manual reporting method works. Let's take a quick look at what happened in the two games where I've seen (and reported) cheaters:

I had the misfortune to play with XxN1GTACULARxX in a team slayer game. Check out his game stats: 38 kills (including 32 headshots, 19 sniper kills, a kill frenzy and a couple of killtaculars) and only 2 deaths. Now if you look at his XBox Live stats you find... nothing. Oops, banned, seeya.
It's even worse when there are two cheaters on the opposing team — for instance, MoB Zero and BILLIEJOE11. From the game stats you can see that BILLIEJOE11 wasn't as effective a cheater as MoB Zero: only 15 kills (all headshots, of course), no killtaculars, and he died once. And now they're both banned — thanks, banhammer!

Here's how to report cheaters on Halo 2: email h2cheats@microsoft.com with this information. And then bookmark the stats page for your game, so that you can check up on it in a few days and see the punishment meted out to the offenders :)

The wheels of justice grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine...

Update: Bungie's patch is out today (7/20/05), according to Major Nelson.

Cultural change at Microsoft, or, "What was the point in keeping quiet?"

jonathanh — Wed, 06 Jul 2005 19:30:00 GMT

In an anonymous comment on “Patch for tcserver.exe memory leak on Tablet PC - at last!”, zzz asks:

What was the point in “keeping quiet”? Is there some kind of NDA that stops from stating the obvious thing (holy cow we have a bug in our perfect product!) that everyone knows about? You could have instead tried to work with the tablet pc community - as it seems that it otherwise takes media attention to give such bug some deserved attention.

This is a good question, and my reasoning probably deserves a wider audience than just a comment-reply, so here goes. There'll be a plea for feedback at the end :)

The Tablet PC community actually knew about the bug and the kill-two-processes-then-restart-one workaround back in May 2004 - see this link from Orlowski's original article. So I wasn't saying anything new, I was just saying it as a Microsoft employee. Despite/because of this, my post rapidly became the top Google hit for “tcserver.exe”.
No, there's no NDA, but there does seem to be a general unwritten rule that you don't pile on to bug reports about another team's product. If it had been my own team, or the Tablet PC team had been blogging back then, I'd have been much more aggressive. Instead I decided to work from the inside, rather than the outside.
If you break rule #2, you run the risk of getting unwelcome notice from the other team, journalists (and then our public relations people), and finally your boss. Sometimes this is worth it, sometimes it isn't, but ultimately it's a personal judgement call. I've skirted close a couple of times over the past year and figured my boss was losing patience with giving me political air cover, so I let this one slide...
Pre-announcing patches is almost always a bad idea, because they typically take longer to test than you first think. This definitely happened here. Do you think the anonymous spokesman who said this back in February is feeling good about himself?

“Progress is being made and there'll be an update soon,” a spokesman told us. “For now, we advise users to reboot the machine on a daily basis,” he added.
Finally, media attention does work as a forcing function in these situations. Media attention gets executive attention, which in turn percolates down and results in change priorities. It’s a fact of life.

Here endeth the self-justification. Am I happy about how long it took to get this fixed? No. Would I do it the same way again? No – but that’s because we have at least one Tablet PC tester blogging, and I could engage on his blog rather than going through “the usual channels”. Do I think I did the right thing at the time? Probably — at least if I wanted to keep blogging :)

What do my readers think? Should I have risked all back then? Pushed the Tablet PC team for greater transparency? Done so from the inside or the outside? In short, how do you make cultural change happen in your job?

If you think Microsoft uses silly product names, you're in good company

jonathanh — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 19:10:00 GMT

I've ranted before about Microsoft product names, so it's nice to see that I'm in good company:

CNET Interviewer: “You made a comment this morning poking fun at a Microsoft product name. Do you think Microsoft is good at marketing?”

Steve Ballmer: “Sometimes. Sometimes we're very good. Sometimes I get tired of hearing, oh, they're only good at marketing. The product was Windows Mobile Security and Messaging add-on pack, or something. Bleeeeeehhhh… Couldn't we have figured out a way to name that more simply?”

(for more insider takes on Microsoft product naming, check out Adi Oltean and Kevin Briody — for external opinions, Hugh “gapingvoid” Macleod gets a good rant going, but I still like crazyapplerumor's “Undead Focus Group Picks Names For Microsoft Technologies” best of all)

New Tablet PC feature on Channel 9 - ink-enabled posts!

jonathanh — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 08:24:00 GMT

Charles and the gang just showed off a new feature for the first birthday of the Channel 9 community site - readers can now post handwritten comments using a Tablet PC! Or a mouse, plus sufficient determination :-) Here's the first of many ink posts in that thread:

Ohhhh, I want Microsoft Forums for my product, too...

jonathanh — Fri, 08 Apr 2005 05:46:00 GMT

Jim Glass just announced Microsoft Forums, the next links in the Microsoft developer division’s “virtuous feedback loop”. The idea is pretty simple – “hey, why don’t we give our users web forums in which to talk, as well as newsgroups” – but Jim does a compelling job of explaining how this will help both Microsoft product groups and our customers.

I’m particularly jealous because I’ve just spent several days wrestling with the recalcitrant toolset we use to build and run beta programs and newsgroups on http://beta.microsoft.com. Non-intuitive interfaces, out-of-date documentation, unimplemented features – this thing is the poster-child for a typical line-of-business application. I’ve been trying to smooth off some of the more jagged edges so that our users won’t cut themselves too badly, but there’s only so much I can do to hide the beast lurking underneath.

If my manager is reading this, we really should switch to the developer division’s “Ladybug” system (aka http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/ProductFeedback/) as soon as possible :-)

Category feed URLs all changed - sorry

jonathanh — Tue, 05 Apr 2005 08:44:00 GMT

As Josh Ledgard and Brian Johnson have noted, the upgrade of blogs.msdn.com to Community Server 1.0 changed the URL format for all of our category feeds. If you were subscribed to any of my individual categories, those feeds are now failing with no redirects in place. Sorry :-(

Changing feeds with no redirection is probably one of the cardinal sins of blogging, and definitely wasn't supposed to happen. It's also the reason why you might not have seen any recent syndicated blog posts on the various microsoft.com community sites (since no-one told the blog registration tool about the new URL format either). Hopefully redirects will be in place tomorrow. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible…

New comment policy on this blog - thanks to Betsy and Scott!

jonathanh — Sun, 03 Apr 2005 07:07:00 GMT

Congrats to Betsy and her team on completing the second half of the March Blog Massacre: blogs.msdn.com is now happily ensconced on shinier servers running much shinier software (in case you missed it, the first half was the migration of some IT Pro-focused bloggers to blogs.technet.com).

I'm taking advantage of Community Server's new features to re-enable commenting on any post (not just the recent ones), and to only moderate anonymous comments (since Scott just fixed this for Cyrus). In other words, if you register with blogs.msdn.com, you should be able to post a comment and see it show up here immediately, rather than sitting in my inbox until I next log in and click on the "unmoderate" link.

The Ides of March - a bad time for bloggers

jonathanh — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 08:52:00 GMT

This has been a bad time for a couple of bloggers that I read. First Jeremy Wright was refused entry into the US by a customs agent who couldn’t believe that blogging is a paying job (and didn’t believe any of that newfangled Skype stuff, either). This is already kinda silly, since I showed Jeremy around Microsoft just last month, but the truly horrendous stuff is in the posts that Jeremy pulled. Let’s just say that they involved the customs agent getting wayyy more intimate than you’d expect in any reasonable encounter between consenting adults.

Now we learn that John Porcaro (aka Mr XBox Marketing) managed to blow himself up with the old “gasoline on the bonfire” trick. The pictures on his post are pretty icky, but to be truly grossed-out you have to watch the PhotoStory of pictures from his recovery. You can imagine his kids going “oh, COOOOL” as each new scar is revealed.

Best of luck to both you guys on your road back from these misfortunes. And to all the other bloggers who I read, let’s be careful out there, okay?

"Remember, February is a short month"

jonathanh — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 09:32:00 GMT

Not enough blogging this month - I've been getting back into coding. And, as those of you who read Channel 9 might have spotted, breaking the build. In fact, the dev team didn't even get their bagels for another week after that post, which shows just how behind I am!

I did manage to find time to hit the Microsoft Museum with Jeremy Wright when he was in town. Not only do they have free internet access (vitally important if you're negotiating a book deal), but they also have a kick-ass two-player Halo 2 room set up. Recommended for all weary travellers.

And just to show that I haven't forgotten the MOM and SMS community, I've added Fabrice Meillon (Windows system management en francais) and Chris Rees (SMS programmer writer) to my list of SMS and MOM bloggers over on the left of the page.

At this point I think I'm supposed to say "normal service will be resumed as soon as possible", but of course "as soon as possible" just means "the day after ZBB" :-)

“It’s the weirdest thing, but my thumbs are tired.”

jonathanh — Sat, 20 Nov 2004 23:21:00 GMT

No sooner did I mention Blogjet than Dmitry Chestnykh announced a new version. So if you're looking for a great WYSIWYG blogging tool, go grab the beta of version 1.2 from his downloads page. And this post isn't really about Halo 2 multiplayer tactics, it's actually a test of Blogjet's new auto-thumbnail feature, honest…

Anyway, back to the Halo 2 tactics, I mean Blogjet feature test. While it couldn't match my best game ever, a recent CTF game did help crystallize a couple of tactical thoughts. I'll use the gameviewer to illustrate these points, since it shows far more than the raw stats of a battle ever will. If you've never seen the gameviewer before, the icons and arrows mark all your victories and defeats on various parts of the map, while a timeline along the bottom of the screen shows when they occurred. It's easier to see the direction of the arrow (pointing towards the victim) and the weapon icon (showing the means of death) if you click on a picture to show the larger version. And yes, I'm TheEnglishman () in these stats. Jeremy W claims that he didn't know this before complaining about people calling themselves 'The "Englishman"', but I have my suspicions

#1: Nothing beats the shotgun for a headlong charge.

When you're outnumbered and in a confined space, the best defense is a good offense - a suicidal headlong charge with the shotgun. You charge because you want to get up-close-and-personal, and you need the shotgun because nothing else has the ability to do one-shot-one-kill time after time. Here I took out four opponents in quick succession in their own base, mostly before they knew what hit them. With any other weapon, I'd have had to do the dance-of-death with each of them in turn, losing valuable armor and taking even more valuable time. And it's suicidal because, hey, you're still outnumbered. In this case I went right past the flag, hesitated (first mistake), turned around, picked it up (second mistake - since I dropped the shotgun), and died. But that's ok, because the best bit was yet to come

#2: Flag carriers don't need escorts, they need protection.

Right after I died, one of my teammates picked up the flag and headed out from the enemy base on the left of the picture. The natural instinct in this situation, especially if pretty much everyone else has just died, is for players on both teams to run madly towards the flag carrier as soon as they respawn, picking up whatever weapons they can find along the way. My claim is that it's often better to fight this instinct and spend the time to get a good long-range weapon. In this case I manned the machine-gun turret at the base of the tower on the right, and you can see from the radiating lines what happened next - I mowed down seven members of the enemy team as they made a bee-line towards NUTTSO769 (really, where do they come up with these names?). He made it to our base intact, captured the flag, and sealed our victory 2-0!

"It's the weirdest thing, but my thumbs are tired."
UNSC Marine, talking to Master Chief in the midst of battle

Best. Halo 2. Game. Ever. (Until the next one)

jonathanh — Wed, 10 Nov 2004 11:28:00 GMT

This was one of those games where you immediately realize, based on long and hard-won knowledge, that you should quit right afterwards. Because that's as good as you're gonna get all night, and if you play even ONE MORE ROUND, you'll be there for hours trying to replicate the experience, and ultimately you'll go to bed disappointed and bleary-eyed, instead of endlessly reliving your moment of perfect gaming nirvana.

To set the scene: a large-teams multi-flag pickup game on Waterworks, the massive underground cavern map. I grab the rocket launcher at the start and wander off through the tunnels to see who I can pulverize. No-one stops me, so eventually I end up at their base. After seeing our assault team go round the back of the base, I waltz in the front, figuring that everyone else will be busy. There follows a particularly nice (and for me, very rare) triple-kill, and then I'm all alone, unless you count the small pieces of enemy splattered over the walls. What the heck, I pick up their flag and run out the back door.

Or more correctly stagger, since the flag slows you down. I hit the voice button and tell my team what I'm doing, expecting to be shot in the back at any moment. I veer towards the tunnels, still staggering, and plasma bolts start hitting the ground ahead of me. Shit shit shit, I'm gonna die. I even hear an enemy team-member calling out to his friends "I'm following him, he's right here!" Gotta love that proximity voice, but I'm SO dead. No, wait, wait, I've reached the tunnels, and the firing's stopped. What gives? I turn around, and he's flying a Banshee, and he's STUCK because it won't fit in the tunnels. Hahaha. I stagger on.

I'm still asking my team for support, but no-one else is talking. Out through the middle and into the open ground, the big scary and very EXPOSED open ground. Stagger stagger stagger. I start taking some distant machine-gun fire, and suddenly a big red splotch on my radar starts gaining on me rapidly from behind. I've now stopped asking my team for help, and I'm swearing at them instead. I hear a motor being gunned, make a big jump, and time it PERFECTLY. A Warthog on a collision course zooms beneath me and careers off, out of control and in search of other victims. Stagger stagger stagger. I've almost made it to the front door of my own base, walking the entire way! And there's a tank standing guard there! I'm saved! I'll be a hero!

BLAM.

I'm dead. They've parked THEIR freakin' tank outside our base. While waiting to respawn, I watch one of my worthless, non-talking teammates calmly walk under the nose of that tank, pick up the flag that I just brought back across the entire freakin' map with NO backup, and take it in to our base to score a point.

GAH.

Frustrated, I decide to give up on team play and just have some tankin' fun. Their tank is dead by this time, so I hop in ours and shoot up anyone and anything that approaches our base. The score remains at 1-0, until they bring their tank up again, kill me, steal our flag (using actual TEAMWORK), and tie the game. I hop back in the tank and play more defense, but now it's getting personal. One minute to go and I shoot BOTH approaching Banshees out of the air - yes, they'd stolen ours, but they both end up in little piles of wreckage in front of our base. I'm so in the zone that I decide to head off to their base to rampage a bit more. While I'm halfway across the map, both teams simultaneously grab the other team's flag, stopping the clock with a few seconds left. Damn!

So I park my tank outside THEIR base and wreak horrible revenge. Reduce THEIR nice line of parked vehicles to scrap metal. Blow up the poor slob on THEIR team who was trying to bring back our flag with no support. The flag flies through the air and lands just a little way outside their front door.

You can see what's coming next. I hose down the area with constant fire. Their entire team starts respawning, sprinting for the flag, and being blown away by my guns. The commentator who calls out "notable" kill levels runs out of new phrases after reaching "running RIOT!", and just start repeating that after every 5 kills. But things are getting frantic, they're learning to come out at different angles, I can't slew the turret fast enough, and they're getting closer and closer before I can nail them. Things don't look good for our hero. And then, after what seems like an eon of terrible carnage and no-one touching our flag, it teleports back to our base. Where our waiting flag-capturer promptly scores, winning the game for us 2-1. And I get the high-kill score. By a lot.

God, I rocked.

Uh oh

jonathanh — Mon, 11 Oct 2004 18:11:00 GMT

It's official - I'm a WikiGnome