Michaeljon Miller

Learning as a family trait

mikemill — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:24:57 GMT

A few days ago a cousin of mine posted some pictures that I haven’t seen in years. They really got me thinking. The first one was a picture of my grandfather from around Christmas 1953 or so, they year “the twins” were born. The next was a picture of him in one of his many workshops, I think this one was in the basement of his house. The last one though, that one threw me for a loop.

Nearly every picture I’ve ever seen of my grandpa shows a man with a smile in his eyes. I think a lot of it was his philosophy. He was from that generation of men who likely didn’t finish school before they went out and started working. That was just the way things were. For a long time I thought that was strange. How could a guy with an 8th grade education do all the things he could do? But then he said something that made me take pause and think a bit. He said that the day he died would be the day he stopped learning.

On Sunday I was thinking about this again after I saw that third picture, and I started wondering if he’d actually said that the day he stopped learning would be the day he died. Yeah, there’s a really subtle difference there, and one that I had to think hard about. The difference, as I see it, is that one of them puts learning in a passive place, and the other in an active place. I believe that my grandpa took the active approach and always tried to learn something new every day. If you know me, you might recognize that trait. If you knew my grandpa, then you know where I got it.

That third picture. I don’t know the date it was taken, but from it’s location, and the lack of smile in his eyes, I can place it some time just before he passed away from complications of Alzheimer’s. I want to believe that he was still in there, still looking out, and still trying to learn. Damn, I miss him.

World Standards Day

mikemill — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:40:43 GMT

Yesterday was World Standards Day. Mark Ryland, one of the guys I work with on a regular basis, posted a great article yesterday talking about Microsoft’s position on standards and the smart grid. I sat in that same room (well there were several drab hotel rooms) and have to say, there’s a serious push to get standards in place for the grid NOW.

Microsoft Smart Energy Reference Architecture

mikemill — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:35:28 GMT

This crossed my desk today. These guys busted their butts to get this done and out. Congrats to the Utilities team.

Dear Power & Utilities Community:

We released the Microsoft Smart Energy Reference Architecture (SERA) on Tuesday and we hope you will familiarize yourself with its content and goals.

SERA establishes a vision and strong foundation for migrating power and utilities companies to the new infrastructure and services. SERA informs customers, partners and prospects about the Microsoft technologies that can serve as the basis for their development of the what we often call the integrated utility of the future. In this vision, the silos of utility business processes (generation, transmission, distribution and customer service) become integrated from an information access perspective to deal more effectively with the major disruptions changing the industry (growing demand, environment, government policies, zero carbon energy sources, etc..).

SERA supports our view that utilities will enjoy significant benefits by ever greater collaboration, especially as the Smart Energy Ecosystem evolves and requires the industry to integrate everyday business processes and regulatory compliance.

We have announced SERA on our blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/mspowerutilities

Seattle City Light is connected to Hohm

mikemill — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 02:11:51 GMT

I completely forgot to tell anyone. Seattle City Light has passed all of their Hohm integration certification tests and they’ve gone live. You can read the SCL press release here. Congratulations to SCL for being the first and for a job well done.

Hohm’s beta audience is US single-family households

mikemill — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 21:05:00 GMT

For now yes, Hohm is targeted at US single-family households. Sure, it’s possible to use it for multi-family homes, but some of the assumptions start to break down. Over time we’ll extend the models to support other countries. In the meantime, if you want to try out the site, the US models generally apply if you pick a zip code that climatically matches your own (and has comparable energy prices).

There is a known issue with browser language settings that we’re actively addressing as I write this and we expect to roll out a hotfix soon. To get around this problem you can simply switch your browser to use en-US as the default locale. And no, we don’t really think your annual energy costs are in the US $1b range. That’s a bug. It’s a beta.

If I might ask a favor as well – if you use the site, please send us your feedback via the feedback links. We’re still in beta and we’re listening to everything our customers are saying. Thanks.

[Edit 8 Jul 9:45am] We released a hotfix yesterday which should address the browser language setting. It was a mistake on our part and it was fixed. The huge energy cost problem, as one might imagine, was related to the language fix and shouldn't appear from now on.

[Edit 8 Jul 11:10am] Ok, so we didn't roll out the hotfix yesterday. We decided at the last minute to take one additional fix. I'll update when the us-EN assumption is fixed. Sorry.

Sitting in deployment – Microsoft Hohm goes live

mikemill — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 21:20:33 GMT

Other than a few minor DNS hiccups, Microsoft Hohm went live this morning. The team’s been sitting in a conference room on campus since about 5:30 this morning watching things spin up. We’re triaging other issues, but so far there have been no show-stopper bugs and no reason for any of the dev team to stay late tonight.

Way to go Hohm team. Considering this is the first major web application that most of the team has shipped, things went extremely well. More later.

Announcing Microsoft Hohm

mikemill — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 01:55:39 GMT

So, I haven’t been blogging much over the last year or so. But, there’s a reason. I couldn’t really talk much about what I’ve been working on. Turns out, starting today, I can. This morning we announced Microsoft Hohm. Once again I’m playing the role of architect of a Microsoft start-up. This one has been loads of fun because I’ve been getting a chance to play with a ton of new technology, have had an opportunity to do a mini-degree in Electrical Engineering, and learned more about energy production and consumption than I thought I’d even want to know.

We have a few final things to work out over the next few days, so go to our home page, add your email address, and watch this space for more about what we learn.

By the way, my home falls below the “efficient” home in my area, mainly because of all of the work I’ve done on it over the last few years. Where does yours fall?

Why are thermostats like a VCR?

mikemill — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 21:35:26 GMT

Actually, I don’t have an answer. For some reason thermostats still seem to follow a 1980s user paradigm. There are days where a simple T-50 (you know, the round thermostat) model would work tremendously better. I needed to change my thermostat settings, first to deal with the newer insulation and windows, and second to deal with out of town situations. Both changes require setting the “program” for multiple days.

My thermostat is powered by the 24VAC provided by the HVAC system and doesn’t use a battery backup. That’s pretty typical. But, it means that there isn’t an “armchair” programming mode, and that means I need to stand in front of the device running through an arcane sequence of key presses. Sure, after three or four cycles, assuming I want every day to be just like every other day (and I don’t, weekends are clearly different, but so are a few of the week days), my fingers get into a groove and I can just press Next Day, Program, Copy, Save. However, those buttons are in a criss cross pattern – a big X – and it’s unnatural feeling to press them given their placement. And if that groove gets interrupted, all bets are off.

There are days where I’m convinced I’m going to walk by the thermostat and see it flashing 12:00 at me in warm LED red. Really. I’m convinced of it. For those of you too young to remember VCRs, before DVD, before TiVo, before DVR, they were devices capable of recording your favorite TV shows as long as your either had a Ph.D in VCR programming or were sitting in front of the TV and pressed the Record button right when you were ready.

It wasn’t a pretty picture. And because it wasn’t a pretty picture, nobody could ever figure out how to set the clocks, so they always flashed 12:00. (And if you can’t figure out how to set the clock, you certainly can’t tell it to record Sunday’s football game.)

Yeah, I know, I can buy a remotely controlled thermostat, or one of those “armchair” models that lets me take the thing off the wall and program it from the comfort of my favorite chair (in better light, with a martini in hand). But, the remote control versions are really expensive or have some weird requirement to install software on my PC or take a “programming remote control” over to that same armchair. If the experience wasn’t so horrible the armchair model wouldn’t be bad, but it just moves the discomfort from the hallway to the chair. I would still need to do the criss cross thing.

I want to make my house comfortable, I want to save money, and I want to save the planet by using less energy. My thermostat has a big sticker on the box that says it’ll do that for me. I don’t believe it right now.

Temperature inversion

mikemill — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:18:25 GMT

Well, turns out doing a bunch of home “tightening” has some interesting effects on the climate in the house (and helped locate a few external leaks that were missed). My house is what’s called a tri-level. That is you enter on the main floor which has all the common living spaces, and can go up or down a half-flight of stairs to the bedrooms / office area or to the media room. Well, the rooms that used to be cold (defying logic and physics) were the upstairs (warm air is supposed to rise, right?) are now the warm rooms, and vice versa. So now the office and bedrooms upstairs are almost uncomfortably warm when the downstairs rooms are at a comfy 68°F. Turns out that the thermostat in our house is located near the stairs, but on the main floor. So, the main floor follows all the rules and seems cold when you walk down to it.

Sounds like it’s time to revisit the air return ducts (one at the top of the stairs and one downstairs in the media room) to see if they can be tweaked to move the right air at the right time. Or, time to figure out how to tweak the thermostat so it does the right thing. And no, my house is too small to have multiple zones (trust me, it’s small for the area, and small in general).

By the way, those external leaks were places where the old cable TV lines were pulled into rooms, but the siding wasn’t replaced during remodels we’ve been doing. There was an actual paper-moving draft in my kitchen a few days ago coming from between two upper cabinets. Yup, there was a hole on the outside wall right behind that. I still don’t know where the path is, but plugging the source helped.

It’s getting warmer in Bellevue?

mikemill — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:02:41 GMT

I’ve been paying attention to two different things about my house for the last year or so (while I’ve gone dark). The first is that it’s unusually cold in parts of the house, the house is showing its age, and the single-pane windows always seem to be wet. The second is that it costs me an arm and a leg to keep the house warm or cool depending on the time of the year.

So, last week I had a crew out to do an insulation check. Turns out that there really wasn’t any. The walls, except where we had remodeled, were empty (and cold to the touch), and the ceiling above the bedroom area had something like an R8. Oh yeah, and none of the knee walls – those vertical walls between living space and cold space, like in the attic – had insulation. None. Just drywall and paint between.

Step one was to fix that problem because it’s the least expensive, there’s an energy rebate available from my local energy provider (PSE), it’s quick, and it has immediate benefit. Yeah, immediate. The first night after having the new insulation blown into the attic and stuffed through little holes in the outside walls was uncomfortably warm.

The next step was to remove all those single-pane, aluminum framed windows with something that is energy efficient. We noticed that the rooms where we had already done windows – the living room, kitchen, and other main-floor spaces – had a very different feel to them already. No drafts, no damp windows, no uncomfortable spots.

Side benefit – the new windows are exactly the same size as the old windows, but the egress size was more than doubled, that means that in case of an emergency where we need to get out of the house ASAP we can easily do so without squeezing out of the old opening. Oh, and if we open the windows upstairs there’s a breeze now. Ah, fresh air.

I’m looking forward to seeing a few of my energy bills this winter to see what the bottom line looks like. I suspect that this will be a long term investment (about $12k worth) that will take a few years to pay back, but the impact on my family’s comfort and the environment is well worth it.

Call me a greenie cheapskate if you want. But this is one of those cases where spending (a lot of) money is well worth it.

I've decided that I finally really give up on stored procedures

mikemill — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 06:31:00 GMT

As much as I want to play the game and use stored procedures for data access logic, time and time again I run into yet anothe rissue where I get bit. I've always pushed back on developers who want to use stored procedures for any number of reasons. There's a great list of reasons here. This time it turns out not to be the usual reasons - this time it's much simpler: there's really no way to make the whole deployment story scale in any way. As soon as you have more than one database (i.e. a multi-tenant application hitting a "private" database) you WILL run into a problem when you need to fix the always present data access bug.

Ugh... why can't I have a single place where I can put all my data access logic? Like, maybe, just maybe, a shared database holding no structure, only proc definitions? Or, maybe a DLL. Yeah, that'll do it, I'll use a DLL with dynamic SQL.

Too funny

mikemill — Fri, 30 May 2008 01:29:00 GMT

Yeah, yeah, I've been really quiet for a really long time. I know. I'm sorry. But, I've been busy with my new venture in MSR. I can't talk about much of it right now, even our internal email messages go through DRM. Let's just say that I've been having fun with hardware (ya know, soldering and stuff), embedded systems (not CE), and lots of toys.

Anyway, the point of popping my head up is to try to figure out why the sudden increase in CRM-related traffic into my inbox. Seriously, it's like I started over or started posting a bunch of interesting things about CRM. It's been a long time - I left when we were just thinking about what CRM V4.0 was going to look like under the covers (and it even looks like I thought it might). But nothing since then. Anyone else have any idea why I'm suddenly popular again?

I'll post a lot more information about my new project in the coming months and may even start posting stuff about the group I belong to independent of that.

GP's been drinking the Kool-aid again

mikemill — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 02:19:00 GMT

I really respect GP's opinions on a lot of SaaS-related issues, but this one might be pushing my boundaries a little bit. GP is starting to confuse a rich client experience sitting on some "free" cloud storage as an S+S story. I don't know about this. It's a very small step from storing a document on a file server somewhere, anywhere. The only difference is that the "save" API used is slightly different.

Now, if something happened to GP's document once it was stored, or even better, while he was editing it. And that something happened because GP had signed up for a cloud-based service that added value to the client, then I'd have to say have another sip. But, this is not what I think of when I think of S+S (disclosure: I'm not part of the DPE organization that truly believes in S+S and I'm no longer part of the MBS organization that wanted to believe in S+S).

The "light-up" scenario just doesn't cut it for me. I want SaaS - either the stuff runs in the cloud and that's my primary interaction point, or the cloud is completely indispensible like in IM, or we finally start building service-oriented applications where stuff just runs and the fabric figures out where things happen. But, saving an Office document to a SharePoint site? Not so SaaS.

Not surprising, but I have nothing to say

mikemill — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 21:49:00 GMT

It's not going to come as a surprise to anyone who used to read my blog and has noticed that it's been very quite. I realized that I really have nothing to say when I'm not working on a project that I can say nothing about. I have been working on a few interesting projects over the last two years, but neither one is something that I can publicly discuss. I've found that makes keeping my blog current particularly difficult.

I'll try to keep writing here as I move on to my next project - which is again extremely MSFT-only at this point. Hopefully I can find a way to talk about the different ways we're solving general problems in the space without giving away what it is there we're actually going to work on. How's that for promising and saying nothing.

Wow, just sitting here trying to explain why I have nothing to say is hard. I wonder what's happened that I'm gotten quiet. Weird...

SaaS: Collaboration

mikemill — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 02:00:00 GMT

Yesterday I set the stage for the 5Cs of Saas: collaboration, community, connectedness, completeness, and changeability. Today I'm going to focus on collaboration in SaaS. As I mentioned yesterday our team found, through customer interviews and research, that a motivating factor - one of the primary factors - for SaaS purchases is to allow seamless collaboration between parties in arbitrary (but well-defined) roles.

Well, what exactly does this mean? From our perspective it means that an actor using the software has full, role-specific privileges and experiences directly within the software. That is, there's no concept of a "portal" or any other external "connector" to the software. It also means that the provisioning of that experience is seamless to the actor doing the provisioning.

An example here might help explain this. Let's say we have a customer support representative using a customer service application. This person receives a phone call or other trigger causing them to describe a customer to the application. Now, in a typical application, this means that there's a user, the customer service representative, and a customer. These two concepts are typically quite distinct in their semantics. The user has access to the application and, by definition, can use it. The customer is a data point somewhere in the application represented by a row in a database, but has been granted no additional rights.

In a collaborative world this model breaks down. There's a distinct difference in the caste model: in some way the user is a higher caste entity than the customer. The user can create new data items and fully interact in business processes. The customer is disconnected from the application and may be able to "interact" via some external connector (for example receipt of an email message or a message exchange).

What we found was that our customers want us to remove this divide. They want to see the customer as a first-class, privileged actor in the application. But, and this is important, they do not want the customer to be a user in the application in a way that either uses a license or requires a specific provisioning step. As you might see we have a bit of a dilemma here. Most business software written to date enforces this divide. We can't use the existing models.

What can we do about this? Well, we could fake it and create an additional layer on top of the business application which provides some level of interaction for the customer. But, this means that any customization that takes place in the core application must be duplicated in this additional layer. It's not only that, but any business logic or business process which is enacted in the core application must be augmented so that it explicitly takes this additional layer into account; and this business logic must typically be duplicated, often in a different way, in the additional layer. This doesn't sound like a good thing.

What customers want is a single application, with defined identities, playing well-understood roles to collaborate around a given business process. Additional layers only mean additional work. That is, customers want to treat their partners as if they are first class citizens in the business process.