load of tosh

My dev lead Jim has a nice history of OWA on the Exchange blog.  He talks a bit about the early versions of OWA and describes how XMLHTTP came into being for the Exchange 2000 release and how it came to be installed with IE.  Neat little piece of internet history.

http://blogs.technet.com/exchange/archive/2005/06/21/406646.aspx

I noticed today as I was trying to work out why I was unable to log in to my work blog, that this day two years ago was when I made my first blog entry.  After one year I made an entry about what I thought of the blogging phenomenon after a year of trying to understand it.  I'll give my thoughts after two years now.

I read fewer blogs these days than a year ago, although I am subscribed to many more - 56 at last count.  This is still nowhere close to the hundreds that some people read.  It's easy to subscribe and never check back, but my agg. keeps pulling them down.  That said there are a few consumer blogs and personal blogs that I read regularly and expect to continue to do so.  I also write fewer entries than a year ago.  Certainly part of this is due to having less free time being a parent now.  There are some "blogs" that I just prefer to read in a web browser.  I think this was the same a year ago.

I produce atom and rss feeds for various personal web sites - hoops, baby page, and at least one of my family members has subscribed to the baby's feed.  I have written code for my sites to consume feeds exposed by other sources.  Hurray for RSS and XML. 

The term "blogosphere" is very common.  CNN has a television show of people reporting what other people write on their blogs.  The Daily Show had a bit making fun of CNN's show.  My non-technical mom knows what a blog is now.  This is probably a result of me, but no doubt she's heard it from other places.

I am convinced that you can make money from blogging.  Just look at Calacanis' and Denton's operations.  At this point, I think consumer oriented weblogs are a legitimate media form definitely capable of producing ad revenue.

I still use a standalone desktop aggregator, although I have an account with a web based aggregator.

I expect the popularity of blogging and the use of such terms in media to lessen or just fade into the background in the next year or so.  People will point to this proving blogging as a fad, but it will not go away.  I expect it will be less distinct from regular web based "columns" than it is today.  These days you see the blogs of staff writers on many sites, msnbc, news.com, nba.com, etc.  The only difference  between a blog and a column imo is trendiness.
 
 

There are a couple new TechNet articles on customizing Outlook Web Access.  These are two months old now, but given that I haven't posted in some four months, I'll consider them "new".  In any case, they deal with creating custom UI themes and changing the appearance of the logon page.  Sometimes our development team is forwarded screenshots of the OWA UI after it's been changed by customers and many of them are really fantastic looking.  If you're interested in giving OWA a look that is customized for your org you should have a look here:

• Creating and Deploying Outlook Web Access Themes
• Customizing the Outlook Web Access Logon Page

Thanks goes out to Don Mace for his work with these!

My former intern Albert has finished his metronome project that uses DirectSound and talks about some of the issues he hit on his MSN Space -- The Groove Yard.

It Works! Creating streaming, live audio is sorta easy! This opens the doors for all kinds of projects…(audio synth? Audio sampler?).

Hey Omar, regarding this entry...  Your comments are closed so I thought I'd let the trackback do the talking.  I just wanted to say I have been bitten by this kind of thing before as well.  This would work too.

get
{
return DateUtc.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture) + ".dayfeedback.xml";
}

I think thinking about incorporating forums into my pickup sports sites - InfiniteHoops.com and InfiniteSoccer.com - and although I am tempted to write my own forum code, the fact is I have so little time and this is something I think there are several implementations in .NET already.  Anybody using a .NET forum control or app that they like and would recommend?  Let me know.  Thanks. - T -

Since the US beta launch of MSN Spaces, I made up my mind to focus more random interests posts to my space and leave this one for posts focusing on Outlook Web Access, .NET or general programming.  More eclectic posts like those on best Seattle mochas, robots, hoops and various opinions on industry happenings will be on my space.  Feel free to subscribe as that's what this blog thing is all about.  I enjoy looking through referrer logs and links left in comments by the people reading my stuff.  I don't plan on cross-posting or migrating old content.  This change will just be for future posts.

Monday I received an e-mail from James Buchanan asking what is the query-string parameter to bring up a monthly calendar view in Outlook Web Access.  Actually, I am starting to get a lot of emails from people asking about this or that, which is great and I am happy to help when I can.  I'll do my best to get back to your guys if I can help, but of course, I still have to write new code, which may make it impossible for me to get back to everybody.  Funnily enough, I just received another email from the blog as I write this.  This time it's just blog spam.  Great.  Where was I?

Right.  James asks it is possible to bring up a calendar folder in the monthly view.  The answer is yes.  Your URL will look something like:

.../Calendar?cmd=contents&view=monthly

Additionally, you can specify the weekly view like this:

.../Calendar?cmd=contents&view=weekly

The view param is case-sensitive so anything but "monthly" and "weekly" will give you the daily view.

Thanks James.

As you know OWA's UI or display language is determined by the Accept-Language HTTP header sent up by the browser on each request.  This is controlled by a value set in Tools / Options / Languages...  Now there are times when an OWA administrator might wish to override the language requested and return something else.  One way to do this (if you have access to your front-end box) is to create an ISAPI filter which re-sets the Accept Language.  This is described in the following KB (knowledge base) article. 

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;310599&sd=tech

(Thanks to Stuart Fox for the pointer)

The Exchange Content Engineering team (including a couple of characters I've been known to hit the espresso stand with) along with various other folks have released a revamped Exchange TechCenter on microsoft.com as a portal for finding technical information on our software.  There's lots of good info up there if you're looking for more help or considering a upgrade or move to Exchange.  Also as the Exchange blog was one of the first product blogs at MS there's naturally an RSS feed of recent downloads such as Exchange 2003 SP1 and various KB articles and tools.  If you run Exchange and use an aggregator feel free to subscribe.

So, today the sphere is all a buzz with the US launch of MSN Spaces.  I am psyched that the Japanese beta of Spaces I had associated with my Passport automatically converted to English with the launch.  Now I can read and customize it.  I guess Scoble will be photo sharing with Flickr.  Not me.  My moblog is moving to Spaces.

http://spaces.msn.com/members/toshm

Subscribe now for moblog pictures of the Kirkland 24hr Starbucks drive-thru!

http://spaces.msn.com/members/toshm/feed.rss

This is from January, but it's making the rounds again.  Here's a listing of .NET Framework equivalents of the Win32 API.  Highly useful to some.  Historically interesting as well.

"Publisher: 'Blog' No. 1 word of the year"

No kidding.  The word has entered mainstream consciousness like never before.  No doubt Howard Dean was the impetus.  People have been waiting for weblogging to reach a critical mass and perhaps after this election season with masses of political bloggers, candidate blogs and even war bloggers, it's finally here.  I wonder if my mom knows the word.  Does yours?

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/11/30/words.of.the.year.reut/index.html