Chrome OS And The Microsoft Squeeze - Reaction

What utter bs - until Chrome OS and Mac OS X are adopted by the enterprise, they are always going to be the outsiders looking in. Techcrunch writers really need to get their head screwed straight so they see the light. Or go to PDC...

AWS for Windows Developers

If you are:
1. A Windows developer
2. Curious about AWS
3. Using AWS services but want to manage your infrastructure

Get the AWS SDK for .NET Development :here:

Getting started with AWS is simple using the built-in Visual Studio templates, project samples and AWS reference documentation is integrated into Visual Studio (hit F1). Post a message to the AWS Windows development forum and tell us about your experience with the SDK.

The Yankees - 27th Title

Many will attribute this latest addition to the Yankees trophy collection to the 1/2 Billion dollar acquisitions they made in the summer. I think more than the money spent, there is something to be said about the new set of individuals playing like a team. The big stars didn't bring this to the fray; it's the National League players they acquired that imbued in the "jaded" Yankees a oneness of cause and lightened the atmosphere in the staid locker-room.

Even if I am wrong, I am so happy that the Yankees won it all this year. The best team in baseball deserved to win. Alex Rodriguez can stop going to the therapist now - he played like a champion, albeit a tainted one. Everyone in baseball has considered or used steroids; I am sure football players use HGH as well. Players are going to cheat and us fans are going to find out eventually. Let's stop being petty and let the games continue...

MSVCR100.dll was not found. Reinstalling ... (FIX)

Searching the web for how to fix this will frustrate you to death. The fix is to download the latest .NET SDK (4.0 in this case) and run the installer. Download the redistributable exe, not the web downloader.

Download Link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ded875c8-fe5e-4cc9-b973-2171b61fe982&displaylang=en#filelist

So much for the web, MSDN or Bing search on MSDN adding any value.

The Visual Studio Clipboard Ring

Here's a quasi-funny story. I didn't know C# when I worked at Microsoft, and oh god no I didn't use Visual Studio to write code at Microsoft either. ViM was my editor of choice at M$. Fast-forward to today; Amazon is paying me to build C# applications and libraries. I would use ViM to write C#, but VS 2008 is the cat's whiskers when it comes to .NET development.

With this being said, I do miss a ton of ViM features that aren't in Visual Studio. After what I learned today, I won't miss one - named buffers. To summarize the feature: if you need to preserve multiple items into the clipboard, do the following in command mode:
- select the text (Shift-V, Ctrl-V)
- pick a letter [A-Z] or a number [0-9] - say M
- type "My

To paste the contents of buffer 'M' in command mode, type: "Mp

The clipboard ring doesn't provide named buffers, but it remembers the last 15 items I copied, which is almost 90% of what I want. Here is how you use the feature:
1. Copy a selection using Ctrl-C (Copy).
2. Pressing Ctrl-V will paste the last item you copied.
3. Pressing Ctrl-Shift-V will also paste the last item in the clipboard. If you want to retrieve the second, or last item you inserted into the clipboard, simply keep pressing Ctrl-Shift-V to cycle through the items in the clipboard. Or just drag and drop any entry.

Q.E.D.

Sleep already Manoj!

In the last five weeks since my return from India, I feel like I have worked more than I did during the five months prior to my vacation. Each passing day brings with it a new challenge, a new hack is put in place, an old hack is reused, heads are scratched to find ways to not break existing users, and the entire team is getting progressively tired. There is still a lot to do, and though the next few weeks will be hell, there is light at the end of the tunnel. A few of the key moving pieces have fallen into place this past week, and if we meet our development targets for this week, we will be in even better shape to make our deadline. Aah, the week after we release is going to be a well-earned break from the madness. At Amazon though, such reprieves from a harried schedule are short (too short some would argue) - I don't underestimate my boss's ability to assign me to another under-staffed, high-visibility, high-risk task that needed to be done yesterday. I guess being busy is a virtue and a blessing in this economy.

It has been a little more than 17 months since I joined Amazon; forever the observer, here are some differences I have noticed between working at Microsoft and Amazon:

- Amazon adheres strictly to its dictum of "Frugality drives Innovation". The philosophy is so pervasive here that it has seemed to have an effect on people's behavioral patterns - they switch off lights, use CFL bulbs, are environmentally conscious and avoid waste wherever possible. Compare this to Microsoft where a casual walk through a corridor will reveal at least one office with multiple incandescent lamps glowing bright. Problem is, the line between frugality and inconvenience is a very thin one, and is often drawn wrong. For instance, getting a parking spot at Amazon requires jumping through so many hoops that I wonder whether the administrative overhead involved in reimbursing people for parking saves Amazon any money!

- The number of "friends" I have made at work can be counted on my fingers. Maybe it's where I am in life, maybe it's the people here, but I haven't formed a group of Amazonians I can hang out with after-hours. Most folks here go home to their other-half, go to the opera or the symphony or the theatre, usually have their activities planned weeks in advance... Such a sea change from my life on the East-side; gone are the days when we did things on the spur of the moment.

- Most Amazonians I have interacted with live on the West Side.

- The lack of a gym, like the Pro Club, affiliated with Amazon is a glaring omission from the benefits package. I miss The Pro - without it, I don't have social hour any more :(

- The average age of an Amazonian seems to be older than a Microsoftie's.

- After a certain amount of time passes, the politics and in-fighting is the same everywhere.

- I actually miss the Microsoft cafeterias. The soda - not so much, and the Starbucks coffee machines - not at all!

On to other things now. A few months ago, one of my closest friends left Seattle, a departure that left a gaping void in my life. You don't realize how dependent you have grown on a person until they are no longer around - even the most basic activity becomes more fun when you have someone to share it with. The abject loneliness struck me like a bolt of lightning during the first weeks upon my return from Bombay. I was sunk; my closest friends were more than a simple phone call away - some were married, others had left for new cities in new countries...

As I struggled to cope with the sudden changes in my surroundings, I got my first lucky break - a connection with a person I've known, if only in passing, since I was 16. Kapil and Prachie had moved to the Seattle area, their son Adi in tow, sometime this summer. New to the town, Kapil was looking for the same things as the weathered Seattle-local in me was: a person to trust, to play tennis with, to share stories from Bombay with. You know, reminisce about the good times, thereby making the present even more livable. Not a week has gone by since my return that we haven't hung out, and I haven't returned home the last two weekends because it's hard to tear myself away from Adi, the warmth of their home, and Prachie's bland-but-flavorful cooking. Unbeknown to them, these three are the accidental heroes of my recovery from the depths I had sunk to. I no longer feel alone here - I have people that care for me. It's one thing to feign positivity and happiness; the comfort of knowing that I have people has helped me find inner peace and happiness. Armed I feel, to take on the next challenge that comes my way.

The torrid Windows Mobile saga continues on

Trends in the Mobile Phone segment became required reading for me once I heard about Apple entering the fray. At one point I considered moving to the Windows Mobile team before better sense prevailed and my career took a different turn. To be fair, Microsoft used to be a contender in the Enterprise smartphone market a few years ago. Now that it isn't, it continues to shock me how Microsoft executives view the future of the segment, at how skewed their perceptions of user interactions with Mobile phones are, and how they continue to believe that Windows Mobile is what customers might want moving forward. Says Andrew Lees, Microsoft’s senior vice president for the Windows Mobile effort:

“Our value proposition is you can get your business and your consumer scenarios on the PC, and in a relevant way for you on the phone.”

Fact - there is no value proposition for WinMo customers presently.

So far, Microsoft has not been able to answer critics who say its operating system is old, slow and hard to use.

“Windows Mobile is simply dated, and that hasn’t changed in this release,” said Avi Greengart, research director for consumer devices at Current Analysis.

Indeed, a J. D. Power & Associates survey found that Windows Mobile had the lowest satisfaction rating among customers of any smartphone operating system. The iPhone has by far the most satisfying software, the study found. Android is a distant second, followed closely by BlackBerry’s operating system.

Windows Mobile scored below average on every attribute, said Kirk Parsons, director of the study, especially in ease of operation, speed and stability.

At least, Robbie Bach is willing to acknowledge that Microsoft should speed up its rate of innovation and think about customer scenarios more.

“You will see a speedy set of innovation for us in the next 6, 12, 24 months,” said Robert J. Bach, president of Microsoft’s entertainment and devices division at a news media event in New York to introduce a quick revision of the operating system called Windows Mobile 6.5. “Should we have picked up on the trends a little sooner? It’s hard not to say we should have,”he added.

Android’s supporters say that in contrast, Google’s software and the devices that run it are evolving very quickly.

I dare say, Windows Mobile needs an injection of Steven Sinofsky.