I know - platfrom folks shouldn't do code. But yesterday I wrote my first "proper" program in nearly 2 years. My university lecturers would hate me to call VB "proper" programming: but although I've done a some scripting I haven't written anything with a user interface since writing a little Smartphone App back in '04. Not only do I feel rusty, but I thought I'd try VB Express  for the first time

After reading the RSS team Blog I wanted to see how easy it was to use the API for RSS,  that is enabled by IE7. How difficult would it be to code with an updated language, and programming environment, and a new API ?  Astonishingly easy as it turned out. After 3 hours work I had a tool which will

• Show your feeds and downloaded items in a tree view with unread items in bold (22 lines)
• Shows item selected in the tree with its image, time stamp, and links to it and its feed (20 lines)
• Let you mark the selected item as read or delete it (35 lines)
• Resize properly (5 lines)

So anyone who writes RSS software or wants to - leave the subscribing and downloading to IE, and get on and write something great on top of it. Newsgator's CTO already gets this

Regular readers (if I have any) will know that RSS is one of my interests. So I noticed Robert Scoble’s post “Windows Media 11’s lack of Podcasting gets noticed” which in turn followed up a post on Geek News Central

For background:

• Podcasts are just RSS feeds with Enclosures.
• Internet Explorer handles finding and downloading RSS feeds including Podcasts
• Applications – certainly Microsoft ones – should use the IE service and NOT implement their own RSS
• To look at Windows Media Player, it appears that the Windows media Team have never heard of podcasts.

So how do you get a Podcast into WMP 11 ?

1. In Internet Explorer 7: Find and subscribe to your podcast..
2. Still in IE, click the "Favourites Center" (Gold star) button, select "feeds", and right click your podcast feed and choose "properties"
3. In the feed properties make sure the “Automatically download attached files” option is checked. If have to check it you may also need to refresh the feed at this point. You may also want to limit the number of stored files.
4. Click the “View files” button, a file explorer window will open. Copy the path from the file explorer
5. In Media player, click “Library”, the “add to Library”. Press “Add” and paste the path you just copied. Hey presto. Media player now has your podcast

If your feed is pictures then you can choose the photos screen saver and paste the path in there too.

By the way, this 5 line VBS script is all that is needed to get a list of feeds and their folders.

Dim rssMgr
Set rssMgr = CreateObject("microsoft.FeedsManager")
For Each rssfeed In rssMgr.RootFolder.Feeds
   If rssfeed.DownloadEnclosuresAutomatically then _
      wscript.echo rssfeed.Name & "is stored in " & rssfeed.LocalEnclosurePath
Next

I guess people who worked for Microsoft a few years ago must have some idea what it's like to be Google right now. A huge market share means people want to criticize you, you seek solace by  watching your stock price, but that only makes you worry that the whole thing is built on sand and someone could sweep it away at any moment. 

A few days ago,  I mentioned the search box in IE7, and it seems Google is worried about it (the search box, not my blog post.) And Robert Scoble points out that lots of people are blogging about that.

According to a piece in the New York Times,
Google, which only recently began beefing up its lobbying efforts in Washington, says it expressed concerns about competition in the Web search business in recent talks with the Justice Department and the European Commission, both of which have brought previous antitrust actions against Microsoft. 
You have to wonder if Google is aware of its the extent of its dominance in the web search business - because this would colour the views of the regulators. Since they are sponsoring the adoption of Firefox - which has search for highlighted text hard coded to Google - there are tough questions which they could be asked: one of the bloggers has a few And if Google's search is so good, another wonders what they are worrying about.
This complaint also says a lot about Google's confidence in its customer/brand loyalty -- if Google is worried about people dumping it for MSN Search because it's not worth the extra effort to click twice in IE7 to change the default search setting, perhaps Google fears it really does have a one-click brand loyalty problem

Maybe they've compared the Windows Live powered search on A9.Com  and think that (unlike today's MSN search) no-one will switch to them from the new search…. Whatever, the IE team have been at pains to point out that "the search box in IE7 is not Microsoft’s. It belongs to the user". The search box is managed with   Opensearch XML descriptions of how search engines accept queries: here's an example.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> 
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns=http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
<ShortName>Google</ShortName> 
<Description>Google Web Search</Description> 
<Url type="text/html"
    template="http://www.google.com/search?q={searchTerms}
      &rls=com.microsoft:{language}
      &ie={inputEncoding}&oe={outputEncoding}
      &startIndex={startIndex?}&startPage={startPage}" /> 
</OpenSearchDescription>

<a Href="#" onClick="window.external.AddSearchProvider(&quot;URL of XML file &quot;);">
Click to here add our search
</a>

Here are the clicks to open the Microsoft providers library and make Google your default search engine. (I copied XML and the code from there).

Google could put this on their home page in 5 minutes flat. 
 
But there is a second thing which OpenSearch enables, which I found in Erik Porter's blog : If you put a link tag into a page  - like you would for a style sheet, icon, or RSS feed - then you can have a page specific search. Instead of users hunting for "search this site", it's on the same pull down as search this page and search the web. Wouldn't it be great of users had a consistent way to find a site's search ? Of course some people would be bound to complain about that too.

One of the nice things about the new job is I get to walk round and bump into people I haven't spoken to for ages. Sharon left Microsoft a few months ago, and was sitting in the coffee bar when I walked by on Thursday. Her web-site is called "joining dots" because she brings ideas together to "make sense of emerging trends and understand their potential.". She has an interesting blog too - this piece on instant messaging is a must read - partly because of the way it brings ideas together. I like to weave themes together as well, this post is an example of that.

My daughter's school is trying to encourage people NOT to drive right up to the gates, and instead park in a pub car park 400 yards away "to be kind to the environment". If I driving 3/4 mile to the pub, drop my daughter at school and then drive 40 miles to the office, it makes very little difference if we walking 400 yards or not. It's walk the full mile from home to school or park at the gates. So on Friday we did the walk, and enjoyed it.

Microsoft is about to build another building here in the UK - part of the information that has been circulated internally  was an energy assessment done on the existing buildings by the Carbon Trust. Although the details of the report are confidential, what amazed me was the heating bill per unit area for these modern buildings is much higher than my house - which was built about 150 years earlier.
I forgot all about it until I read something on Sharon's site which said 50% of carbon emissions come from the work place, 23% from travel (20% from cars and 3% flights) and the rest from homes.

Wouldn't it be better to use less office space by working from home more ? It's good to see the people you work with, but seeing them on 5 days of a week is NOT 25% better than seeing them on 4, or 66% better than seeing them on 3. Having only a proportion of people in the office - and sharing the space among them with compact "Hot desks" is environmentally good, even though I've said hot-desking is the only thing I dislike about the working environment at Microsoft. Still, I'm sure that it's postponed the need for a new building. 
I can save a lot of travel too: my car is 50% more efficient than the one I had 6 years ago but even so, saving one trip per week to the office will save roughly a ton of C02 over a year (and about 2 working weeks worth of time spent in the car).

So I'm, going to try to have a car free day per week - Mondays preferred. I'll walk my daughter to school, and work from home, and today is the first of these days.
I'll try to collect ideas together about how technology helps (or hinders), and post them here. Things like the use of Outlook or Communicator without VPNs, Groove and so on. It doesn't matter where we are if we have good collaboration software. And collaboration software was Sharon's interest when she worked here. That's joined a few dots of my own.

It was a pleasant surprise to get a mention from Robert Scoble, for my "RSS in 90 lines of code", and the I'm pleased to announce that it is available for download.  Before give you the link, please be aware that

• Only the source code is included, you need Visual Basic 2005 (or express edition) to compile it. There is very little in the way of error checking and coments.
• This  is sample code:  Any use you make of it is at your own risk
• I do not code professionally, as a sample, it shows how things might be done, not necessarily how they should be done.
• Microsoft’s copyrights in the code are licensed to you under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License (version 2.5).  To view a copy of this license, please visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/.  

If you would like a copy of the code AND you are happy with these conditions, right click here and choose save targets as.

I want an Xbox 360. Someone gave me an original Xbox and the games still impresses me. When I got the Xbox I already had a cable TV decoder, VCR, and DVD player lashed into the back of the TV. I gave the DVD player to my Dad because the Xbox did that job. But it's not a pretty piece of furniture and it's noisy. The 360 is better in that regard, wireless controllers are tidier, and it's ability to display photos, play music and so on makes gives it greater "lounge appeal".

Part of the 360's advantage is high definition pictures - so a few weeks ago I replaced my 16-year old TV with a widescreen TFT one. The new TV supports DVB-T - "Freeview" to anyone in Britain, which means farewell cable decoder (and £20 a month saved). But I can't tape digital stations; and my 16-year old VCR isn't widescreen either, I need to play my old tapes, but it's time to find a new recording solution

Windows Vista does away with a Media Centre edition, "Ultimate" and "Home Premium"  include Windows Media Centre as an application. The Xbox 360 can act as a media extender, so you don't need a PC under the TV. I think that's ideal: with a TV decoder and Vista on the PC in my study, it can be a big store for music, photos and recorded videos.  Except: that PC is old and underspecified for the job. So I need a new PC, maybe even a 64-bit one, and no doubt the monitor will be replaced at the same time. I learnt about backup the hard way, and with more storage my backup system will need a re-think too.

Vista is going to solve another problem for me. I have something like 15,000 digital photos, and little by little I'm digitizing my way through 20 years of film. No filing system I've found works. Back in 2002 when I was a Sharepoint Portal Server Guru, I summarized what I had learnt amount managing thousands of documents in "The Taxonomy ten commandments", the last of which was: Readers will find documents by browsing categories or by searching. If readers are exposed to your folder hierarchy you are doing it wrong! The things that applied to documents in Sharepoint then apply to photographs on my hard disk now. Category driven search folders in SPS have given way to Tag driven ones in Vista - and Vista's are much easier to use.
For example: I have hundreds of photos of my daughter and her friends. If I tag pictures with the names of people in them, then two clicks "stacks" my pictures by tags, each tag becomes a search folder - all the pictures of a particular friend are in one place.. two more clicks burns those pictures to CD. Further, the tags are  EXIF fields just like technical details of a TIFF or JPEG. If someone looks at the CD in 20 years time, they can see who else is the picture and when it was taken: I wish I had that for all my old negatives.

Trying to get control over all this content, causes some other headaches. My wife's music is in Apple's AAC format for her ipod - mine is in WMA for everything else. It seems we need to stick to MP3 as the only common denominator. Formats are a nuisance, even without DRM, or   Content, Restriction, Annulment, and Protection as  zdnet calls it http://news.zdnet.com/2036-2_22-6035707.html . DRM'd files either work on Windows media player (including mobile), or on the ipod, but not both, plug the iPOD into the Xbox 360 and it will play

 [Rhetorical question] Our server folks think about the customer who has some Unix/Linux as well as Windows.  For Vista I wonder if our media folks have considered households like mine with both an iPod and a Windows mobile device ? Media sync is broken in the interim build of Vista I have at the moment, so I can't check.

I hope to avoid wiring a TV aerial connection for the PC - it is difficult  to wire anything in the old house where I live. For that reason, I use 802.11b to provide internet connections to laptops, desktop, and Xbox. I've had it since the summer of 2000, when I imported my own Linksys box from the US. I noticed that Linksys's free-standing Media extender supports only 802.11A or G variants, so my 11Mbit/sec network may be too slow and need upgrading.

I can't help feeling something's gone wrong here.  I wanted a new HDTV games console. So I've upgraded to an HD TV screen, which caused me to change my digital TV provider, which in turn has made look at changing how I record TV, to do that I'll be replacing my OS, which means changing the PC hardware. To make it all work may mean reformatting all stored music, going back and tagging photos and revamping my wireless networking. And the one thing that's staying ? the 16 year old VCR because I still need to play old tapes. Maybe with Vista I will finally digitize them.

The following dates from 2002 when I was working a with Sharepoint Portal Server 2001. We used to talk a lot about meta-data (data about the data - file properties) and Taxonomy - the method we use to classify documents. I came up with a Taxonomy Ten Commandments to make Sharepoint document stores work. Looking at the way Vista uses meta data in its search, I've been thinking about this again - and I've mentioned it in passing in a couple of presentations. And a customer at last night's presentation asked if I would share the full thing. 

Some of the points don't carry forward to vista (like the question of making authors choose a profile for their documents) but the key points of gathering data, and breaking the dependency on folders and file name as the way to find things are important.

I’ve distilled what I’ve learnt about this subject in these basic rules:

1. Gather useful meta-data. The meta-rule is "It’s all about gathering and using meta-data".
2. Do not add any field to a profile unless you are sure it will be useful. Authors want to write their documents, save them and get on with the next job: generally they do not want to spend time entering lots of profile fields. Remember that you need their co-operation.
3. It is better to search for unique information in the document body than in a meta-data field. For example, getting the author to enter a serial number field allows readers to search for documents with that serial number. But in reality they will probably do a free text search for it, not a property search. The free text search has the side effect of cross referencing documents e.g. a search for DOC71077345 turns up a document which contains "This document supersedes DOC71077345".
4. Store data in the data, not in the field name. Do not create a long list of properties with yes/no answers. Not only is this awkward for users, but the sequence “Relates to product A, Relates to product B” stores Yes and No as the data. A multi select box “Relates to products...” stores the information where you can search it.
5. The most important meta-data items are Title, Categories and Description: put these first in your profiles; other fields are a bonus. From a pure SPS point of view: if readers won't use it in a property search, then don't ask authors to enter it. SPS‑based applications can be exceptions to this, but generally see rule 1 and rule 2: don't burden authors with requests for information that readers won't use.
6.  Authors should ALWAYS set a meaningful title: if a document has a short abstract at the start, then authors can (and should) copy and paste it into the description. Remember that the results of a search or category browse show the document title and description. Readers won't open a document to find out if is useful.
7. Ensure that authors understand the importance of title and description. Yes we know people don't want to fill in properties in word, but remember that Sharepoint gives extra weight to words it finds in the title and description – a document with these filled in will come nearer the top in searches where they it is relevant.
8. Where authors have to make choices make them easy:
    a. Don't make lots of similar profiles e.g. If you deal with software specifications, don’t create profiles called, User interface Spec, Database spec, Search spec, etc: instead use "Specification" with an "area" field with these choices,
    b. Don't make very fine grain categories (e.g. I use "Windows" and not Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT Server, Windows NT Workstation, Windows 2000 Pro... etc. A document for Windows 2000 might well apply to XP, and to Pro, Server etc. Authors would be unlikely to file their documents correctly and the categories would go out of date. I use a “product version” field to qualify them).
9. Remember folders are for the benefit of authors and administrators, not for readers. You only need to create new folders for different security, different approval, and different document profiles. You will want other folders for authors' convenience. If you find you've got lots of folders you're probably using the folder path to imply something about the content of the document which should be in the meta-data.
10. Readers will find documents by browsing categories or by searching. If readers are exposed to your folder hierarchy you are doing it wrong!

Microsoft is a better place to work than it was last week.

I was out of the country on Friday. My phone downloaded the start of a long mail from Lisa Brummel – who I mentioned recently: A mail from a major name saying he was excited by Lisa’s mail, made it “Read NOW!” instead of “Read, eventually”. It takes something big for me to go “YES!” and throw my phone in the air when I’m in a customer’s building. That hoopy Lisa Brummel has only gone and got rid of the worst thing about working here: The Bell Curve

Mini-Microsoft feels like “Drawing hearts around her name” and Robert Scoble loved the changes (when he could say more than “Wow”). To quote the Seattle Times

The changes likely to have the biggest impact involve evaluation and compensation practices.The existing system doles out bonuses and promotions based largely on a controversial numerical rating scale. The number of employees who can receive a top score is fixed, sometimes forcing managers to give a lower score to a worker even though he or she might have performed at the same level as a peer.

Until Thursday Microsoft insisted that staff performances fitted a normal distribution. Other companies believe this myth of mis-applied science - that everything fits a normal curve. It doesn’t – not if you recruit the best people (and Microsoft does – new starters are often overwhelmed with the calibre of people.). If you do get a Bell Curve you’re failing. Why ? Let me draw you a picture.

The diagram on the left shows a Bell Curve for how the whole population would perform in a job: number of people is shown on the y axis, and performance on the x axis, 100% fall under the Green curve. If we recruit from top 10%, we’d get 100% under the red-curve – which is just part of the green one, stretched The actual performance people are supposed to deliver, is added in blue on the diagram on the right. The best possible performance is fixed, but the big spike in the “potential performance” (red) has been turned into lower performers (that’s the two shaded areas). There are 3 explanations for this

• We didn't recruit the people we thought
• Our environment means about a quarter of people aren't delivering their full potential.
• The basis of the grading system is wrong,.

Previously, there was a distrusted and secret process where people were “stack ranked” (so helping others wasn’t in your best interests) . My previous manager sent his team a link to “Stack Ranking as a popularity contest”. Once ordered, grading forced the number of each grade in each group to match the Bell Curve - some people had to be doing well, the same number had to doing equally badly. Microsoft made $250,000 profit before tax per employee last year, how could 1/3 of our people be lousy ? THEY WEREN’T But the Bell Curve said they were. Common sense said some groups would have a greater proportion of “stars” the Bell Curve said they couldn’t

As a friend who runs European IT for another large American company who use the Bell Curve put it: “If a third of my people are turning in poor performances, why have I kept them? It’s just as well that every manager has the same number, otherwise I’d deserve to be fired”

The Bell Curve wasn’t enough to walk away from a job at Microsoft – though it would count against any company wanting to tempt me away. Even those who benefitted from it couldn’t make a case for it. How could we let it go on and still hold our values like taking on big challenges, openness, integrity, commitment to constructive criticism and self improvement ? A few railed against it, but most believed it couldn’t be changed, so said nothing, did nothing: proof that negative thinking is more potent than positive thinking, because it stops the possible from happening.

I mentioned I did a spring clean of my documents. Among them I found “True communication is possible only between equals, because inferiors are more consistently rewarded for telling their superiors pleasant lies than for telling the truth." There was a widespread assumption that no-one would tell Steve Ballmer that this needed to change. I also found some stuff entitled “Colin Powell on Leadership”, which contains some corkers such as "Never let your ego get so close to your position that when your position goes, your ego goes with it." Some aasumed Steve had too much invested in the Bell Curve to accept change.
I was introduced Thomas Kuhn’s “The structure of scientific revolutions”. last summer via William Leith’s book “The Hungry years” when it was book of the week on BBC Radio 4. It is about his experience of the Atkins diet; and he refers  to Kuhn's idea that revolutions in thinking come from outsiders – Atkins was a cardiologist, not a dietician: people inside a comminity cling on to old assumptions. Lisa’s Channel 9 video explains that her first job in HR was to be head of it at Microsoft, at Steve Ballmer’s instance...did he put an outsider in because he saw we needed a revolution ?

On the flight home I made a list of 5 great things about this announcement - In descending order:

1. Values. It proves they’re not just a puff piece, We do prefer the route which aids integrity. We do look for improvements. And we do take on big challenges.
   We shouldn't assume that the person who prefers the hard truth to the easy lie can't end up at the top of the company.
2. Demonstrable Fairness. Some people stay out of management to avoid handing out unfair grades with “there weren’t enough arguments to stop others being pushed above you” .Now, if someone truly Underperformed they can be told what’s wrong (and what the possibilities are). And team members should see why one of them graded as “Exceeded”.
3. Team working. It gets rewarded, rather than pushing others up the stack rank at your own expense. I think this means better products, and greater efficiency. We talk about “the people ready business” now we’re acting like one.
4. Steve Ballmer’s ego isn’t an impediment to doing the right thing.
5. A lack of cynicism. They could have announced this just before the annual MS Poll which measures organizational health. They waited till it had closed.

This change makes Microsoft a better company for all it's stakeholders.

One other change caught the headlines; in a triumph of legumetrics over sense (or excessive attention to costs) in 2004 the company stopped providing towels in Redmond locker rooms. Adam Barr grasped that a towel has immense psychological value, and the change spawned public ill feeling. Lisa’s reversed that. I never thought I’d call our HR supremo “ a frood who really knows where the towels are” but as I said of her before it's good to challenge those assumptions.

You may have heard claims about how Vista can help you save electricity. It has 3 features which play a role in this.
Firstly it's "Sleep" and Hibernate modes work better than their equivalents in XP - various things have lost their veto over Hibernation.
Secondly the machine can "wake" from it's sleep state to run a scheduled task, so you don't need to leave PCs on overnight for software updates, disk de-frags, virus scans and the like.
And Thirdly we've added power to the set of things which can be centrally managed with group policy, so PCs which are left on 24/7 and spend most of their time running screen savers can now be powered down.

The numbers go like this,
There are 8760 hours in a year, and a PC only needs to be on 10 hours per day 5 days a week = 2600 hours a year. So those 24/7 PCs could be in sleep mode for 6160 hours per year. [That's the basis we use, and I think the savings are bigger - a PC isn't used from 8AM till 6PM in most offices, it can power down when we're away in meetings or at lunch, and we don’t come into the office 260 days a year... you might have a further 1000 hours of sleep. Those PC produce heat - reduced it, and you reduce air conditioning requirement too]
A PC and monitor use about 125 Watts when running and 5 Watts when on standby a saving of 0.12KW. Multiplied by 6160 hours per year that’s 740 KWh per year. The national energy foundation have a useful "calculate your CO2 emissions" page which says 1 KWh of electricity makes 0.43 Kg of C02, so 740 KWh is about 1/3 of a tonne of C02. Multiply by the number of PCs you have and it's quite a big saving.

I found a paper from the UK parliament which makes that about 3% of the average C02 emissions per person here - France emits less Co2 than us - because their electricity is mostly nuclear, so their Co2 saving will be less. US emits twice as much (4.6% of the worlds population contributes 23.8% of green house gasses) so they need all the savings they can find.

It's hard to estimate the number of "Sleep hours" we can get (how many PCs run 24/7 ? What can it be reduced to ?), and I don't have a world wide average for C02 emissions per KWh, and I can't predict how much power an average PC will consume in the future ... but with hundreds of millions of PCs, saving hundreds of Kilowatt hours, that makes tens of millions of tons of C02 - equivalent to whole output of a small country. Doing something about global warming means both big changes (like electricity generation) and small ones (in its consumption). This is a small change, but as the Chinese proverb has it, "The Journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step"

Back in the 1990s when I was working for a Microsoft partner I read Douglas Coupland's novel "Microserfs"  The story starts inside Microsoft, and the narrator talks about hanging with the cool guys at Nintendo on the other side of I520 from his building. When I visited Microsoft campus for the first time, I was surprised when our approach into campus brought us past Nintendo.

I was thinking of Microserfs when reading  a recent article of Robert Scoble's.   In passing he mentioned his frustration with product names.
why do we make cool names like "Sparkle" lame by changing that to "Expression Interactive Designer?")
And UMPCs [are] another lame name for "Origami's"

Code names are usually cool, release names less frequently so. "Tahoe" was cooler than "Sharepoint Portal Server", Hotmail is a better name than "Windows Live Mail", "Exchange" is a decent name "Live communications server" isn't. Vista breaks a tradition of Windows versions having lame names. Sadly no one told Redmond that in British English you can't call a product "One care"… any more than Mr and Mrs Kerr would name a son "Wayne". Mitsubishi had the same problem when they called an SUV the Pajero - it means the same thing in Spanish (although the similar and more widely told story of the "Nova" is an urban legend.) Joining the list of strange name choices we have the once cool Nintendo, whose new console is called the Wii. Ok, Ok: "Oui !" in French is "Yes!", "We" is a nice inclusive "all of us", "Wee", especially in Scots English is cute or small. "Weeeee" is the kind of thing we shout whizzing down slides. All good stuff, but did they miss its more lavatorial connotation. I mean:

"Did you go for an X-box or a Playstation ? "
"Neither, I went for a Wii"

"OK your friend can come round and play"
"Thanks mum, can he bring his wii ? "

"What would you like to purchase sir ?"
"Can I have a Wii please" ? 

"Stock levels are too high in the games section"
"Yes we have a lot of wii on our hands"

And before anyone from Ninteno asks, no, I'm not a one-care evangelist.