blog://brycem@microsoft.com

AD: Two slightly used TiVos for sale

2005-06-22T03:35:00Z

Before Windows Media Center Edition was released, I purchased two TiVo DVRs. My family has really enjoyed these units - In fact my 3 year old daughter has become so used to being able to watch a favorite episode of Rugrats on demand that when we explained that grandma's TV can only play scheduled programs she was shocked and disbelieving :-) Also, (slightly embarrassing, but true) TiVo taught my 5-year old how to read! Nevertheless, the TiVos in our household are being supplanted by superior technology: Windows Media Center Edition! I started by playing around with the free CD that Microsoft employees could get and putting a Hauppauge MCE250 tuner card my desktop, and helping them beta test their subsequent updates and was finally won over. When I started using MCE, it seemed a weak facsimile of my beloved TiVo, but the rate at which it has been evolving has far-outstripped TiVo, and the home media scenarios they've been working on have made the anemic Tivo II Home Media Option seem pretty, well anemic. We really liked our TiVos but I'm thinking the time has come to sell these units while there are still people out there willing to buy them!

-Bryce

The Windows Server System Song

2005-05-10T05:36:00Z

Jeff Swift was asking me about royalty-free music earlier today and the first thing that popped to mind was Richard Stallman's magnificent "Free Software Song" - Jeff thanked me for my suggestion, but pointed out that it wasn't very appropriate fare for a Microsoft blog entry... He was of course right as usual, but he got me thinking: Why not introduce my very own version of this timeless classic that is (slightly) better suited to a Microsoft blog? Without any more ado, I present to you the Windows Server System Song for your listening pleasure! (MP3 version here)

Run Windows Server System Software;
Time and money, admins, spend less of both.
Run Windows Server System Software;
Time and money, admins, do more with less---

Penguinistas get tons of free press,
Sad but true, admins, sad but true
Hippy freeware can't run an enterprise;
Not "good enough", admins, hold out for great---

If you buy Penguinista freeware
Support costs, admins, Kernels Panic,
Just fdisk that kludgey OSS
Windows Server, admins, ever more---

Run Windows Server System Software;
Time and money, admins, spend less of both.
Run Windows Server System Software;
Time and money, admins, do more with less---

-Bryce

6/21/05 note to Groklaw.net readers: I wasn't my intention to mock the FSF itself, so much as it was to mock Richard Stallman's taste in music and I stand firmly by that criticism :-)

Paintball Outing

2005-05-06T22:01:00Z

This last weekend a couple of guys from the EEC and the Windows Server TAP team went down to a place called Hole-in-the-wall Paintball to shoot each other with small projectiles from pneumatic weapons :-)

Before

From left to right, we have Matt Wagner, Dave Kearney, Do Kim, myself, Nathan McAffee, and Nathan's neighbor.

The tactics were pretty loose, but we got better as the day progressed. We played "air ball" (shooting at each other while taking cover behind inflatable obstacles), and "woodsball" team matches until someone had the bright idea of challenging a large contingent from the Woodinville High School Baseball Team who were there playing that day as well. We were outnumbered by about 2.5 to one against this large band of high school boys and girls :-) We acquitted ourselves honorably by taking out about 2 or more of theirs for every player we lost, and won 2 out of four matches by the time we were ready to pack things in. There were no serious casualties, but a few paintballs did manage to find their way behind Matt's mask (the swelling had gone down considerably by Monday, thankfully :-)

-Bryce

After

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

2005-04-19T22:09:00Z

What Kind of American English Do You Speak? - Having been born and raised here in the Redmond area with a couple of years spent in rural parts of Pennsylvania and Maryland and elsewhere, here's how I tested out on the latest "timewaster of the week":

75% General American English

15% Yankee

5% Dixie

5% Midwestern

0% Upper Midwestern

-Bryce

Terminal Dodgeball

2005-04-15T06:15:00Z

Last week the Terminal Services Team squared off against the EEC crew in a very one-sided dodgeball game at the ProClub in Redmond... I wasn't able to make it, but as I hear things, the score was something like EEC=3, TS=0! Stanley Jones took some video of it using a Kodak digital camera which I've put up on a streaming media server for your viewing pleasure :-)

-Bryce

iSCSI in the Real-World

2005-04-13T22:49:00Z

The EEC has recently been evaluating iSCSI technology options from some of our vendor partners - Really interesting stuff. We haven't had any requests from customers for this technology yet, but we want to get up to speed on it and gain some operational experience before they do. There are iSCSI options for our Brocade SilkWorm 24000 and are evaluating an IP7500 unit from Intransa that looks promising (below). Have any of you deployed or are you considering the use of iSCSI in production yet? What iSCSI hardware? What are you using it for?

-Bryce

Microsoft's version of the Darwin Award...

2005-04-04T23:03:00Z

Well, it's official: Richard Gregg has been sentenced to 2 years in one of Washington State's fine correctional facilities for the crime of tragic stupidity. This is really a shame - Richard is a very likable fellow who had run the software library for the Windows Application Compatibility Testing Team, first as a contractor and later as a full-time employee, since the days of Windows '97 "Memphis" (later known to the world as "Windows '98" because we shipped late). Given that a large part of his job was to buy MS and 3rd-party software, his management chain had been shuffled a half-dozen times over the years, and the inadequacy of our controls on the internal software purchasing system, I can see why it would have been easy for his activities to go undetected and unquestioned for quite some time. Two years plus full restitution is a stiff penalty, but I'm really glad to see that he's had the courage to own up to this rather than going the way of the dude...

-Bryce

Windows Messenger in Corporate Environments

2005-03-30T23:03:00Z

I had a surprise the other day - I run MSN Messenger 6.2 on my laptop here at work for occasional IM sessions with friends and family, and after I signed in yesterday morning with my user@microsoft.com Passport, it prompted me to change my Passport email addy to user@messengeruser.com! It told me to wait an hour to sign back in while they "upgraded" my account, and then later in the day when I did sign back in with MSN Messenger 6.2, it prompted me to download and install a special version of Windows Messenger 5.1 for my new corporate account... It was automagically configured to use both internal LCS SIP accounts and external .NET Passport accounts and seems to work fine. In fact, nothing appears to have changed here on the front-end so I'm kind of curious about what may have changed on the backend... I'm guessing that anyone with a user@microsoft.com Passport will have gotten the same prompts - Anyone know what's going on here?

-Bryce

Inappropriate relations with a Sun server...

2005-03-12T02:50:00Z

Wow! If a Microsoftie has a few complimentary words to say about Sun's latest Windows-compatible hardware, should he be fired for revealing his latent "hardware fetishist" tendencies? According to TheRegister, the answer is a logic-defying "yes". Fortunately, my boss doesn't look to the Register for staffing guidance, and colleagues assure me that having the Register tear into you personally is in fact something of an honor:-) At least el Reg managed to preserve the core message that Microsoft and Sun are capable of putting the customer's needs before egos (even if it was sandwiched between baseless hints at an impending termination) I'm thinking of having some nice t-shirts made for my team here at "the Beast's Enterprise Engineering Center", what do you think of enlisting Beastie's help, now that he's about to be unemployed? Ok, ok - Perhaps not that's not such a great idea, after all...

-Bryce

My boss is running a SUN workstation on his desktop!

2005-03-04T05:59:00Z

I never saw this one coming: After playing with the new WindowsXP x64 Opteron-based Sun workstations at tonight's Sun mixer held in honor of the deployment of two racks worth of new SunFire Windows Server 2003 gear, my boss cleaned off his old HP desktop and and rolled in a new Sun Workstation to use as his dektop! Am I jealous? Nah - I have an AMD 4-way reference SDV that's loaded for bear sitting under my desk that can run a small server farm of Virtual Servers, but I gotta admit that those Sun monitors have as nice a picture as I've seen yet!

-Bryce

Making life as a LUser more livable

2005-02-28T19:30:00Z

Well, after reading Aaron Margosis' blog, I decided to give running as a limited user at home another try... I'm used to running *Nixoid workstations in this manner of course and I've tried running this way on my Windows boxes on a couple of occasions in the past and had been dissatisfied with the experience: The first time, I had just clean installed my NT4 Workstation machine and ran for a few weeks as luser until my lovely wife put a stop to it because of the applications compatibility issues we saw with a bunch of applications she was attached to. The second time was a few years later on our Win2000 Pro machine that I had setup and operated for quite awhile as admin and when I tried to get our luser profile running by default, I ran into a maddening series of MSI issues with Office applications and other app-compat issues, not to mention getting fed up with having to logout\logon whenever I wanted to install apps or visit Windows Update.

This time however, was different: Following the guidance contained in this article for PCs that aren't domain joined, I took the XP SP2 Media Center PC that serves as our primary desktop at home and kept the renamed administrator account password protected, limited the permissions of our shared primary login, removed it's password, and created another admin account without a password. I had to make a few permissions tweaks to some files and directories to make Media Center happy among some other apps, but by and large it was truly painless this time. Switching to admin is a matter of hitting Win+L and clicking over to the "red desktop" and my wife hasn't squeaked once about anything not working as it did before.

So far it appears to be the most livable luser setup for Windows I've yet seen and I'll probably give this a try on our daughters' spyware server this next weekend :-) Actually, the Microsoft Anti-Spyware utility has been running for quite a while on their PC and giving it a clean bill of health, but my uncle was not so lucky. A few weeks ago, he called me up and asked me to drive up to his house up north and help him clean up his family PC. His teenage kids had been running Kazaa on it for P2P and the machine was literally possessed of virii, spyware, and trojan malware! Between the McAfee-identified virii (whose prompts my uncle had been ignoring because they were getting drowned out by the din of other pop-ups that were assailing him every time he logged on), and the Microsoft Anti-Spyware depth scans, more than 60 (yes, 60!) threats were identified and removed with apparent success! If I'd had more time to get into it, I would likely have clean-installed the machine just to be safe but it does appear to be in much better shape now. I went ahead and set his machine up as a luser box as well and he's been reporting that this is working well for him, though his kids have noted that their P2P apps tend to be much more unstable because their failed attempts to write to locations they shouldn't are apparently not being handled very gracefully ;-)

-Bryce

What would an http://www.asp.net style community site look like for the Server Community?

2005-01-29T23:58:00Z

There's been talk around the halls of building 25 of exploring an IBuySpy/CommunityServer/CommunityStarter type web site to host community-generated ITPro content, provide community resources pertaining to Windows Server System products, and perhaps add a sandbox.msn.com type of area to help get early feedback on some of the things we're working on... I love the feel of the Visual Studio teams' non-Corporate feeling Community Portals like www.asp.net and www.gotdotnet.com, and the community-generated articles are my favorite feature. I had lunch the other day with Brian Goldfarb to pick his brain on his experiences in getting www.asp.net off the ground and he was full of enthusiasm and good information. What do you folks think?

-Bryce

Defining the "Windows Server System"

2005-01-21T04:42:00Z

It's a widely acknowledged fact in the software industry that we've got a pretty hot marketing machine here at Microsoft that is fueled by an endless stream of excellent products and creativity, but I've been thinking a lot recently about the "Windows Server System": While this brand name is neatly consistent with the "Microsoft Office System" brand name from a marketing perspective, from a usage perspective it is much less so...

To illustrate the point, here are some examples of the Office System at work:

When a user hits CTRL+C from Excel and CTRL+V into Powerpoint, the right things happen - The content is transformed into a dialect of the ubiquitous HTML or XML standards and transferred into your slide with formatting intact, or alternately, a Paste Options button appears in your workflow with helpful options that allow you to indicate your intent
When installing elements of the Office System, they use the same installer technology that gives the admin a tremendous amount of control over the process
They have nearly universal support for upgrading previous releases
They use forward and backwards compatible file-formats that ease transitions between versions
They have a very complete and consistent programming model
Shared functionality is engineered into shared components
Common and consistent UI design guidelines
Unified help systems
Unified product update procedures
This list could go on and on because the Office System has been engineered as a complete system of applications for several versions now...

The current suite of Windows Server System components do not yet exhibit this same level of integration and shared direction in my opinion. CTRL+C'ing a bunch of computer objects from the AD Users and Computers Snap-In and CTRL+V'ing them into a directory on my hard drive doesn't result in a nifty Paste Options menu asking me what I intended to have happen... I don't have the ubiquitous and intuitive CRUD across every object on the system through the consistent programmatic administration interface my heart aches for. I recall once having gone through the exercise of installing the majority of Windows Server System components and Microsoft Business Solutions applications onto an SBS2003 server and ending up with no fewer than 7 instances of MSDE and SQL that all had to have the SQL patches applied to them separately. Half of the databases had backup models that were not compatible with NTBackup, and that test machine must've had the worlds most fragile port 80, not to mention the half-dozen IIS vServers it took to get everything working on a single host!

There's a lot going on at Microsoft to achieve a much improved level of consistency and operational harmony\efficiency\simplicity between the various components of the Windows Server System, and to tell the truth, I'm not super-clear on what's public and what is not so I won't go into detail, but I'd like to hear what kinds of things you would suggest be included in a clear articulation of the the kind of engineering substance behind the Windows Server System Logo that you'd like to see. I'm not suggesting a server system designed by committee, but I'd love to hear what kinds of great ideas the community can add to the discussion in the hopes of arriving at what the user actually wanted in a more direct fashion.

-Bryce

Kingdomality companion worksheet

2005-01-14T21:10:00Z

On the topic of Kindomality, for those that have a copy of the book, they may have noticed there's a different version of the personality test in the appendices than the better known online version. Here's a companion worksheet I put together that let's you visualize the breakdown of your responses for the version in the appendices. For example, while the bulk of my responses were heavily Explorer-centric, this worksheet shows that challenger and helper responses were also well-represented (maintainer responses were a different story). The book does a great job of describing the achetypes in a memorable and engaging manner, it didn't spend much time dicussing our complexities as they relate to the archetypes presented in the book.

-Bryce

Kingdomality - Helpful insights into team dynamics

2005-01-14T09:47:00Z

I know the www.kingdomality.com quiz has made the internet rounds a few times, but I was recently handed a copy of the book by my boss and I really did find "Kingdomality: An Ingenious New Way to Triumph in Management" to be quite an engaging read that was very worthwhile. Thanks for putting me on to it, Chris.

-Bryce