Last night was the MIX party at PURE at Caesar’s Palace. It was pretty sweet. Definitely too crowded, but I guess that’s just the way it goes when you tell 1500 software developers that they can have free drinks and see the Pussycat Dolls.

Anyway, the craziest part was that on the way back I saw several women out walking their babies in strollers. This was at 11pm. wtf?! 11pm and they’re out walking their babies? Aren’t babies supposed to be asleep by then?

The Pussycat Dolls were pretty fun. Here are some pics from flickr. (Just search for tags MIX07 and Pure or pussycat dolls to find more.)

 

I’m sick this morning, sadly, but I don’t think it’s a hangover. It was starting up yesterday morning. I think I’ve just got the old fashioned flu. 🙁 It’s going to be a miserable 3 hour plane ride.

• Silverlight is pretty freaking sweet. Check it out.
• I’m actually excited to learn about AJAX programming with ASP.NET.
• It looks like DevDiv is doing some really kick-ass work. Congrats guys!
• That said, I’ve had a freaking HARD time getting Orcas Beta 1 installed. The DVD I got with my conference welcome pack was corrupted or something and downsloading it is a pain. Kitty’s going to get her DVD for me now and I’ll give that a try.
• I’m really glad to see more Mac support from Microsoft. Nobody’s going to write a web app that doesn’t work on Macs, especially in this age of social computing.
• I’m totally excited for my new job. And totally excited for what I was working on in my old job to be released to the public. It’s going to blow people away what they can do with that stuff.
• The moderator for the social networking discussion was suboptimal.
• It’s freaking hot in Vegas.
• The Venetian has super nice basic rooms.
• I haven’t gambled at all yet. That makes me sad. I’ll have to go lay $100 on the pass line.
• I was too tired last night to go to the Facebook party at the Playboy Club. I’m either getting sick or getting old. Given the events of this morning, I think sick is the answer.
• What can I get for a souvenier for Heather?

 

Technorati tags: MIX07

I woke up at 3:30am for a 6am flight this morning from Seattle to Vegas. I know, it was early, but it was the cheapest flight. Got to watch the bottom line, you know. 😉

Anyway, the flight was uneventful and I arrived at the Venetian at something like 10:30am. Turns out that my room wasn’t ready yet, so they held onto my bags while I had some breakfast. I thought about going to Bouchon, but it was too much trouble (off in some tower on the 10th floor or something like that). I’ll try going there a different day for something.

While reading the New York Times at breakfast, I got a call saying that my room was ready, so I finished up and finished the checkin process and headed up to my room. I had to wait quite a while (something like an hour) for my bags to make it to my room, which was upsetting, but the room is quite nice. It’s got to be 650sq ft. or so. There’s a bedroom, a living room, and a very nice bathroom.

So far the most dissapointing thing about the room is the internet access. My wireless signal strength is VERY weak, ranging from 18-30%. Bleh. I have big packet loss, pages keep timing out, etc. It’s a pain.

In any case, now that I’m settled in, I think it’s time to hit the casino for some craps or blackjack.

What I could really go for right now, strangely enough, is some movie theater popcorn and a pay-per-view movie. But alas, no popcorn is on the room service menu.

After something like 5 years on the MSN (now Windows Live) Messenger Team, I’m moving to a new role at Microsoft. Messenger is one of my favorite products in the world, the team is absolutely great to work with, and we’re working on what I think is our most exciting release ever,  but an opportunity came up that was just too good to ignore.

Starting next week, I’m taking a job as a (Software) Architect reporting to Joshua Goodman, who is BillG’s Technical Assistant and reports directly to the man himself.

Yeah. It’s pretty freaking sweet. I’m extremely excited. I’ll be working on all kinds of things across the whole company. It’s going to be an amazing period of learning and I hope to contribute to some wicked hot new stuff that will amaze and delight our customers. I can’t talk about anything publicly, but it’s some software that I for one would love to use.

Anyway, I’m starting the new job off this Sunday by heading to Vegas to attend MIX07. I’ve worked a ton on clients, a ton on peer-to-peer apps, a bit on servers, but basically none on web apps, so I need to ramp up quickly there.

w00t!!!~!1!!!~one!~@~~!

A few months ago, we decided on the Messenger team that we wanted to do something more to help the world. Already our service brings people together and helps distant friends and relatives communicate, but we wanted to do something more direct. So now we’ve got the i’m initiative. It works like this:

1. Download Windows Live Messenger 8.1
2. Pick a charity
3. Put the charity’s emoticon code in your friendly name
4. Have IM conversations as normal

The more conversations you have, the more of our ad revenue we donate to your charity. Pretty simple. So now when you talk to your friends, you can also help find a cure or feed children or stop global warming or whatever.

  http://global.msads.net/ads/pronws/generic_panel.swf

I recommend you buy a Wii. It’s freaking sweet. The included sports game is awesome. Obviously the control is what makes this platform and it is done very well. If you don’t believe me, come play mine (but wait until I get another 3 wiimotes).

I recommend you do not see Apocalypto. This movie made me want to claw my eyes out and stab myself in the head with an icepick. I don’t want to waste any more words on it.

I’ve lived with my Mac for about a month now. It’s had its ups and downs. I’ll start with the high level summary, then delve into details.

Pros:

• Sexy Hardware
• Built in iSight, great feeling keyboard, magnetic power cord
• MacOS is fun
• Can run both Mac & Windows apps (and linux, I suppose, but I’m not a freak fanboy)
• Enthusiastic Boot Camp support community
• Glossy display
• Killer MacOS Apps:
  • Quicksilver
  • XTorrent
  • NewsFire
  • Parallels

Cons:

• No official Vista Boot Camp support
• Corrolarry: issues in Vista when dual booted
• No 3D acceleration in parallels
• Hard Disk too small and too slow
• Low resolution display
• One button on trackpad
• Trackpad is absurdly large, so easy to hit by accident
• MacOS can’t write to NTFS / Windows can’t read or write HFS+
• Slightly weak graphics card
• No pc-style delete key

NOPs:

• .Mac

Details:

Hardware
The MacBook Pro is a nice piece of hardware, no doubt. The metal feels nice and solid. The screen stays put at whatever angle I set it. The Core 2 Duo is a killer proc and at 2.33GHz, fast as hell.

The glossy screen is gorgeous. Let me put this with the precision to help the reader to understand: glossy LCD displays are superior to matte LCD displays. There’s plenty info about the physics of this online, but suffice it to say that this is not a matter of opinion — it’s a matter of fact. And the glossy screen on the MBP is absolutely fantastic. The colors are vivid. The pixels are sharp. My only complaint with it is resolution. It’s 1440×900 pixels. I would really rather it be 1920×1200, or failing that, 1680×1050. I like a nice high-res display. But it’s not that big of a deal.

The trackpad is absurdly huge. Seriously, it’s like 4" wide. Do I really need to be dragging my finder around that much? Probably not. What’s worse, my palms constantly touch it while I’m typing. The drivers are supposed to detect when this is happening and ignore it, but they’re not perfect and sometimes my mouse zips away. This basically means you can’t use mouse focus, which is too bad.

MacOS / apps
MacOS is nice. It’s really the apps that make me love it. Shareware for the mac is just higher quality than for the PC. I’m not 100% sure why this is the case. I can only assume its because Mac users will more typically pay for shareware, so it’s more profitable on the mac. In any case, shareware apps on the mac are just better looking and feeling than on the PC, whatever the reason.

As some examples, look at NewsFire, XTorrent, QuickSilver, Saft, Delicious Library, Democracy, etc. These apps are great. Better than their commercial or shareware counterparts on Windows.

As for MacOS (Tiger) itself, it’s an OS. What can I say. They’re all about the same. It’s got search integrated in. It’s relatively snappy feeling. Comparing it to XP, it’s probably better. Comparing it to Vista, it’s probably not quite as good.

Vista’s glass look is prettier than Mac’s aging Aqua interface. The sidebar is a bit more useful than dashboard, I’d say. I like that the sidebar is always up. I never actually go to the trouble to push F12 to bring up the dashboard on MacOS. The one feature MacOS has that I wish Vista had is Expose. Win-Tab is nice, but hitting one button than clicking the window I want is far superior to scrolling through 30 windows.

As far as perf goes, MacOS is definitely faster on this hardware. But I feel that’s a driver issue. The perf bottleneck on the Vista side appears to be disk i/o. The queue is always full when I’m doing much of anything and sometimes even when I’m not, causing access times to get into the 100-200ms range. This, obviously, slows things down quite a bit. That said, even when Vista is being slow, it still does what you tell it to. MacOS, on the other hand, just shows a pinwheel and you have to wait and hope for the best.

When it comes to security, I feel a bit more secure on Vista than on MacOS because of all the work that’s gone into it and the man-centuries of effort put into cracking it. MacOS is kind of virgin territory. It seems pure now, but if the hackers of the world turned their sights to it, I have no doubt that it would crumple quickly.

Parallels
Parallels is freaking amazing. If you have an Intel mac and any interest in running Windows, buy it now. The mode where you can run the same partition as you use in Boot Camp, though, isn’t stable yet. Avoid it. Otherwise, this is can’t-live-without software if you need to use some Windows apps (I need to use Outlook to see corporate mail and Mac Office doesn’t yet support the Office 2007 file formats everyone at work is using).

There are, however, some issues with Parallels:

1. Running 2 OSes really eats up system resources. 2GB RAM is the bare minimum. I should have bought 3GB.
2. You have to have 2 windows installs – one for Boot Camp and one for parallels. They’re working on this, though, and have a beta of support for XP boot camp partitions, but this is not stable enough to trust yet.
3. No 3D support. This means Games don’t work and Vista looks lame.
4. The keyboard mappings in parallels are bunk. I want the apple key to act as control on windows so I can copy/paste between apps and OSes without remembering what OS I’m currently working in.
5. Only 1 virtual CPU. If you want to do perf intense work in Windows, you need to boot into boot camp.

Boot Camp
Boot Camp is the great hope for Mac gamers who want to use Windows for real. However, it only currently officially supports Windows XP SP2. Once you’ve used Vista, there’s no going back to XP, so I’m stuck trying to kludge it in Vista. It’s going ok (this post is written from Windows Live Writer in Vista from Boot Camp), but there are definitely some issues. Driver installation is a headache. You have to manually unpack the boot camp driver CD to a folder on the hard drive, then grovel through the device manager upgrading the appropriate devices (wireless ethernet, iSight, trackpad, keyboard, etc.). This is obviously annoying and not something for the average Mac user. Hopefully Vista support will be forthcoming in the next Boot Camp verison and this issue will go away.

The second issue is perf. Vista seems to have some disk i/o issues under boot camp. I’m not sure if these are because of Vista, the hardware, or the drivers. Hopefully this will be fixed in a future beta. If not, I need to round up some io devs at work to investigate.

The other issue is stability — Vista in Boot Camp under heavy load hangs. It just flat out stops. It looks like the computer is overheating or something, because it just stops dead — no bluescreen, nothing. I hope this is addressed in a future release, but I’ll keep investigating.

.Mac
Summary: Not useful for me? .Mac would be great for a few types of users: mac only users whose friends also only use macs, n00b users who don’t know about superior, free alternatives, users that never need windows.

.Mac provides a small amount of storage (1GB) space that is shared between mail and files. For mail, I use both Windows Live Mail and GMail. Either one is superior to .Mac mail except that .Mac mail offersStorage in "the cloud" isn’t really useful to me. I have, let’s see, 3 computers at home, my macbook, a tablet and 2 desktops at work. That’s 7 computers I can use to store files on. And with FolderShare, I have backups of all my important data on at least two of them, typically more, which I can access from anywhere and recover easily. Not to mention FolderShare works on both Windows and MacOS.

 

Overall Summary:

If you have money to spare and any interest in MacOS, buy a Mac. If you’re used to MacOS and don’t care about games, buy a Mac. Otherwise, buy a PC.

FedEx exceeded expectations and delivered my package on Friday the 10th. I’ve had the MacBook for a week now and I’ve developed some impressions. I love it, of course. But before I get into too many details, a matter of order…

I’m trying to post this from a Mac blog posting app called ecto. Let’s see if it works!

Apple had said that they expected my MacBook Pro (replacement) to ship on 11/7 and be delivered on 11/8, as I’ve mentioned. That was pretty slow, but hey, I could deal.

As you may have noticed, the 8th has come and gone. No MacBook Pro. No email from Apple either, saying it had shipped.

To back up a bit in time, on the 7th, I called Apple and asked "WTF?" They claimed that they’d sent it to FedEx and even gave me a tracking number. Outstanding! Good news. Apple said this was supposed to be next day delivery, so I should be getting it on the 8th as expected.

Not really believing them, I called FedEx. FedEx did in fact receive the package from Apple in China. But it was not going to get to me the next day. It "missed the cutoff" to be shipped out of China that day and would wait for the next day. Hm. Ok. I asked if it would get to me on the 9th then. They didn’t know. It hadn’t had enough scans for them to tell whether it was shipped next day or not.

Great. So Now I spend all my free time refreshing this tracking page. This morning, the 9th, I expect to see FedEx has made some progress. I expect to see my package is "On FedEx vehicle for delivery" or at the very least "At local FedEx facility". But not only do I not see that, I don’t even see an "Arrived at FedEx location" anywhere in the US. I do however see they’ve added to the webpage a little nugget saying "Estimated delivery Nov 13, 2006 10:30 AM".

WTF!??!!!#@!#

I think it’s much less likely FedEx’s fault than Apple’s, at this point. I’m going to contact FedEx and see if Apple in fact sent the MacBook next day as they promised they would, or if they decided to send it rowboat class.

God I hate Apple! Let this be a lesson to you prospective Mac buyers out there. You have no choice but to buy a Mac if you have your heart set on one, so I won’t recommend against it, but I will recommend that you never order anything customized from Apple. Just get the default configuration. Upgrade your hard disk yourself. Apple is MacDonalds, not Burger King. You can’t get it your way. You can get it their way or no way.

Last night I called Apple again at about 5pm since I hadn’t yet received an email with my fedex label in it. The person I spoke with said there was no record of me talking to them before about this and getting a label, so they sent me one right away. I got it in my inbox while still on the phone with them.

So I printed the label and dashed off to FedEx. You see, Apple assembles the machines in China, so if I could get them to start the order last night, they’d have all day in China to work on it. Anyway, I got to FedEx and sent the package, got my tracking number and called Apple.

"Sorry, it doesn’t show up on fedex.com yet." Great. I watched the FedEx man load my package onto his truck. He said he scanned it and it was in the system. I ask Apple to check again. No dice. I talk to a supervisor at customer support. He says there’s essentially nothing he can do until it shows up on the fedex.com webpage as having been shipped. But what he can do is take $100 off my order. So that’s nice, but I tell him that if he could just get me my freaking laptop, I’d pay him an extra $100.

Frustrated, I get off the phone and head to Heather’s for Halloween. On the way, I check the fedex tracking site on my Windows Mobile phone. The package is showing up! Wonderful, I think, and call back Apple. Of course, I can never talk to the same person, but the person I speak to says they’ll release the hold on the order and set it for next day shipping so that it comes in 1 day rather than 2 when they finally do ship it from China. That’s something, at least. I get off the phone, marginally happier.

When I get to Heather’s, I decide to check my mail to see if Apple has sent any updates. They have. I take a look and they say I have a replacement order number. So I check it out on http://apple.com/orderstatus.

WTF!!!?!~! It says that Apple canceled the order. This is getting absurd and now Apple is closed for the day. I have to wait for the next day (now) to call them.

So this morning at 7, as soon as I woke up, I called Apple. They say, yes, it was canceled. Because it had a non-glossy screen. LOL. This is just too absurd. Apple is trying to send me matte again. They say there’s another replacement order open. I take a look and find out that this replacement order is set for standard, rather than overnite, shipping. I ask them to fix that and they do. But it’s still got an estimated ship date of 11/7.

I hate Apple. They feel much more like a monopoly to me than MS ever did. Consider: I want a Mac. I have only one choice of where to buy it. I can buy it from Apple. If I want a PC and Alienware gives me bad service (as they did) I can decide never to buy from them again and go to Dell (or Apple) instead. But if I want a Mac, I have no recourse but to buy from Mr. Jobs. It’s extraordinarily fristrating to be a consumer bereft of choice.

I hate Apple because their product is so cool that I feel I have no choice but to buy it, and given that, I have no choice but to buy it from them. I have no choice with Apple. With Microsoft, you can go to Dell, Alienware, DP. You can get a chip from Intel or AMD. You can get any number of graphics cards, sound cards, displays, etc. With Mac, you’re stuck.

But they’re still cool.