More and more, my smart friends are switching from IE to something else (I've heard mostly about FireFox lately). At a recent blogger conference filled, by definition, with a bunch of web techno-wonks, only something like 15% of the audience admitted to using IE. If you hate IE enough to deal with the integration issues, you must really hate it. Why not let unleash that hatred on the IE team? The IE team is blogging now and would love to have a giant catalog of the specific things that you hate about it.

Brad Smith writes:

“I just found your site. I love it!!! It is now a regular read for me.

“I read ‘The Human Side of Microsoft’ post on your site and had an idea… What about getting a bunch of people to list what car they drive (or what they used for transport if it is not a car). Aussies tend to be a bit car crazy and you can tell a lot about a person by how they get around!! :-)

“Just an idea…. Take it easy mate.

“Brad Smith
”Canberra, Australia”

Brad, I drive a 1998 Volkswagen Cabrio covertible. It’s kinda funny looking and it’s a semi-girly color (white), but I fit in it with the top up (I have a long torso, so that’s a problem in most convertibles), it’s got a good service record, it gets good gas mileage and the Sells brothers still fit in the back (although not for much longer).

Can the other 55,999 Microsoft employees post what kind of car they drive from Brad? Thanks.

Tim Ewald, one of my closest friends and the guy I think deserves to be much more famous (the first chapter of his criminally under-selling Transactional COM+ is worth the price of a Hawaiian honeymoon and is just as fulfilling) is blogging.

In fact, he’s been blogging for a few weeks now, but he’s teased me before, so I didn’t want to point people his way if he was just going to break my heart again. Still, he seems to be on a roll. My most favorite post is XmlSerializer sans XSD, but his recent post on why he cares about the angle brackets on the wire pushed me over the edge.

Don’t disappoint us by going away again, Tim!

BTW, Roger Searjeant built some tools to support Tim’s ideas.

Microsoft stunned investors yesterday with the announcement that they were distributing 75 billion in cash because they had run out of things to buy. According to Microsoft CFO John Connors “With the acquisition of Lookout, we’ve crossed every single item off our shopping list. Frankly, there’s just nothing left to buy.”

(more)

Ah, the bittersweet memories:

“Maybe you have heard some of the stories about the [DevelopMentor] Brains? Brian Randell delivered a VSLive conference talk in a bath robe. Don Box delivered a conference talk in Amsterdam naked from the waist down. Chris Sells, not to be outdone, agreed to pose completely nude for an advertisement in a technical magazine whose readership is 95% male.”

It wasn’t an ad, actually. It was an official photo shoot for an article. Most of the pictures were normal, but they had to pick the naked one (although they did airbrush out the nipples and go another way for the cover : ).

Barry Kouda, Barracuda.NET’s most recent hire, lists some of the other DevelopMentor alumni in a loving “where are they now” kind of way.

There’s a smart client app that I’ve found myself using more and more and loving it: robocopy. The UI for robocopy sucks, of course. It’s a command line app with a myriad of options that take experimentation to really figure out, but once it’s started, it works like a champ, providing progress on each file and, most importantly, retrying once it loses it’s network connection.

What this allows me to do is set up long copy operations bringing down the latest internal Longhorn builds (which are huge) over my uncertain VPN connection. When I hibernate my box, I don’t worry about Robocopy dropping bits or getting confused and when I lose my internet or VPN connection, it retires 1 *million* times before giving up, which gives me plenty of time to notice and reestablish the connection.

Slap a friendlier UI on Robocopy and you’ve got a wonderful smart client citizen that should be emulated.

Here.

According to Computerworld, Don Norman, the design engineer famous for such works as “The Design of Everyday Things,” is consulting on Longhorn UI design. Cool! I especially love this statement:

“This is not the ‘computer age’ any more; this is the age of very smart chips hooked into a huge worldwide network. Infrastructure is about sharing.” This means two or more incompatible ways of doing things is counterproductive.

I love his characterization of client computers as “smart chips,” i.e. storing services and data production on the server, although the “smarts” of the client is important, too, i.e. data visualization and manipulation (which is death with a round-trip per click).

In Ian Griffith’s latest post, he shows 3 identical (to my eye) upper case Os next to each other and says, “[t]his clearly shows the shortcomings of that implementation” like a normal human can tell the difference!

The funny thing is, I’ve actually noticed that ClearType on Longhorn was generally better, although I never knew if that was my imagination or not. The thing I love about Ian is that he takes that vague sense of “this seems better” to “let me show you why it’s better and I’ll show you my own implementation of ClearType as a comparison just for fun.” What’s not to love? : )