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November 07 YouTube music videos on iLikeSo over on iLike, we added this *hot* new feature over the weekend. I'm talking Paris Hilton HOT. Seriously. And I thought listening to measly 30-second clips of music was cool.
It started on Thursday. After scooting into work I walked upstairs to the office. I was preparing myself for the day, planning to fix a few bugs and get ready for a new feature Josh and I were about to start working on. As soon as I walked into the room I knew something was up. I got that 6th sense feeling of a new idea about to hatch. Sure enough, I saw Hadi waving his hands over in Josh and Gabe's corner of the room going on about something (our "office" is an open floorplan that is, just barely, but not quite, big enough for all of us).
"Not just music clips", Hadi was explaining, "but music videos!". I got his drift, and sat down to mock something up. It should be noted that Josh and Nat had been talking about something similar months back, but neither of them were *this* enthusiastic about it. In his typical eager fashion Hadi had mentioned it was only a "3-hour project", so the challenge was on! I cracked open a Dr. Pepper and got down to it. Hadi offered to bring back lunch if I'd keep working on it (of course I accepted), and by 12:30 I had a working version with playable videos and real code hooked up to whatever song you were listening to. This was cool. Yeah, it needed a lot more polish, but the look and feel was there, and there was no question that this thing was addictive and fun to play with.
After pushing the changes out to our test server so that everyone else could play with it, I spent the rest of the day polishing and tightening it up and adding a few more features. While I was coding, Hadi quickly wrote up a spec to make it all legit, along with what new features and fixes we should have for the next 3 versions. The next day, Friday, we all tested the heck out of it, I fixed a few more bugs, and we agreed that we should really ship this thing ASAP. Testing the feature was hard since everyone wanted to just keep watching videos! By Saturday we had it staged and ready to roll out to production, and by that evening it was fully shipped.
From an idea, to a spec, to development, to testing, and to production, all in less than 72 hours. Yes, I love my job :D
Try it out! I'm enamored with Imogen Heap right now, so go to http://ilike.com/artist/Imogen+Heap, listen to the first track (Hide and Seek) and click Play video. You can click any of the 4 videos on the right of the playing video to select an alternate version.
Until the next feature!
steve October 25 iLike.com launches!It says I haven't posted here in over 6 months. Is that right? Have I really been holed up in our company's cozy little office for *that long* without coming up for air? I think the answer is "yep". And we shipped last night. So now it's official. I can finally start *telling* people about what we've been doing instead of continuing on in this weird paradoxical world where I was forced to contain and measure my enthusiasm about the product whenever friends asked me "so what have you been *doing* all this time?"
Anyway, it's iLike.com, a social-networking meets music-recommendation site that wants to meet your iPod. Have iTunes? Try it out, let us discover your listening habits, then see what kind of music we recommend to you. Oh, and add some friends, too, while you're at it. The more people we have, the merrier the party, and more importantly, the *better* our music recommendations.
For some coverage, try Walt Mossberg, the Seattle PI, Brady's blog on O'Reilly radar, TechCrunch, and Mashable. Here we go! April 28 time to move on...Hi all,
I'm writing this from my girlfriend's house on the night before I leave for the Coachella music festival in Palm Springs, CA, where I'll be enjoying (suffering) another year of hot weather, cheap food, crowded tents, and oh yeah, good music (Depeche Mode is headlining, woohoo!). It's 1:30am and I'm falling asleep over the keyboard on her powerbook. But that's not what I'm here to write about. Which is probably a good thing that I'm tired and falling asleep or this might end up as one of my longer swimming-pool kind of posts :) My friends still give me a hard time over that :) But I digress. I've been telling people for a year and a half now that I have the coolest job at Microsoft. Being able to work on something as cool as start.com and live.com has been awesome. It's been a crazy kind of high. I've been incredibly lucky to have been able to work with talented and passionate people and to have been given the opportunity and support for something like that. We started from nothing, zilch, nada! And we had these few ideas and philosophies and tenets that were important to us, and we just ran and ran and ran with them, and it was an amazing ride. I really enjoyed every minute of it, and have put my blood, sweat and tears into this thing. But it's time to move on. I'll be leaving Microsoft after 7 years to join a startup in Seattle. The team I'm leaving behind kicks serious ass. We've had a couple of hiccups over the last few months while we've been getting bigger and going through some growing pains, but things are seriously being kicked into high gear. Big time. We are hardcore about getting back to basics and you'll see this soon. We're focused more than ever on our principles and core tenets (simple, fast, powerful) and making sure everyone up and down the management chain knows this. Sanaz is making sure of that :) The team knows I respect the hell out of them. I've never worked with such a great group of folks. I'm really going to miss them. But I'm leaving my baby in very good hands. I'm keeping this short. Good luck guys! I wish you all the best :) ciao, steve March 20 MIX06It's Monday morning, and Todd, Sanaz and I are at MIX06 in Las Vegas. I'm blogging this from the back of Bill's keynote while Todd is scooting about on the Razor :) We just heard the CTO of MySpace talk about the crazy growth they're getting on their site, and the fact that they're running everything on ASP.NET and SQL Server. They're here to investigate our client-side Atlas framework so that should be fun.
What is MIX? It's a new conference hosted by Microsoft to get people together to talk about new things happening in the web space, and it gives us a chance to show off some of our cool new technologies. Todd and Sanaz and I are here to talk about live.com and gadgets. We've got a few machines in the sandbox set up with real code so if you're here, stop by the sandbox and say hi, and get busy writing gadgets :)
Check out some of the photos being taken real-time: http://flickr.com/photos/tags/mix06/ February 09 Career FairAm down in Albuquerque, New Mexico to work a career fair booth at my old college (UNM). Should be fun to talk to potential candidates and see if any are interesting enough to fly back. I love this part of the job - it's really cool to talk to these guys and hear their perspectives on the work we're doing and the industry and general, and really just what their passions are. It's like seeing your job through someone else's eyes and makes you remember why you got excited about this field in the first place. It's very motivating.
You know you're in Albuquerque when you get a purple Chevy HHR as your rental car, and the agent at the desk says "I like to tell people this is our gangsta car". Since I flew down on America West it meant my plane would be delayed leaving Seattle (which it was) and we ended up sitting on the tarmac for about 2 hours before they decided the plane really wasn't about to go anywhere and proceeded to get everyone off the plane so that we could start the whole process all over again. Thank god for bluetooth-enabled cell phones. I happily surfed along and checked email the whole time we were stuck out there from my handy little sony vaio sub-notebook (I love that thing). Anyway, I didn't end up getting into Albuquerque until 11pm, so I got to drive my purple "gangsta" HHR around the streets of Albuquerque at midnight, of course stopping in at the famous 24-hour Frontier Restaurant across from UNM to grab one of their famous green chile breakfast burritos before heading up to my parent's new house to crash for the night. They haven't moved to New Mexico yet so I have the house all to myself. It's up in the foothills near the mountains and is nice and quiet.
We've got a bunch of copies of OneNote and some other Microsoft swag to give away at the career fair. I think it's going to be a competition to see which company has the most popular booth. Should be fun. :)
February 06 The chair has arrived!I ordered this swanky chair from Roche Bobois last summer, and they weren't kidding when they said it would take 4-6 months to arrive. I ordered it in August and it finally showed up at the showroom at the end of January. It became a running joke with my friends as to when I'd actually get it. Almost as funny as whether my scooter was back from the shop (ha ha). I think most of my friends assumed it had fallen off the boat somewhere on the way back from France.
But it's here now and it's freakin' *hot*. I even picked it up with a cheap U-Haul truck I was so excited, much to the amusement of my friends who knew how much it actually set me back (hey, every penny counts!). I wanted something that would be a centerpiece to the living room, something that would pop when you first walked in, the cherry on the pie, the icing on the cake, the brulée on the creme, etc etc. Most of my furniture is subdued in color and I have wall-to-wall dark tinted mirrors in the living room, so apart from some olive green accent pillows there isn't much color, which I like since it's earthy and zen and nice and cozy. But it just begged to have something obnoxiously bright as the showcase. So my sister and I shopped and shopped and shopped, online and off, looking for something modern, but I didn't want something recognizable or something you'd mistake as coming from IKEA (tho I like IKEA). So there we were on yet another shopping adventure when we walked past Roche Bobois on Western Ave, and we both knew that this chair was THE ONE. I already had the color in mind and we didn't need to look at the swatches for long before the perfect color was found. I feel like now I've finally finished my apartment.
I think it's time to throw another party. January 12 Ok ok it turns out the flag does stand for something pretty cool :)A flag bearing the number 12 showed up on top of the Space Needle the other day. I only write to tell you this because you probably haven't seen it yet, given that it's been RAINING for the last 24 days straight. I don't know about you, but I'm a pretty optimistic guy and see life as generally a half-full glass, but in the rain I generally keep my head *down* when walking to the bus or the store or the Starbucks on the corner... Actually now that I think about it I keep my head down to avoid all the homeless dudes that hang around my apartment. Anyway, I happened to see this number 12 flag waving in the wind while I was checking email from my couch today and thought, hey wow, is this a cool city or what, we're actually counting down the number of days until we hit our record 33 consecutive days of rain!! And I remember thinking that the person who came up with the idea and managed to convince the council of Space Needle Flag Approvers must have been a pretty cool dude. Which is the same thing I feel whenever I watch Adult Swim on Cartoon Network and a funny bump goes by.
Turns out the flag is actually the "12th Man Flag", a Seahawks jersey number that was retired in 1984, and the flag was hoisted in support of this Saturday's game against the Redskins. Oh well. I think capturing the number of consecutive days of rain is much more in the spirit of things, don't you?
[update] I'm not a huge sports fan but I have to admit I am getting into the spirit of things. The idea of the Seahawks going to the superbowl *is* pretty damn cool :) There are "12th man" flags all over the city. It's a gorgeous day outside, the sun is breaking, and we're a few minutes into the 2nd quarter against the Panthers (Seahawks are kicking ass!). The crowd noise from the stadium is unbelievable! It reminds me of "the pit" in Albuquerque where the Lobos play basketball. January 05 Eggnog never tasted so badWow, out with the old and in with the new, eh? I made a new year's resolution to stop blogging this year since I have enough *real* work to do thank you very much. Unfortunately the rest of my resolutions aren't faring much better :) Christmas, New Year's Eve, the entire freakin holiday season was quite a blur. I have memories of spiked eggnog, and when I say spiked, I mean eggnog in which the rum literally floats like a glassy saucer an inch above the top of the eggnog. It didn't help that this particular eggnog was of the sugar-free, non-fat variety which I didn't even know *existed*, so it was basically the worst eggnog I've ever had in my life. My sister did a pretty good job of watering it down with more and more eggnog as she kept drinking until the surface tension of the rum finally gave up the battle and could be stirred away into the rest of the non-fat mess. Memories of playing dominos (yes, *bones* to you more cultured types) with the relatives for hours and go-kart racing with my race-car driver uncle in the deserts of Albuquerque where they don't even make you wear seatbelts. We tied to the hundredth of a second in the first heat. He then solidly kicked my ass the 2nd time around. Here are some highlights and not so highlights of a few other things I did over the break:
- Vegged out one day and watched a several hour marathon of the new Project Runway. The idea of pairing fashion designers with an elimination style competition where you get kicked off by a supermodel is awesome. I thought the first season was better though - I think they were more creative. I mean, fashion designers are already drama-queens by nature, and it's almost heart-wrenching to see them get kicked off week by week. I have to leave the room sometimes when they're on trial at the end, it's so hard to watch. Kind of like The Office. The only thing I can imagine more tear-jerking would be to watch a bunch of fashion *models* battling it out. Oh wait...
- Noise-canceling headphones are great. Except when you're on the plane and the annoying guy two rows back who talks the whole trip and has that kind of radio commercial voice that is *impossible* to ignore can now be heard *as clear as a bell*, now that the background noise of the plane is nicely and completely filtered away. Actually when I first tried them on I thought about the blog post I was going to write, about how I've officially graduated into yuppie-dom when I'm excited about getting a pair of noise-canceling headphones and actually looking forward to using them on my plane trip home. :) Seriously though, these things are pretty amazing. A bit pricy though.
- Have been getting into bitpop finally, which is music made on old 8-bit computers and consoles like commodore 64s and gameboys. Mr. Pacman is pretty good. They call themselves an "8-bit hero gangsta rock" band. That just rocks.
- The poor scooter is in the shop again, something to do with the electronic ignition inhibitor thingy. The guys at the scooter dealer have been very nice about it and came out as soon as I called them with the official Vespa van with the cute little scooter trailer in tow. I got stranded at REI and had to walk home in the rain (luckily I had just bought some warm gear) so I want to make sure they fix it this time so I don't get stuck on Bainbridge Island or somewhere out in the sticks. They're swapping out the little black box that houses the inhibitor and will be hauling it back to the dealer near my house, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed. All under warranty of course, thank god.
- I finally got around to planting my little Birds of Paradise seeds that I brought back from Hawaii (yes, there have been a couple of days during the break that I was looking for something to do). I happened to pick up these seeds at a little store in Kauai and figured what the hell, wouldn't that be fun to grow in my apartment. And of course the packaging is inviting and has these nice simple instructions on how often to water, when to put in the sun, etc, and finishes with the line "and if the temperature never goes below 65F, your plant will grow vigorously and produce fine quality flowers." How easy is that? However, the word *vigorously* must have a different meaning in that part of the world. I found a nice little footnote on some enthusiast site which states nonchalantly that "if started from seed, it takes five to seven years for blossoming to begin." Holy crap!!! So please, do stay tuned for my follow-up post, oh in 2012.
- Best Buy's return policy is EVIL. Well, it's partly my fault, but when you spend $98 on a DVD box set and find out that the complete epic series of Battlestar Galactica that you bought is actually the one from 19 freakin 78 instead of season 1 from last year like you wanted, it's a little annoying when you find they won't take it back since the shrinkwrap is missing. "But I've only been out of the store for a few hours!" I yelled. No luck. "But I bought it using TWO gift cards from relatives, what am I supposed to tell them?" I cried. No sympathy. I knew it was over when they shook their heads and said my best bet would be to try one of those internet auction sites. So if you're in the market for the complete epic series of Battlestar Galactica, check out my half.com listing :(
- Finished Tai-Pan and Shogun over the break. Man these are good books. Yeah they were written decades ago, but damn, James Clavell writes really good stories. I never imagined that 16th century Japan could be so thrilling. I must have spent 3 hours on wikipedia one rainy afternoon looking up more details on the delicate balance in the tea and opium trade between Great Britain and China and reading historical details about the feudal classes in Japan... Anyway, total page-turners these books.
- And finally lots of other time-wasting activities too numerous to babble about like playing Liberty City Stories on the PSP (I still think Liberty City is the best of the series), watching lots of movies, and doing little projects around the house.
- Oh, and I'm moving offices again. I'm moving about what seems like 100 offices down the hall (it *is* one of the longer hallways), and the new office is right across from the first office I moved into in this building 15 months ago. The razor scooter will indeed be put to good use traversing the vast distance now between me and the rest of my team. Happy new year :)
steve
November 29 Poor little monorailI got off the bus tonight at my usual stop and found myself right in the middle of the whole monorail un-entanglement mess, literally, with fire engines and cranes and police cars and all sorts of yellow police tape stretched about. In case you hadn't heard, our poor little monorail literally ground to a halt last weekend when the two trains clipped each other going around a curve and got jammed up side by side. My bus stop happens to be directly under this special spot, and just as the bus left I realized they were about to try to pull the trains apart, so naturally I joined the crowd to watch the big show.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10247451/
November 23 Recent gadget changes on live.comHi folks, We've made some changes recently to live.com that may affect some of the gadgets you are writing. These changes were made in part to help alleviate some concerns around having 3rd party gadget code hosted in the live.com domain. What you'll find is that your external gadgets are now each housed in their own IFRAME (more on the implications of this later) in a separate domain (gadgets.start.com). We considered the idea of hosting all gadgets in a single frame and providing a tab at the top of the page that lets you switch between internal and external modules, but we felt that this solution with individual iframes gives the best balance since gadgets of all types can still be intermingled on the page. We do have plans to add tabs to let you organize more content on your page, and we didn't feel that adding a one-off tab for this particular scenario was the right solution. Most utility methods will continue to work, such as the parsing routines and utility functions like ObjectToString. Your gadget will also receive all the same constructor arguments as before, such as p_args.onDashboard, p_args.module, and any gadget-specific parameters that were serialized out using the gadget-level storage method described in an earlier post (here). The gadgets.start.com domain is cnamed to www.live.com, so all network requests and back-end calls will continue to work as before. If you are using the Start.Const variables for making network requests, you won't need to change any code for this, as these have all been updated to point to the correct location depending on the domain. The session id in the live.com cookie is also automatically written to the gadgets.start.com domain before your gadget is instantiated, so you don't need to worry about network requests not having the correct session id. In general, we've done a lot of work to make sure your gadgets operate in almost the same environment they were operating in before, and for the most part they should continue to work without any changes. With that said, here are some issues you may experience: - GetPreference and SetPreference will no longer be supported - sizing issues - scroll bars in Firefox - internal APIs may stop working GetPreference / SetPreference We've decided to discontinue supporting GetPreference and SetPreference for gadgets due to the performance issues it has now that they are hosted in iframes. To understand why this is an issue, it helps to understand the iframe approach. Every 3rd party gadget that is hosted in an iframe is essentially running in a scaled-down version of the live.com framework. To get the preferences into that frame, a round-trip to the server would need to be made to fetch the preferences for each gadget this is instantiated. Since the iframe url is on a separate domain, the iframe instance can't interact with the parent application so none of this data can be shared. The only other alternative would be to parameterize the data on the iframe source URL, which isn't really feasible in this case. We will continue to support gadget-level storage using the method that was posted earlier. Note that there is a bug in our ObjectToString code that may cause Out of Memory errors or Stack Overflow errors as the code ends up going into an infinite loop. Unfortunately, the solution we posted for gadget-level serialization may very well cause this to occur, and we've posted a fix on that thread to resolve it. If you are seeing this error, please check to see if you are using the updated version. Resize issues Obviously, with any iframe solution, there may potentially be annoying resize issues. We've done our best to make this as small of an issue as possible by automatically resizing the iframe to the correct size whenever the gadget content changes. However, from some of your gadgets that I've been testing, we know there are some corner cases that will need some polishing, so we've added a Resize() method on the p_args.module object to let you force a resize. If you are experiencing truncation issues, we recommend that you call this Resize() method any time the gadget content changes. For example, as the result of an network request or user interaction. Again, this shouldn't be necessary in most cases, but we've provided the method just in case. Note that we don't currently have a solution for this in Firefox, as explained in the next section. Scroll bars in Firefox Resizing an iframe from within the iframe content is not currently possible in Firefox, so you will see scroll bars and a fixed gadget height on your gadgets there. We're looking at ways to make this better, such as including a custom height in the manifest xml that would allow you to specify the preferred height, or adding a drag grip or +/- buttons on the gadget that would allow the user to resize the iframe manually. We're not thrilled with the scroll bars either, and we're definitely pursuing a better experience. Please bear with us for now. Internal APIs Internal APIs, such as DisplayReaderPage, will no longer work since these will no longer have the right context (e.g. there is no reader page in the stand-alone gadget iframe). We're looking into possible solutions for those of you using methods such as these. One upside to the iframe approach is that gadgets can be tested in a stand-alone environment by visiting the iframe url. For example, visiting http://gadgets.start.com/gadget.aspx?manifestUrl=url will instantiate only the gadget contents without chrome. This is helpful for testing memory leaks and for doing other debugging. We have some cool debugger tools in the works that will let you take more advantage of this as well, such as call stack windows and trace output windows, so stay tuned. Thanks! steve November 14 In love with Na Pali coastI took Monday and Tuesday off and decided to go to Kauai (yes it was last minute, and yes I now owe a lot of money on my credit card). But oh my god, this place is beautiful. A friend of mine in MSN shopping told me to take a helicopter ride to start off the trip and it was awesome advice. Not only was the ride utterly freakin' surreal, it made it easy to pick out a bunch of places to investigate when I got back to sweet mother earth.
Some quick stats:
- oldest of the main Hawaiian islands - tallest sea cliffs in the world - consists of swamps, deep canyons, rain forests, coral reefs, and lots of beaches - the peak in the middle is the wettest spot on earth (450 inches a year) - 87% of the island is undeveloped (75% isn't even accessible by foot) It's so wet on top of Mount Wai`ale`ale that it's not even possible to hike up there. It's basically a swamp. On a mountain. (I left off the statistic that Kauai has the highest swamp in the world). And because of all the rain and steep canyon walls, there are these spectacular waterfalls *everywhere*. One has a 3,000 foot drop. And it doesn't take much to realize that if there is literally a torrential amount of rain centered in one spot, and a lot of sunshine everywhere else, and a hell of a lot of water vapor coming off of all these waterfalls, that there must be some truly gorgeous rainbows every where you look. And normally this would be exactly the case, except that on this day, it didn't rain at all! Just a tiny cloud. So we didn't see a single rainbow (bigger clouds started forming on the way back *down* though, dammit). The point is that the island is raw, uncut and pretty much drop-dead gorgeous. The girl next to me said she almost had tears in her eyes during the last part of the trip, and another girl agreed. We were all wearing these fancy Bose noise-cancelling headphones so that we could hear the pilot and each other, and the pilot had a, shall I say, *majestic* soundtrack piped into everyone's ears as we were flying around, so it really didn't take much to push you over the edge. Though the Top Gun theme was a little cliche I think.
The funny thing was that at one point I had a flashback of Halo, specifically that map on Halo where you storm the beach (level 3?). I am now certain that this map was directly inspired by Kauai. If you haven't played it, you start off by storming a beach and exploring the map with your jeep, and you quickly find that you're on a circular island, ringed by beaches with high, lush green cliffs all the way around. There is also a cute little arch that forms a tunnel between the cliffs and the water that you can speed your jeep back and forth through. Some time ago, this dude made a video called the Warthog Jump (I actually knew this dude from the old IRC days, and I met him in Seattle and he kicked my ass at DOA3 and hasn't talked to me since). This guy creatively exploited the physics engine in Halo in such away that he was able to essentially blast the Master Chief, and more importantly, your point of view as the game player, way up into space. He made of video of this trick (near the arch as a matter of fact), and as Master Chief is sailing gracefully up thousands of feet into the sky, you got a neat birds-eye view of the entire island that you knew so well from having walked around it so much, and it's truly a sight to see.
The point is that while we were flying around, we circle over the top of Mount Wai`ale`ale, the highest point on the (circular) island, and I had this mental image of being Master Chief, sailing gracefully up over the whole island. And I couldn't help think, my god, this is Halo level 3! Awesome!! And then thinking what a geek I am. The pilot then pointed out a suspicously familiar looking arch on the northern part of the island, so I feel pretty damn good about wagering my bets. Lucikly Master Chief didn't drop out of the sky like he normally did in the video and the we continued merrily along on our way.
I spent the rest of the day putting around the island, having a swim with a bunch of snorklers (I didn't have a snorkel), enjoying a big plate of Hawaiian food, then hiking around Na Pali cliffs until I couldn't bear to get my shoes any muddier than they already were (I wasn't very prepared for hiking). I had deju vu again, this time of playing Riven while I was hiking around the cliffs, especially at one point when I stopped for breath and could hear the chirps of the birds all around, echoing off the cliffs, and the sound of the waves crashing against the rocks far below. How geeky is that. Plans for tomorrow include tackling more of the hike at Na Pali cliffs, a visit to Waimea Canyon, and maybe more snorkling (with a snorkel this time).
Some pics of the helicopter ride at http://www.flickr.com/photos/steverider/sets/1363268/. And look for the chickens. They're everywhere. It's crazy.
steve
November 07 Start.com goes "live"!Last week we officially announced Windows Live, and boy, has there been a lot of hubbub on this. I've seen a lot of people asking "well, ok cool, but what the heck is it really? Is it just another portal, cuz like, dude, portals are so 1996". Folks who have been keeping up with us on start.com have also been asking good questions, such as: "is start.com the same as live.com? are you guys the same team building this? is start.com going away? should I use live.com or should i use start.com? do gadgets work between both?" Tho nobody has asked the question, "how the hell did a company of 50,000+ employees keep the live.com domain a secret?" (seriously, this amazed me). Of course, my buddies who knew I was working on it were like, "hey man, is it really going to be on live.com? cuz, um, i see some other dude's content up there and you guys are supposed to ship in like 2 weeks." Yes, it's been that crazy.
Yes, Live.com is basically a (personal) Web aggregator, but the primary difference between it vs. Bloglines and MyYahoo is that the gadgets hosted on Live can be developed by anyone. So, Live.com is indeed very much an online version of Windows in that it is a platform for hosting multiple apps that you use frequently to do or view things that you care about. And ultimately, you can use Live.com on any device from just about anywhere. Therefore, Live.com becomes an “attention aggregator” for me.
Expect to see other parts of the Windows Live experience made available as gadgets, little mini-applications that can be pulled into the live.com homepage. Expect to see a whole damn *buffet* of these gadgets, some written by us, most written by the community. And expect to be able to view and *use* these gadgets on various devices whenever you want (while *any* device is a nice goal, it has a little bit too much of a marketing ring to it for me. We'll try to make it available on as many devices as makes sense :) ).
For folks asking about start.com, here are some answers:
1) Live.com *is* the same technology as start.com. In fact, we pushed pretty hard to keep live.com fairly similar to start.com, since we've been baking start.com for a while now and we know what's been working and what hasn't. It's easy to get carried away when you have a blank slate to build something new, and there were a lot of ideas coming from all over for what live.com *might* have been, and some of them were pretty good and some were downright horrible. I'm a big believer in keeping it simple, sticking with what works, getting back to basics, giving people what they really want, and avoiding all the flashiness and pretty stuff that looks good in demos but sucks in practice. Basically we're just keepin' it real yo, if you know what I mean.
2) Yes, the same team that build start.com also built live.com. Of course there were a *ton* of other great folks that helped really pull it together, like our buddies from the search team, our friends in hotmail, all the international testers and operations folks, Jeff Sandquist's team for making a huge update to the microsoftgadgets.com site to support communities and forums at the 11th freakin' hour, and various other folks in MSN like the design team and our friends in marketing. Our main focus right now, besides fixing all the bugs and keeping it stable, is to start the process of really scaling out our team, because man, we have a hell of a lot of stuff in the pipeline. It's time to scale, baby, scale.
3) No, start.com is not going away. While you may not see as *much* activity on start.com in the near future, we made damn sure that start.com would stay around as a place where we could keep pushing the envelope. Think of start.com as the little incubation arm of live.com.
4) Should you use live.com or start.com? Well that's up to you. Live.com is only 4 characters to type compared to the oh-so-much-longer 5 characters (tho start can be typed on one hand, hmm). Besides that, Start.com will always be a little more experimental. Expect to see weird and wacky stuff, out of which come good ideas that make you go "damn that's cool", and the inevitable bad ideas that make you think "man this sucks, what the hell were they thinking?".
5) Gadgets should work on live.com and start.com. There may be some differences from time to time as we open up new APIs on start.com, but in general it's the same code running on both.
I think that's it for now. Besides scaling out the team, we are working on a bunch of bugs and stability issues fpr the very short future, like finishing supoprt for Firefox (I hate that we always leave this until last), better back button support when paging through search results and returning to live.com, and other various things that we didn't have time to fix before we shipped. Bear with us, we hate having these bugs too and we're working on them as fast as we can. Keep the feedback coming!
steve
October 06 Aw yeah!Check this bad boy out! (yes, I do appreciate the irony of referring to a scooter as a *bad boy*)
Picked it up last night after getting my motorcycle permit yesterday morning. Chatted with the same awkward dude at the Vespa dealer from last time, but it turns out he's really friendly and actually a great guy - just a little shy. We chatted and joked for about 2 hrs while buying the scooter and he even threw in a helmet. While we were there a girl walked in like "Oh my god, like, I sooooooooooo need a helmet, because, like, I just bought this cute little scooter off craigslist last night? right? and OH MY GOD! I soooo don't even know how to ride it! Like, I crashed it into the back of my garage last night even, haha isn't that wild?" He sold her a helmet too.
Took the scooter to work today across the 520 floating bridge which turned out to be fine. The scooter can top out around 75-80 and I had no problem keeping up with traffic at a lazy 55. I doubt I'll be doing a lot of freeway riding though, as this thing is *way* too much fun zipping around smaller streets and downtown, but it's nice to know it's there if I need it.
If the weather is nice this weekend I may take it across the ferry to Bainbridge Island and see what kind of trouble I can get into out there.
that's all for now!
stever October 05 Stever's scooter adventures (part 2)After my attempts at scooter shopping were resoundly rejected by all involved parties, my sister and I headed over to Wasabi Bistro with my old friend Kurt from Albuquerque to cry in our tiny chokko cups of warm sake. Well, I think I was the only one crying, Kurt and Cindy were too busy making fun of me about how the weathermen had predicted rain all week. But I had hope - I had spoken with the owner of Scoot About, a new scooter rental shop that rented scooters by the hour, day or week. Our weathermen are wrong half the time anyway, so I wasn't worried about rain at all.
It rained all morning. I hopped out of bed Sunday morning to find the skies completely gray. I can't even see the damn space needle it's so dark and gray out. It's now 10am, and I look around for something else to do, hoping that by noon, when Scoot About opened, the rain would have subsided somewhat.
Noon comes, and the sky is as dark and gray as ever, and I watch sadly as rivers of water continue their merry way down the street. I camp out in front of the TV and get caught up on several episodes of Wolf's Rain that I've missed, and check the weather periodically. It's not hard - i've got these enormous windows that show the dark, gray sky in all its glory, and for the next few hours there wasn't much glory to be had at all.
Around 3, however, I notice the sky getting increasingly brighter and brighter, and the rain has stopped. I grab my keys and decide to give it a shot. I meet up with Susan at Scoot About and she's awesome. We talk about scooters and Seattle and then we get down to business. She's willing to let me take a Vespa ET2 50 out for a spin, and for $100, I can keep it for 24 hrs overnight, helmet included. $35 for 1 hour, or $100 for 24 hours? Well that wasn't a hard decision. She's even willing to meet up with me on Monday to return it, even though she isn't officially open on Monday. How cool is that? After being taught proper scooter etiquette and the ways of all things scooterish, I zoomed away from the shop with a big fat grin on my face and headed directly over to Cindy's apartment to show off my new toy.
The rest of the day was filled with lots (and lots) of zooming around, as I literally rode from one end of Seattle to another. I zoomed around Ballard, zipped through Fremont, and bebop'd all over downtown. It felt like a new city! I stopped at coffee shops, boutiques, and scenic views just because I could. The simple task of seeing a place, stopping, and parking directly out front is something that cannot be overstated. When I'm visiting a new city, at some point I get that urge to just get out of the damn car and walk around, to stop and enjoy the scenery and just take it all in. With the scooter it was like being in the best of both worlds. If I saw something interesting I just zoomed off to the side of the road and stopped. There were none of those feelings of being trapped, like the way you feel in a car when you can't find a place to *put* the damn thing. It's completely changed the way I see the city. Everything seems like a possibility now! Going shopping in Capitol Hill, zooming up to Queen Anne hill, or grabbing a bite to eat in the U district doesn't seem like a chore anymore.
Around sunset I ended up on Alaskan Way by the waterfront and stopped to take a few pictures of the gorgeous sunset. It had just started to rain and the sky was black, but the sun was low enough on the horizon to be visible underneath the dark clouds, and the effect was awesome. A nice rainbow creeped up over downtown to help complete the mood. I parked the scooter back at the apartment to regroup and get something to eat. The rain was coming down pretty hard, and I was surprised by how well the scooter gripped the road.
After dinner the rain had stopped, and I spent the rest of the evening hitting some of my favorite backroads - the twisty road through the Arboretum, Interlaken boulevard up to Capitol Hill, and the switchbacks and steep hills on Queen Anne. I stopped at Dick's to grab a burger before finally heading home. I didn't want to stop!
The next morning turned out to be gorgeous, and I rode around for several more hours before finally returning the scooter to its rightful owners. I had put almost 100 miles on it and had stopped once to fill it with gas (1 entire gallon at $3.24, thank you very much).
I guess now I can say I'm officially hooked, and will hopefully get my motorcycle learner's permit soon. Check back to see how things go. Soon, I hope to be the proud owner of a brand new Vespa of my own :)
Happy scootering,
steve
October 03 No scooter for stever (yet)...My sister came by on Saturday to help me buy a Vespa. I've had my eye on the GT200 for a while. Well, ever since my friend Brian took me for a spin on his around San Francisco late one night last February. And since the only authorized Vespa dealer in the entire state of Washington is located just a few blocks from my house, we decided to ditch the car and walk over because, heck, I was going over to buy a Vespa and we could scoot back to the apartment on it! Why, oh why, do I get so excited about these things? You'd think I'd know better.
We rounded the corner of the store, looked on excitedly at the window displays, and headed inside. I must have seemed like an easy target to the ominous thunderclouds looming above, because I think it was at this point that they decided to stop doing whatever the hell thunderclouds *do*, and grouped up to figure out how to make the rest of my afternoon miserable. More on this in a moment.
sales guy: "can i help you?"
me: "hey, how's it going, I'm interested in buying a scooter, and I thought I'd come by to see what you have..."
sales guy: "..."
me: ".. so I've, uh, been looking at this exact model here *points at black GT*, I really like this one..."
sales guy: "..."
me: ".. and uh, well, I'm just trying to figure out whether to get the GT or the LX model"
sales guy: "..."
me: "... because I, uh, know that the GT model has a 200cc motor but it weighs about 80 pounds more than the LX, and uh, I want to ride it around the city but also take it on the highway. And uh, yeah well that's about it.."
After a few more awkward fits and starts, a couple of thoughts surfaced in my head. The first was that I doubted I would be buying so much as a *helmet* from these weirdos, let alone one of the most expensive scooters in the store. The second thought, which proceeded happily to make fun of me about the first thought, was that this store was the only authorized Vespa dealer in the whole god damn state, so where else was I supposed to go? At this point, a third, very clear thought surfaced in my head, which was that there would unlikely be any scooter buying today, or tomorrow, or the next day (since most scooter places are closed Sunday and Monday), or for the rest of the week for that matter. Dammit! And to think I had brought my little garage door opener with us in the hope that we'd be scooting back to the apartment in the next hour or so.
After a few more minutes of conversation, my sister and I took a brief pow wow in the back of the store to figure out our next move. We decided to head to Big People Scooters, a little vintage scooter store just south of downtown to see if we could get a test ride. Our mood was a lot more somber, and the thunderclouds had finished their huddle and had decided to get down to businesses, the nice sunny day going the way of dark black skies, and by the time we got back to the apartment it had started to show signs of rain.
The guy at Big People Scooters was much friendlier, and I learned a few more things. I asked about a test ride and he said well, let's take a look. We followed him out into the middle of the street, where he rubbed the heel of his boot against the pavement, looked down, looked up at the sky and exclaimed that yeah, the street was a little too wet for a test ride. It's pouring down rain, so this guy got some points in my book for going that extra mile :) I asked if we could maybe get a test ride the next day and learned that they only do test rides on Saturdays. Well, crap. But he did mention that a nice lady had opened a scooter rental store near Greenlake, and that we should give it a shot. As we headed back to Seattle, the skies proceeded to dump an entire week's worth of rain on us, just to make sure we woudln't try any more funny business, so we decided to give it up for the day.
Stay tuned for tomorrow's episode, where stever gets to ride on a Vespa for hours and hours on end! Hooray!
September 16 Start.com at the PDCLots of great stuff to post about from the PDC. We've been up to our eyeballs the last 3 days talking to customers, writing and shipping code, meeting with folks from various teams, giving our talk on start.com and generally just getting involved with the community. And of course partying and schmoozing with folks from companies like Newsgator, Google, and Technorati during the downtime. The rooftop lounge/bar on the top of the Standard hotel is a great retreat :)
We shipped our developer platform at http://www.start.com/pdc this week, with details on how to write your own Gadgets at http://www.start.com/developer. Thanks goes to Jeff Sandquist, who secured a quiet room for us where we were able to hole up for a few hours and build and release the developer site. Thanks Jeff!
Sanaz has been busy meeting with other teams, folks in the community and with other companies on how we can make this all work better together. She'll be on the "Future of RSS: Beyond Blogging" panel at 8:30am tomorrow, along with folks from Amazon and Yahoo. Come by the panel if you're at the PDC. Scott has posted a great set of articles about the developer platform, how to build Gadgets, and his thoughts on how all this is shaping the wave of web development for the future. The other half of the team back in Redmond (hey guys!) are working on some really cool stuff that we'll be releasing very shortly.
Build a gadget. Seriously, try it out. Then send us your gadget and your feedback. Here's a screenshot of a flickr photo album gadget that an attendee whipped up in a few minutes immediately following our session. Way cool!
September 07 All start, all the timeWhile we've been busy getting ready for the PDC, we shipped start.com to the web last week with no slashes, which basically means that we've stopped getting emails from frustrated folks who tried start.com after hearing it from a friend and only finding our teaser page, since their friend was kind enough *not* to tell them they needed to put a /1, /2 or /3 after it. :)
But this last release was by far the most fun. George, Noor and Venkat are now on board *officially*, which effectively doubled the size of the core team. All have been involved in some way or the other on start over the last several months, or almost a year in Noor and Venkat's case. Our group operates a bit differently from other groups at Microsoft and some of them still have obligations to other products that they need to attend to. So around 5 or 6 pm each day, we trickle over into my office and set up camp for the evening. All the email for the day is finished, all the meetings have been attended to, and we hunker down over glowing LCD panels and laptops working on features, writing code and fixing bugs for the next few hours, sometimes late into the night, whatever folks can afford. It's awesome! If you've ever been in that kind of working environment you know the satisfaction that comes from working that closely with your peers, finishing a feature, showing it off, getting feedback, tweaking it, and then being able to cross the feature off the big whiteboard, all monster-garage style. We have an office move coming up and we're tempted to just knock out a few walls and hang whiteboards all the way around, and throw in a few more LCD panels to boot so folks can tap into them with their laptops. I can't wait :)
August 29 The incredible lightness of, er, floating around in a poolI've never lived near enough to a pool to actually understand the attraction of dunking your body into a gigantic bathtub of chlorine and other exotic chemicals while sputtering about with several dozen other people that probably didn't bother to take a shower before they displaced several cubic meters of water around you. I've seen, no, actually, I've *experienced* what can happen when the pH balance goes out of whack, and that nice-looking fish tank of yours with your cute little fish goes a most awful shade of green.
My very few *serious* interactions with a pool per se have been so few that I could easily count them on 2-3 hands. Well maybe 4. The word *apprehension* certainly comes to mind, but I would hate to have my mother and father read this and feel some kind of regret for not having a pool of their own in the backyard that I could have bonded with. Being in Seattle for so long I've forgotten if having your own pool in the backyard is really that common of an occurrence at all, or if it's just something that just happens to you when you move to Florida or Arizona to retire.
I do remember seeing very tiny pictures of a chubby little fat, happy baby, joyfully doggy-paddling around, underwater even, and of course that baby was me. I think everyone starts off with a natural tendency of simply wanting to float, and I believe it wears off right around the time when the parts of your brain that are responsible for alerting you to clear and present danger, like vertigo, and *drowning*, kick in.
My somewhat random, but limited experiences with a pool have usually involved wearing these kinds of ridiculous goggles with what amounts to a huge rubber band strapped around your head, that never really seems to fit right and always pulls out a few hairs on the way on and off no matter how far you stretch it. And was it just *my* goggles that always seemed to have sprung a leak and fill up halfway with water? Thereby requiring adjustments *mid-swim* while madly doggy-paddling in the deep end trying to keep your head above water, lest you end up smacking into a wall or finding yourself underneath someone diving off the diving board since everything had become all red and blurry, and generally just in a worse predicament than if you had just shut your eyes or kept them fully open underwater in the first place. And of course the act of dumping all the water out requires pulling the massive rubber band thing over your hair again and starting the painful process all over again.
I did the nose plugs thing too, which I never fully get the hang of, unless making it feel like you can't breathe was just a simple side effect that most people could shrug off. I rather *enjoy* breathing, and intentionally plugging up one of only two incoming sources of air and reducing it to a single point of failure seems to be toying dangerously and unnecessarily with nature. I'm pretty sure we have 2 openings on our face for a reason.
So I either had chlorine water up my nose, chlorine water in the eyes, or a rubber band thingy pulling out my hair. Not to mention being ever subjected to peer pressure from friends and bullies, awkward locker room situations, shivering for an hour after getting out of the pool, and always the general feeling that I was *just* on the verge of not being able to breathe. I even subjected myself to sheer terror by standing (and jumping) off the high-dive, which you quickly find out is not a place you can back down from in the presence of half your peer group from your elementary or middle school. I wouldn't say I'm *afraid* of heights, I just generally like to have gravity on my side.
You're probably wondering if there is a *point* to all this, and I can happily say that there is.
I seem to have unexpectedly found myself in the presence of a pool! One that requires me to simply walk out my apartment door, into the elevator, and out again into the smell of chlorine and the sound of splashing water and all that is pool-ness. So I've been slowly experimenting with going down to the pool at all hours and all times of day, and you know what? *No one uses the damn thing*. Now I'm still pretty new to the apartment and it's very possible that everyone just simply knows something that I don't. Like how you don't sign up to be a caretaker at a huge hotel for the winter, a hotel with a shrub maze and shrub animals. The lights are always off when I go to the pool, and the rippling water *does* make these kind of spooky reflections from the moonlight. But this pool is great, it's on the 7th floor overlooking the city, and has a hot tub to boot.
So I've been trying out pool-like things that I never got to try out at the public pool. Like something as simple as floating on your back. Trying something like this with my friends would have been on the level of dare-devilish, as it would have promptly resulted in one of my friends (or the local bullies) cannon-balling into the pool, *onto my stomach*, and knocking the sweet jesus wind out of me (the memory of the event is very clear).
And tonight I think I got a glimmer of why people like their damn pools. I've never felt so relaxed! Of course I still do get tired out after flailing and splashing around like an idiot in an attempt to do something akin to a "lap". But the rest of the time I've been floating around on my back or I try to go soaring underwater like a bird, holding my breath all the way across, slowly exhaling as I go. And after several trips back and forth of this and just feeling generally *good* about everything, I realized that this was how I remember being taught to breathe when you are meditating. Sloooooooowly breathe in, hold it, sloooooowly breathe out, relax, then repeat. You can't help but doing that when you're floating around underwater.
So if you see me with a stupid grin on my face and just generally chilled out, it's probably because I've been swimming :). It goes back to something I've been thinking about lately. It was when my friend May-Li and I were talking about how people seem to get so caught up with life that they miss out on the journey and all the cool little bits along the way. She mentioned a book that she'd read that talked about the pleasure of slowness, which I think is a great little phrase. I'll leave you with the same quote she left with me (oh and go check out her web page. She's a hell of an artist):
She says about the book: "...it opens up with a snippet about how fast people go these days. it points out that when you want to remember something and you're walking, you slow down. and now everyone is so obsessed with speed... it's like they're all trying to forget something..."
And in the book, the author says: "why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars?"
See ya in the pool!
steve
August 15 Scott Isaacs about "next-gen" appsScott Isaacs from MSN Spaces is working on a series of posts about the "next-gen" development pattern and how the framework is enabling us to write deep, rich interactive apps that are both scalable and highly performant. He kicks off the series of posts here, and I just noticed he wrote part ii a few hours ago. This is secret saucy kind of stuff guys, it includes some of our core tenets and philosophies which are driving the way we are building these things, so you should definitely check it out :) He totally nails it by the way.
By the way, we'll be hosting a talk about start.com and the framework at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles next month, which is going to be awesome. I can't wait to chat with other folks about what we're doing and what's going on in the industry, and get people interested in helping us out too :)
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