Paul Hammond's Blog

A while ago I came across this fantastic video of two guys singing along to “I Want It That Way”.  Well, they are back with the second installment, this time with “As Long As You Love Me”.

Classic.  Especially the dude in the back playing a computer game, apparently oblivious to the whole thing!

Microsoft has a ton of buildings in the Redmond area of Washington.  They are split into a couple of different campus areas.  The office I visit when I am here is on a smaller campus that has 5 buildings and a cafeteria, and it is where all of the MSN folks live.

Parking is usually tight at the campus, but today I had to do something I have never done before.  John and I drove out to Issaquah to pick something up during lunch and when we returned, we spent about 35 or 40 minutes repeatedly cruising the 6 car parks on campus trying to find a space.  Nothing.  Nada.  Zip.  I have never seen it like that before.  In the end, we had to drive to another building about a mile away and park there, and then call a shuttle bus to take us back to our campus.

All in all, the act of finding a parking space and returning to our desks took longer than the rest of the errand!  And of course, when we want to leave we’ll have to call for another shuttle and make our way back to the other building just to pick the car up.  Is that nuts, or what?

I am in Seattle on business at the moment.  In fact, in the last couple of months, I have been travelling for either work or pleasure quite a lot.  One thing that has always frustrated me a little is the lack of good wireless facilities in the hotels where I stay.  Sure there is almost always an excellent wired broadband offering, but I always feel it would be great to be able to work wherever I felt comfortable.  In the one hotel I stayed at that did have wireless, I got a lousy connection that barely stayed alive long enough to read an email…

Anyway, I am on business right now with my friend John.  For a while now, his laptop has been slowly dying.  Yesterday morning at 5am local time the inevitable jetlag had him awake and trying to get some work done.  However, his network card had finally given up, and he was not able to get a connection to the internet, which in our business is not great news.  Finally I got a text from him at about 6.45 saying “can we leave yet, I am bored”, and we duly headed off for an enormous IHOP breakfast. 

On the drive over the 520 bridge, John started talking about “some Apple thing that might do wireless” that we eventually decided was an AirPort product.  On arrival at the office, we checked out the Apple site and sure enough, the AirPort Express seemed to be the gadget to solve his problems.  It essentially plugs into the wall, you plug in an ethernet cable, and it creates a mini wireless network.  It also allows streaming of audio from a machine running iTunes somewhere else in the vicinity.  It sounded good, but the price was a little steep – $129.

Once work was done for the day, we took an executive decision and drove to Fry’s Electronics in Renton.  This is a Geek Superstore, selling everything from PC components and games machines to TVs and in-car audio – the average geek could spend hours in there.  The average geek with a credit card could spend thousands in there.

The plan was to buy some sort of cheap PCMCIA wired network card so that his connectivity issues were solved at least, and then take a look at the AirPort.  Sure enough, it still looked like a nugget of well-designed and useful Apple goodness.  However, we stumbled across something else that was even better; something that you would have sworn had a market, but that I had surprisingly never seen before.  A Wireless Travel Router.

The NetGear WGR101 54mpbs Wireless Travel Router to be precise.  The box says:

• Pocket-sized – ideal for taking with you when you travel.
• Dual use – external switch for selecting between individual and group use.
• “Creates a wireless network from an internet connection in a hotel room or conference room”.

The deal-maker was the price – $49.90.  Way less than half the price of the AirPort.  John and I both bought one!!

And this thing rocks.  It is completely configurable, so you can set up the SSID the network uses, includes security (WEP and WPA, as well as MAC address filtering), NAT routing, and an SPI firewall.  You can even turn off SSID broadcast so that others cannot even see it.  I tweaked my settings with the included network cable, plugged in the hotel broadband cable and I was off and running – simple as that.  And it really is pocket sized – just tiny! – and it comes with a small case to keep it protected in transit.

If you travel a lot, or perhaps even arrange conferences and need multiple connectivity from a single internet source, this thing is a “must have” gadget.  If you are travelling with colleagues and your rooms are fairly close, you can share one internet connection and save yourself $9.95 per night on the broadband charges.

[Post written wirelessly whilst tucked up in bed…  ]

UPDATE: I just found out that this thing costs £49.99 on Amazon.co.uk!  That makes it a cool gadget AND a bargain at $49.90…

I have posted a couple of times before about FolderShare, and it’s recent purchase by Microsoft.  I just wanted to add two comments:

1) it is now totally free.  I will be refunded a pro-rated amount for the remainder of my subscription year.  This is excellent news, and if you didn’t sign up already, then you no longer have an excuse not to do so.

2) they removed one of the best features – differential analysis of files prior to transfer.  Before the MSFT purchase, FolderShare would be very intelligent about how it transferred files, often only transferring the changed parts of the file to save download time.  As someone who has a number of 25Mb plus files and only a 512kbps DSL line at home, i have now gone back to “multiple minutes” of download time for each change to one of those files, instead of a couple of seconds.  Microsoft, please add this feature back in!

My colleague Matt sent round a link the other day to a Stanford paper on Light Field Photography.  These geniuses have built a plenoptic hand held camera that takes a 4D light field picture in a single exposure.  It is all very technical, but it essentially means you can re-focus a single picture to different depths in post-production.

Rather than duplicate the images from the site here, why not click through and check it out yourself.  There is a sequence of 5 images of a crowd on the homepage here.  On the gallery page, there are a number of videos of the images being changed right before your eyes.

For the technically inclined, there is also a copy of the paper there too: Light Field Photography with a Hand-held Plenoptic Camera.

Mike Torres was asking how to integrate the Windows Desktop Search / MSN Search toolbar with the search on the new Windows Live homepage –  http://www.live.com/.

Well, I can help with that…

First, open up the Desktop Search options dialog (you can do this by right clicking the little magnifying glass tray icon and selecting Desktop Search Options).  On the General tab, there are options for the “Web search service”.  You need to switch your option from “MSN Search” to “Other search service” and then enter the URL http://www.live.com/?q=$w.

And you’re all set.

I have been using FolderShare for a while, and I love it.  I love it enough to shell out $99 a year for the premium service.  Turns out that Microsoft purchased FolderShare today.

This is great news in many respects – and as a Microsoft employee I hope I get to use the service for free now!    I hope also that partners such as Iomega can continue to support the FolderShare service natively in their hardware – being able to have “hot” backups of all of your files on a drive you can simply unplug and take with you if you need to is awesome. 

If you haven’t looked at FolderShare yet, you should.  It functions excellently as a way of backing up your data between many machines, as well as a really convenient way of just having your “stuff” ready to be used on whichever machine you happen to be working on.

The IE Developer Toolbar has been refreshed with some new features and bug fixes.

The details from the download page state:

This version of the Developer Toolbar is an updated version of Beta 1; it was updated on October 31, 2005. Several issues are resolved and some feedback has been incorporated.
-- Element bounding box calculations are more accurate.
-- Outlining of elements is now significantly faster.
-- The image report no longer crashes.
-- Installation no longer requires a reboot. (Beta 1 users will still be prompted to reboot because the current installer invokes the original uninstaller).
-- The minimize and maximize buttons now refresh after the "Resize" command.
-- The "Select element by click" bounding box is now more visible on pages with blue backgrounds.
-- The attributes editor (middle pane) now has variable width fields (for example, you can type beyond the width of the box).
-- Fixes for some pages that do not trigger OnDocumentComplete events.
-- Fixed the continuity of using "element" rather than "tag" in the menus.
-- The ruler is easier to use and to scroll.
-- Enabling/disabling images no longer restarts Internet Explorer.
-- The Resize menu now contains more resolutions.
-- Editing a property is now much less likely to let keystrokes "leak" back to IE and navigate without the user expecting it.
-- Trying to use the ruler while IE is in "folder mode" should no longer crash the browser.

New features and functionality have also been added.
-- Default styles (in the third pane) now appear in gray, separating them from explicit styles.
-- The ruler dialog is always populated with the ruler information if there is just one ruler.
-- The ruler dialog now describes advanced features.
-- "Undo all" reverts the page to the initial state.
-- You can now remove all outlines.

Enjoy!

I just returned from a long weekend in Boston with my wife.  Before returning to work for Microsoft back in October 2001, I spent about 15 months working for a company based in Boston and travelled to the city many times on business.

Boston is one of my favourite cities in the world.  Comparatively speaking it is quite a small city, and it has a great community feel to it.  Unlike in London, where people keep themselves to themselves, you will often find conversations in the most unlikely places, and the people of Boston are very friendly and welcoming.

This time around, we managed to actually take in some of the more “tourist-y” things the city has to offer.  We spent an hour touring the city and the river Charles on a Boston Duck Tour.  If you are not familiar with Duck Tours (a lot of cities are now doing them) this involves riding around the streets of town in an amphibious vehicle before plunging in the river and taking a cruise in a local body of water – all narrated as you guy by an eclectic driver.  The name “Duck Tours” comes from the military code for the vehicle – the DUKW.  As well as being great fun, it also filled in some of the knowledge gaps I had in my head about Boston’s heritage.

We visited the Museum of Fine Arts, which was excellent.  I was most impressed with the display of art owned by collector William I. Koch.  This is a man who buys art and antiques based purely on his love of the piece.  There is no specific “genre”, or “era” or partiucular artist that he favours – it simply has to be art that triggers some emotion in him.  In a small collection I saw works by artists such as Dalí, Picasso, Matisse, Monet and Renoir, sculpture by Degas, as well as a collection of historic firearms.  Not being *hugely* educated in matters of art, it was fantastic to spend a small time viewing many different pieces of art, by very famous artists, that were both thought provoking and emotive in nature.

The highlight of the trip was an impromptu tour of Fenway Park.  I am a big Red Sox fan, having been converted to a baseball lover after my first couple of live games at Fenway.  We went over to visit the merchandise store to buy some typically tourist oriented souvenirs and luckily timed it just right to join the end of a tour.  We sat in the “old” seats for a while, listening to stories about the park and it’s current renovations before moving up to the monster seats on the top of the Green Monster for a great view of the park.  In a weird twist of climate, it was snowing pretty hard, but no-one seemed to care – not even the few Yankees fans that had come along for the view.  My friend John is a Mets fan.  For the first time in quite a while, the Mets are playing at Fenway next June in a 3 game series.  I am going to have to talk to him some more about a possible field trip!  My feeling is that we should be looking to get some seats close to left field…

I found a new drink in Starbucks.  Sadly they are only available in New England right now.  Maple Lattes.  A regular Latte, with maple syrup and whipped cream.  It is like drinking a pancake.  BRING IT OVER TO ENGLAND PLEASE STARBUCKS!

We stayed in a hotel called the Charlesmark Hotel, on Boylston Street right opposite the Public Library.  The location is excellent, really convenient for all of Back Bay, as well as being right by Copley T station on the Green Line.  The hotel was refurbished a couple of years ago, and the new bar area was being prepared for a November 1st opening.  As a “boutique” hotel, the rooms were a little smaller than some I have stayed in, but the personal service and room quality was worth the money I think.  I would definitely look at staying there next time I visit. 

Here is a picture of me at Fenway, atop the Green Monster.  In the snow.