EricScho's Blog

Tsunami Relief

I've noticed a lot of bloggers and companies a like banding together to help the victims around the Indian Ocean. It's a mind boggling disaster. David Weekly, they guy who runs IMSmarter, is willing to match peoples donations up to 50% of his December revenues. Awesome to see people chipping in like this.

Make Firefox much faster

Check this tweak out. I'm still really busy but I thought I'd drop this on here so everyone else can enjoy it and I don't forget it.

Been 110% busy

Been a little more than busy lately. Waxy.org has some interesting stuff regarding the Tsunamis.

Do something nice

I left my fiancée's home last night at about one in the morning after having a good talk with her dad. Her dad and I started off a little rocky but it's worked out pretty well and the last year or so we have gotten pretty close, that is a different story though.

I pick up hitchhikers whenever I feel the urge to do so and when there is nobody else with me. Most of the time it's someone who just got out of the prison and is trying to get to Eastern Washington or a drunk that stumbled out of a bar or if it's early enough someone headed to the bar with some lame excuse such as "I think my kid is there and I need to go get them." Most of the time I pick them up because I'm bored and it's nice to have someone to talk to, most conversations go something like this

Me: Where you headed?
Them: The **** away from here.
Me: alright I'll take you to the bottom of the mountain\Everett\Snohomish\Monroe (depending on where "the **** away from here" is.
Them: You have a lighter/smoke?
Me: No, don't smoke or drink in here, you'll have to wait till you get out, it's only 5-10 minutes away.
[Lots of awkward silence, maybe some talk about how they are unemployed or they were trying to hook up with their ex-wife and she kicked them out of the house at 2am. Maybe a little sales pitch about how I should buy a car from them or whatever the hell else they want to get rid of, some of them are quite persistent. I've learned about all the bars in Snohomish County that you can get into without an ID. Great stuff... really.]

So I picked this kid up, and asked him where he was headed he told me that he was going to, if I remember the name of the hospital correctly, Skagit Valley Hospital in Mount Vernon, "my girlfriend is hurt". Mount Vernon is a little out of my way, here is the route to where I was destined, here is the route to where he was headed. I thought about it for a second and checked my gas gage, I'd have to stop to get some, then I told him that I'd take him. I just had some coffee and didn't really think it was a good idea to leave a kid 25 miles away from his house and hope that he makes it alright. He was quite relieved at that point and told me how him and his mother had just gotten into an argument and she wouldn't take him because she had to work early in the morning, he said he waited till she went to sleep and bailed.

While we were driving we talked about our ladies, he talked about the school he went to in Spokane (a boarding school), he told me what he wanted to study when he went to college (radiation therapy). He asked me numerous intelligent questions about how to get into a decent school; I told him there were three ways, grades, standardized test scores, and starting with community college. We talked about interviewing for a job and being successful; I told him that interviewing was all about presentation and showing that you cared about working for the company and that you had a passion for the work rather than for the pay check and I told him that being successful was a mindset and that it you wanted to be successful at work it had to be more than a job it had to be a passion. If it's not your passion it will be someone else's and they will be more successful because of it, that's my personal view anyway.

While we were driving I kept hoping that we were not close to the hospital because I was enjoying our conversation and I could tell this kid was enjoying himself. He didn't even know about programs like the community college programs, he thought that because he had not done well his Freshman year that he wasn't going to be able to do what he wanted with his life because he wants a career that pretty much requires a degree. I couldn't believe it, from what he was saying it sounded like the boarding school he was going to had really changed him but at the same time I felt like maybe his parent(s) hadn't changed how they treated him.

We got to the hospital around 2:30 am and I dropped him off; told him to call his mom in the morning, gave him a little bit of money to get something to eat with and I'm hoping he used a bit of it to buy his girl a flower, told him to do something nice for someone, turned around and headed home.

I didn't get his name, I'm horrible about introductions, but I did give him my card in case he needs anything or just wants to talk. I can't help but wonder if without even knowing his name I know more about what he wants to do with his life and what his current goals and aspirations are than his parents. If his mom would have driven him she would be short a little sleep and full of information about how her son wants to succeed, I don't think anything fills a parent with more pride than listening to their children talk about how they want to do well for themselves and for their family, instead some guy that doesn't know his name and will probably never see him again heard it.

Your children are crying out are you taking the time to listen or are you taking a nap?

Personal Area Network (PAN)

There has been a lot of talk recently spurred by Scoble calling for Microsoft to develop a media player "differently".

I think that there is something that people are missing in this space, device awareness or what I like to refer to as a PAN, my devices don't know about each other and it bugs me. Here is what I want to see and I'd love to hear your input on in this area.

I will list what I want to happen in specific situations or how I want specific things to work. I think this will illustrate what I'm talking about better than me trying to cover the technical details.

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Scenario:

I'm listening to MP3's and I receive a call on my cell phone.

Desired happenings:

I would like my MP3 player to pause automatically so that I could hear my cell phone ringing or so that I could reach for my phone without having to also pause my music. In a perfect world my MP3 player would double as a Bluetooth headset so that my music would pause, the call could be answered and when completed the music would begin again. All without having to reach for a phone or change headsets. For now though I would be happy with a MP3 player that simply paused when a call began and played when the call ended.

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Scenario:

I'm listening to MP3's and working on my laptop and the song changes or a I receive a phone call on my cell phone.

Desired happenings:

I would like to see MSN style toast alerts for actions like those described in the scenario. It would be nice to see which song I was listening to on my MP3 player or who was calling without having to look at those devices. Another interesting function might be play list syncing where I sit down at my laptop listening to MP3's and my laptop prompts me to play the same song in my play list, which is synced from my MP3 player or some sort of similar function. I usually do not plug my MP3 player into my laptop do anything besides sync songs though. More on syncing later.

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Scenario:

I download a song or rip a CD to my laptop.

Desired happenings:

The songs automatically sync with my MP3 player, no need for wires.

---

Scenario:

I choose to make a call on my cell phone and I navigate to the phone book.

Desired happenings:

I'd like to have an option to navigate the contact list on my PDA or on my laptop if it's available.

---

Scenario:

I have my MP3 player in my pocket or in a case and I want to change the song playing.

Desired happenings:

I'd like to see a very nice small remote for my MP3 player and maybe even be able to control it from my phone which is typically more accessible than my MP3 player. I do not really appreciate the IPOD remote that you can purchase, it's a little big and I'd like to see a scroll wheel or something.

---

Scenario:

I'm with a group of friends listening to MP3's.

Desired happenings:

I should be able to stream the audio that I am listening to my friends within range, and I should be able to stream it to stereos that are nearby also.

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Scenario:

I take a digital photo and it is saved to the memory card in my camera.

Desired happenings:

I should be able to access this data wirelessly from my phone and send a loved one a picture message or an email.

---

These are just a couple of ideas that I came up with while thinking of my personal ideal situation. I want my devices to know about each other and I want them to share resources with each other to provide me, the user, with an seamless user experience. I don't want to know where the information is coming from. I simply want it to work.

I know that there are technical hurdles that would have to be cleared to achieve a solution like this, but I do not see why any one of these features would be impossible. I have seen a few other talk about skipping a portable media player and go directly for the integrated cell phone. The only problem with that approach at this time is that I don't think it's feasible given space limitations. We can wait for these space limitations to go away, which they quickly are, but I think there is still a lot of money to be made in the interim.

I look forward to seeing what Microsoft and their competitors do in this space. Are they listening to us?

She said yes...

Last night was the most excellent night ever.

Trillian 3 Released

Merry Christmas from the Trillian developers. They released Trillian 3 final yesterday complete with a developer SDK. Nice work guys, now time to mess with the SDK and see what can be done. I'm still waiting for a Microscopic update.

Rachel Blackman (Sparks on the Trillian boards, I believe) posts an informative and interesting post regarding the release on the Trillian blog. She is located in Seattle I believe, same area as I am. Rachel do you ever go to any of the developer dinners or get togethers that they have around Microsoft?

Hide the SharePoint !New Icon

I missed this tip in the past and thought it was interesting. I have had to hide the !New icon multiple times and have always done it the hard way apparently. I always hid it in the list template, this way is much better.

Microsoft - How to stop the !New tag appearing when you add items to your SharePoint Team Services and SharePoint Services Web site

MSN Deskbar Indexing SharePoint

Mark Bower posts an interesting method of launching a SharePoint Portal Search from the MSN Desktop Search Bar.

via Maxim and Patrick

What if you want the search results to be directly integrated into the MSN Deskbar Search results? It will only work for documents that can be seen through FrontPage 2003 and isn't as cross portal as Mark's solution, but here are the steps for indexing a specific document library. The SharePoint Portal Server will also have to be located on your Intranet (I believe, I have not tested it on any other way, so I suppose I could be wrong here).

1. Make sure that the WebClient service is enabled\running on your machine.
2. Open the Indexing Options for MSN Deskbar Search
3. Add an indexing destination using this format "\\[server name]\sites\[site name]". This will add a reference to the specified site, this reference can be expanded and you can select specific folders in the site to index.
4. Expand the site reference and check the document library that you would like to index.
5. Close out of the options and wait for your SharePoint document library to be indexed on the next indexing path.

Let me know if anyone experiences problems with this approach so that I can note them here. Thanks.

SharePoint Browse Dialog

Here is a teaser of the browse dialog that I am finishing up for SharePoint. It's designed to be used as a dialog and it returns the full URL of the selected location. This version doesn't support displaying files, that however is a trivial addition once you look at how the code works. I will be writing an article and posting this to my blog in the next week or two depending on how busy it is.

There is a gap at the top because I have left a little room for the Internet Explorer style Information bar that I have implemented for this solution to provide feedback to the user. The information bar that I built will be included in the CapitalDesign.Helpers assembly that I'm working on and it supports displaying multiple notifications at once as well as providing a "More Details" pop up when the notification is clicked on. Right now there are three notification types; information, warning, and error. It's not as customizable or as packaged as I would like it to be but I doubt I will have the time so I will be releasing it in it's current state through the aforementioned assembly. It is by no means unusable and I think it's a clean elegant way to notify the user of specific events without the message box or the status bar that everyone ignores.