I’ve got some exciting news that I can now make official.  I’ve been sitting on this one for a while just to make sure that all of the paperwork and everything would go through smoothly, and now that it’s done I’m happy to announce that I’ve been hired by Microsoft as a Program Manager on the Microsoft Outlook team.

Next week I’ll be moving up to the Redmond area.  I don’t have a place to live yet but I’ve got a rather long list of places to check out as soon as I get up there.  It’s going to be a pretty big change from the smaller town world of Lawrence, KS.  I’m certainly going to miss everyone at Wheatland Systems, my previous employer, as well as the great community that exists here in Lawrence.  However, I’m ready for a change and this is going to be a great one.

I imagine I’m going to be rather busy over the course of the next couple of weeks getting settled in and everything, but I’ll try to resume my “normal posting activities” on here as soon as I can.  Actually I’m going to try and post more often than I have recently.  I’ve got all sorts of things I want to post about what the actual interview process with Microsoft is like for a Program Manager position since there doesn’t seem to be a lot about that out there on the web.  You can bet I’ll be posting details about what my job is like, anything I learn during the transition to Washington, and my experiences during the move in the short term.  Long term perhaps I can become one of those great Microsoft bloggers that I hear so much about, but only time will tell!  Now I just need to add one of those disclaimers that states everything expressed here is my opinion and not related to my employer!

Of course, I’ll still be just as big of a geek and a techie out there in Redmond as I will be here, I’ll just be with a bunch of people like me!  You can still expect to hear me talking about whatever new gizmo or gadget that’s caught my eye along with whatever other irrelevant things I happen to post that give you insight into who I really am. 

I’m super excited to have this opportunity to work with the great people working on Outlook and related technologies and I’m thrilled to be joining Microsoft.  I know that they are going to change the world again, and I can’t wait to be a part of making that happen.

Hopefully by now you’ve had a chance to check this out, because it’s pretty sweet.  This week Microsoft released the first public beta of their new AntiSpyware tool which it acquired from GIANT Company.

I’m very impressed with this new tool.  It already seems to do a lot more than most of the current generation tools out there have managed to do.  For instance, I noticed that it is usually intelligent enough to locate registry keys associated with spyware files installed on the computer.  If it locates some sort of add-in DLL then it also locates the registry keys that load that file, and all can be removed nicely.

One of my favorite features is the Browser Hijack restore, which lets you look at all of the URLs that IE uses for various purposes and restore them to their default values if something has overridden them.

The real time monitoring tools are pretty nice as well.  I’ve already see it in play a couple of times when programs on my system (like Money 2005) tried to add a URL to the Safe Sites list.  It popped up immediately and asked me if I wanted to allow it.  I was impressed, and didn’t even know something like that was going on until it warned me!

I can’t wait to see how this product continues to evolve and how they go about marketing it and distributing it.  It looks as though it’s going to be a subscription based service, so I hope it is priced right and easy for home users to install on multiple machines without making it overly expensive.

It seems that after only a year operating on the web-based publishing framework that Rory Petty and I designed for the University of Kansas School of Journalism, they have decided to go with a new option.  I don’t know any details about what they are planning, but it appears that Kansan.com has reverted to their old design with a note about being updated over winter break.

I hope that they get what they expect to get out of the new interface and framework.  The old system was designed pretty decently by students at the University (which is always a plus I think).  In addition it was open and integrated with their existing publishing technology for their print editions allowing content to easily flow between web and print versions of the Kansan paper.  It also provided RSS feeds which allowed content syndication on the student portal and other websites interested in the news of the University of Kansas.

You can bet I’ll be keeping an eye on this one to see where they go and what they end up with.  I just hope it’s a lot better than what they’re showing now.  I’d hate to loose my RSS feed for the Kansan just as I’m set to move out of the area!

It’s Christmas time again, and I sure haven’t posted anything in a while.

I’ve been super busy getting ready for the holiday season and preparing for the big transition I’m making just after the holidays are wrapping up.

You can be I’ll blog all about it as soon as I get a chance to stop and think about what to say.

In the mean time, I hope everyone has a great holiday and gets to spend time with their loved ones.

Everyone seems excited about the recent release of the MSN Toolbar Suite Beta, and I have to admit I’m one of them.  Since the Google desktop search application was released two months ago I’ve been playing around with it and all in all disappointed with it.

So I gave MSN Toolbar Suite a try out last night.  I configured the options to search everything on my local system including my e-mail.  Since it looked like that was going to take a while I went off to bed to play with it this morning when I woke up.

When I woke up this morning though, I found that Outlook wasn’t receiving any new e-mail.  When I tried to force Outlook to send and receive it informed me there was a “registry” error with Outlook and I should try restarting the application.  After restarting Outlook it worked for a while, then started doing the same thing again.  This appears to be related to the MSN Toolbar Suite search, so I quickly disabled the E-Mail search and the MSN Search toolbar in Outlook and everything seems to be on track again.

Now, as far as the actual searching of my desktop, I’m very impressed.  MSN seems to index everything, even if it can only index the file’s name.  This is quite helpful when you’re trying to find a ZIP file or a JPG and you can only remember a portion of the name.  Google’s desktop search application couldn’t help me out here because it only indexes documents it can “read” and parse.

Not to mention it’s fast.  It took only a few seconds to search the index of everything on my system and show me the results in a nicely formatted HTML interface that even shows previews of photos and other documents.  From there I get the full Explorer style context menu as well, to quickly open the document, edit it, print it, or whatever other actions have been associated with that file type.  This is great!

Performance wise my system was a little sluggish when I forced the indexer to start running even while I was using the system.  I expected this though, since it is digging deep into my computer to find everything there is to see.  After the index was built though I haven’t experienced any performance problems related to the indexer or the search tools.

Hopefully they’ll work out the bugs in the Outlook integration and make it so I can use that aspect as well, although Lookout is doing a good job in the mean time.  Once they get that working, I think this will be a great product that really should be a standard feature with the next generation Windows OS.

I’m running into trouble and I can’t seem to find a good solution (so to the blog it goes!).  I’ve got a program built using several variants of the Winsock control (Microsoft Winsock OCX, CSocket, CSocketMaster), and none of them can connect under Windows XP SP2.

If I give it an IP address it will just sit there on state 6 (Connecting).  If I give it a host name, then it will sit on state 4 (resolving host name).  Neither seem to ever return before my app times out.

I did some googling for anything related, but there doesn’t seem to be much.  Visual Basic 6 is pretty old technology at this point in time but there’s not much choice when that’s what the app is developed in!  Hopefully someone out there has an idea of what’s going on or finds this so we can try to find a solution together.

I’m not really sure when this started happening, but I’ve noticed it a lot lately.  Hotels that provide some sort of high speed Internet connection won’t allow you to use your standard SMTP servers.  They hijack any connection attempts to anything on port 25 and redirect through through some other SMTP server (probably owned by the hotel or the ISP for the hotel).

My guess is that all of this started when all those mass e-mail viruses started spreading via SMTP, or because of the increased chances of a spammer checking into a hotel and using their high speed connection for sending spam?  I’m not sure, but it wasn’t that long ago I was able to connect to my own SMTP server without problems.

Its interesting because I don’t see notes anywhere about how they will be redirecting ports like that.  I also wonder about the security implications, since it’s now being sent through a server you have no control over.  How do I even know it will reach the correct receipent.

What happens if you’re using one of those various anti-phishing/anti-fake e-mail systems where by the verify the sending source of the e-mail as being the correct source for your from domain?  That’s right, your e-mail just got trashed without any notice.

I’m sure using VPN would find a way around this problem… but seriously, aren’t there better ways of making sure that users don’t abuse their SMTP connections?  I could just as easily make my SMTP server listen on another non-standard port and connect to that instead then use SSL to ensure that my connection is secure.  I’m guess that would get right around this sort of limitation.  But what happens if people are abusing other ports or services?  Will we see those become filtered or rerouted as well.

I guess it just goes to show that you get what you pay for, and that “free highspeed Internet” may not be as free as you think it is.

Non-technical post follows.  If you’re only interested in tech stuff feel free to ignore this one!

Well once again I find myself sitting in the airport waiting for my flight to some place in California for work.  It’s a lot of fun getting to see all the cool sights of the west coast and I really enjoy what I do, but the traveling is starting to take a toll on me.  Later today I should find out one way or another about the “exciting news” I hinted about before.  I hope that everything will work out and I can tell you all about what’s going on without making too much of a ruckas.

Today I’m going to be getting all the hardware and software configured and ready to go for Wheatland’s pipeline scheduler software I spent the last couple of months writing.  I’m anxious to get this users feedback and to make sure that everything is working properly with the way they use the system.  Since it’s already being used somewhere else, I hope that the number of changes will be small for this particular site, because I really dislike writing code in the field.

Then around 4 I’m supposed to get the call I’ve been waiting for.  I’ll be sure to let you know.

It seems I'm not the only one wondering what the deal with the issue with voice quality on the Treo 650 is. Ever geek's favorite news website Slashdot had a post a few days back saying the same thing I’ve been thinking: “From the other end, it sounds like I'm inside a cardboard box”.

Hopefully someone at PalmOne will be able to answer the question and even more hopefully provide some sort of an update.  I will say that it appears to be a problem with either the internal microphone or the sound processing code attached to recording from the internal mic.  Since I picked up a Jabra BT250 last week no one I’ve talked to has complained about the sound quality when I’m using it.  Of course, there’s a whole set of other issues around using a bluetooth headset… but I’ll address those later.

It’s still a pain to have to use an external device though.  I’ve found if I hold the phone at certain angles and have relatively low background noise, the audio quality is decent.  However, hold the phone in a more comfortable position or try to use it in a restaurant or around a larger group of people and get ready to repeat yourself to everyone.  The audio has a very cropped feeling as though any intelligence the phone has about removing background noise has decided my voice is background noise.  Come on Palm, there shouldn’t have been anything difficult by now about the design of this part of the system.