Fri, Jun 6, 2003

Check this out.  Via BoingBoing.

Fri, Jun 6, 2003

I've been working on buying a new car recently.  I'm going to buy a BMW Z4.  As part of this I've started learning as much as I can so that I pick the right options (and the right car!) and get a good deal.  As part of this I've been reading the online forums up at roadfly.

BMW seems to have great customer service!  Check out this thread.  This guy is having problems with the SMG transmission on his car.  (SMG is "Sequential Manual Gearbox" and is similar to an F1 race car transmission)  Notice this response from a BMW customer service rep.

I wish that we could give this type of support for Windows.  Perhaps if we charged $40k a copy we could :)

Fri, Jun 6, 2003

If it isn't apparent from other sources, I work for Microsoft.  Obviously, I cant speak for the company, but I'd like to draw attention to some comments from Steve Ballmer in the recent memo that he sent to us.  Scoble has these comments posted on his blog and I don't want to see them get lost in the shuffle.

SteveB wrote: "Many customers, MVP's, employees, and industry analysts have said to us that people would appreciate our innovations more and the value we deliver if they knew the company and its people better." and  "To generate enthusiasm for our company and innovations, we must also communicate more broadly and in a more human and compelling voice."

In case you haven't noticed, this blog (and many others) are a grassroots effort from within the company to do just what Steve is asking.  What would you like to see?  How do you think that we can execute on this mission of transparency?

In my opinion, we have a long road ahead to dig ourselves out of the hole that we've dug.  Engaging with the community in a real way is one step.

Thu, May 29, 2003

Bubba has some interesting ideas around subscribing to an entire site instead of just "news."  He is doing his Master's thesis on blogging so he has been spending a lot of time thinking about htis stuff.

RSS is a part of the puzzle but only captures a part of what is on a site.  What would you need to move in to the post browser era?

• A "site.xml" file to describe the type of content available at the site.
• This could point to a set of blogs available on that site.  Bubba (and a lot of others) expose more than one blog, or view of their blog.  Perhaps this is just a pointer to an RSS file.
• Included in each RSS file a pointer to the archive for that is important too.  Winer has some stuff on that a while ago that could easily be integrated here.
• A reference from the "site.xml" file to other resources available on that site.  This could include a list of "stories" and photo galleries.  Perhaps specific pages like a disclaimer/license page, a contacts page, etc.
• We could use XHTML for all unstructured content that isn't covered otherwise.

This is an incremental start on the semantic web.  If we start with XHTML and start pulling stuff out on a piece by piece basis we can start to reduce the amount of unstructured content.

Any other ideas?  Send me mail or post them to your blog. 

Wed, May 28, 2003

Ha!  Joe Bork linked to me just to let you know that we are not the same person :)

I would have made it to that crossroads thing but I'm stuck here in steamy Boise.

Wed, May 28, 2003 Ug!  The outside air temp (as reported by my car -- not known for its acuracy) registred as 104F.  Now I remember why I like Seattle.

Tue, May 27, 2003

"What a disgusting company.... I want to strangle them."
-- Dave Winer

Just so you know, we love you too, Dave.  And to think I had this as my "profile" over at userland at one point.   Great...

Mon, May 19, 2003 This is very cool.  Now you know that "pigeonry" is the #5 image query on google for April.  Wow!1

Sun, May 18, 2003

I just noticed that when RSS Bandit finds an invalid RSS feed, it offers to fork off to Sam and Mark's RSS Validator.

If only Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer had provided this feature back in 1994, I wonder how much better the world of HTML would have been.

-- Don Box

Actually, reaching way back into my memory, I seem to remember that we had, or almost had, a feature like this in IE4. 

The story goes like this: starting with IE4 we switched over to the new advanced Trident rendering engine (mshtml.dll). We worked super hard to be compatible with all of NS3's quirky behavior.  One thing that our architecture made it very hard for us to handle is the case where someone had both a <frameset> and <body> on the same page.  Netscape handled this one way and it was really hard for us to do the same.

The answer that we came up with at the time was to have an "analyze" dialog that would look at the page and tell you why it wasn't doing what you wanted it to do.  I don't think that anything really came of it and it was pulled at some point.  The particular markup behavior that pushed us toward a solution like this disappeared from the web as well.

This wasn't a true "validate" dialog at such, but the push for pure wasn't there back in 97. 

I'm not making any excuses here, but I think that everyone can agree that one of the reasons that IE was so successful at that time was because it could consume everything that was already out there on the net -- and that meant very careful duplication of all of netscapes bugs.

Sun, May 11, 2003

Chris was nice enough to link to me and some of the latest highlights.  Thanks Chris!

Here are some answers to some of his questions:

• JoeBlogger does, by default now, produce XHTML compatible output.  I don't have it saving out <xhtml:body> to the RSS feed yet.  I'll get around to that eventually.  Please download it and play with it and let me know what you think!
• I got no problem with people linking to stuff that I mirror.  Just link to me and send me the flow!
• I am working in the same group that is doing the Longhorn desktop compositor.  If you look at these videos here from WinHEC (a Japanese site, no less!), you can see KerryHam's hands.  Kerry is one of the PMs in our group and, now that she is an internet celebrety, we are going to start up the Kerry fan club -- alt.fan.kerry.  Let me know if you want to join.  I'm working to help design (along with a bunch of others -- ChrisAn included)a set of APIs that we haven't made public yet.  Stay tuned for the PDC to see what I'm doing.
• I don't hate all New York.  It is too big a place for that.  I definitely don't like the Yankees, though.  A while ago I read an article in the NY Times Sunday Magazine that basically said, "Why is Washington, DC, the capitol of the US when everyone knows that NY is the true center."  I guess that a few experiences like that has tained me.
• I'm really excited about the server and what we can do with it.  For instance, I'd love to have a real CVS server.  (GDN workspaces only lets you check out one file at a time and SourceForge isn't very MS friendly...) I know someone else who (I think) is doing something similar to my co-op idea, but I don't want to "out" him.  If anyone has experience doing this stuff, I'm all ears.  This could  become a pretty popular model for stepping up from a regular web hosting type account.