Category: Technology

I’m not a big user of the BCC field. This morning, however, is one of those rare occassions when I’m trying to use it, and I can’t find the damn thing!

I’m looking somewhat incredulously at my screen right now, and I’ve gone to the oh-so-helpful Microsoft Help, and I still can’t find it! I’m torn trying to figure out if this is my Mother’s non-techie genes interfering with my work today or my Dad’s intermittent memory gene. Either way, I’m stuck!

Here are the instructions from Microsoft for enabling the BCC field:

1. In a message, click To .
2. In the Type name or select from list box, type the name or click Advanced, and then click Find.
3. In the Name list, click the name.
4. Under Message Recipients, click Bcc.
5. Click OK.

I got through step 3, but there is no “Message Recipients” anywhere on the damn screen!?!@#$#! Right click reveals nothing useful. Clicking the little bubble by the name reveals nothing. Nothing in the menus. Just nothing.

God damn it. Can’t do a BCC? What do I have to go back to elm? pine? What happened to “View BCC” on the menu?

Answer:

OK – well, with the help of a colleague, we found the problem. On my machine, clicking “To” (as per the instructions) doesn’t open the “Select Names” dialog box. You have to *double click*. Minor distinction. But apparently important.

To all those readers (both of you) out there that thought I was technically inclined, know now that I am clearly not. Maybe my technical frustration today can bring a little smile to your morning.

I think I’ll go write an Outlook AddIn now which fixes the BCC problem.

You know, I mostly whine about GMail because I have a good friend that works on that product, and I hope when he reads this he jumps to fixing it. Despite all its glitches, I still use it because its got built-in search that just works better. Also, the no-foldering philosophy is one I fell into when building Lookout, and GMail is the only system I know which does this too.

My previous posts on GMail bugs can be found here, or here, or here.

And today, on multiple mail sends, I’m getting this error, repeatedly, when trying to send email, “Oops… the system was unable to perform your operation. Please try again in a few seconds.”

I’ve waited more than a few seconds. At least fix the error message!!!

The Windows Registry has been a computer administrator’s nemesis since about the time it was invented. It started with good intentions, but turned into a cryptic, haphazard mess. Its like a kitchen sink with a broken garbage disposal.

One of my biggest gripes about Windows is that you can’t re-install the OS without replacing all the applications. Have you ever been reluctant to reinstall because you knew that as soon as you do all your applications will be broken and need to be reinstalled too? Why is this? Shouldn’t you be able to reinstall the OS without breaking the apps? Unfortunately, the registry is owned by the OS, and because of this coupling, you can’t.

Its fixable – search

The good news is that this is fixable. The registry just needs to be rewritten. Today, the “registry” is a centralized index of attributes from every app installed on the system. What if, instead, the registry was a set of small files that resided on disk, each file contained a small set of attributes that are related somehow, and we maintained a search index to find things through all of these files automatically. Each application would have it’s own “.reg” file(s), which could reside with the application. If you move the application to another location on disk, its registry file would move with it. If you delete an application, its registry file would be deleted with it. Make sense? Now, we’d maintain a central index which would seek out these special filesystem files and index the data. You could still run a virtual “regedit” application, and it would look identical to how it looks today. Its just that instead of a central storage mechanism, it would use a distributed storage mechanism.

Benefits:
1) Containment of registry settings. Today, if you look at the registry, you might be able to guess where a given registry setting came from, but you can never be sure who really owns it, if it is still relevant, or if there is harm in deleting it. With this new model, where .reg files reside side-by-side with the application, its inherently obvious where the setting came from.

2) Ability to migrate the registry with the application. Today, if you want to move an app from drive C to drive D, you probably have to reinstall. There are other factors too, but one obstacle is the fact that the registry settings have to change, and you have no idea where they are. Adding a few variable substitutions to the registry files for things like (%MYPATH%), and you can now move apps and their registry settings by just doing a filesystem copy. You can now actually backup your apps.

3) Simpler Security. Security of the registry would now be handled by filesystem protections. IT folks could set the registry settings that they want, and use filesystem protections to make sure they can’t be modified.

4) Conflict Resolution. What happens today when application A wants a registry setting to one value and application B wants another? Well, you pick one and lose the other. In the new model, you still have two values, and you’ll need a rule to determine which takes “precidence”. But, if you open up regedit, it will be able to tell you not only which items have conflicts, but where the conflicts are, and what the conflicting values are! Now, you’ll be able to pick the right setting with knowledge about why there was a conflict, rather than having to debug an obscure problem that you didn’t even know about.

What do you think?

Example:

/Documents and Settings/
UserBob
Application Settings
Microsoft
Word
word-usersettings.reg — word might chose to store some registry settings here so that they can be written by a non-admin user

Intuit

Quicken
quicken.reg — quicken might choose to store registry settings here

/Program Files/

/Quicken/
[application files go here]
quicken.reg — This file contains all the quicken registry settings

/Microsoft Office

[application files go here]
office.reg — This file contains all the office registry settings

We’ve all heard companies that claim service reliability of “99.9%” or “99.99%” or “5 nines” (meaning 99.999%). But what does that mean?

The fact is that 99.999% uptime is really hard to achieve. On a monthly basis, 99.999% uptime means that your service is “down” for less than 26 seconds. Now, many services skate around this issue with fuzzy definitions of “down”. They might say that “downtime is defined as a majority of mailboxes being unavailable”. So a single mailbox being down might not be considered “downtime”. But as customers, if its your mailbox, that doesn’t sound quite right, does it? We usually have simpler definitions.

Anyway, GMail this morning has been down for 3 hours (at least) on my mailbox. Assuming they operate perfectly for the remainder of the month, that means they’ve dropped to only 99.58% availability this month. And, if they remain up with no downtime for the rest of the year, they’ve already missed the 5-nines, and are struggling at 99.96%! Given the outages I’ve seen, I think they’ve been down for at least 12 hours on my mailbox, so I think they are operating under the 99% level.

Oh well, I shouldn’t beat up on them too much. It is only beta, after all, right? But geez- with the $4B in the bank from their second IPO, I’d think they could ad least get to “two nines”. What about my god-given right to read email now?

I’m really starting to question my use of gmail. It seems pretty unreliable – I can’t tell you how many times it reports, “Gmail is temporarily unavailable. Cross your fingers and try again in a few minutes. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.”

The humor was funny once, when this was an isolated event. But I want to read my email now, and I really don’t have time for this incompetence. Its been down for at least 30 mins now [6:30 to 7am]. Yahoo! Please take me back!

Update – its now 10am, and the service is still down. 3 hours of downtime on a Weds morning. Not good!

There is a very cool new start page (start.com) coming from Microsoft. Probably one of the best examples of dhtml based apps on the net today.

PCWorld has a nice writeup on Desktop Search Products, Deep File Divers.

They reviewed MSN Search, Copernic, Yahoo Desktop Search, DtSearch, Google Desktop Search, and Blinkx.

And their conclusion:

“Our favorite is Microsoft’s MSN Search Toolbar With Windows Desktop Search”

A coworker pointed me at this simple site – MSN Gas Prices

Just type in your zip code and they’ll find the station with the lowest gas prices near you. I’m impressed – it seems to actually work!

Logged into my Gmail account today, and its got a big, red banner across the top which says, “Your browser’s cache is full and may interfere with your Gmail experience.” (Gmails FAQ on this)

Well, thats an interesting statement with lots of implications.

As a software developer, your job when diagnosing problems is to be an investigator. To figure out why something is crashing or why something is slow requires collecting of evidence, analyzing the evidence, and ultimately trying to apply that back to the bug and symptoms. Sometimes, unfortunately, problems are hard to investigate, and even some pretty smart developers can come up with what I would call voodoo explanations. It used to be that people sometimes ran into “compiler bugs” or “optimizer bugs”. But these days, when a developer claims its one of these, its usually a pathetic, last-ditch effort to explain why his code is not working. The compiler bug is just pretty darned unlikely. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I saw a bug that was actually the compiler’s fault. I’m sure they exist, they are just realy rare. The reason they are unlikely is because there is so much code exercising the compiler that there is just a huge amount of testing on it. If there were a bug, lots of software, not just yours, would be broken.

Gmail’s claim that my browser cache being full also sounds like voodoo to me. I searched around to see if there were any other products claiming performance woes due to the cache, and I can’t find any. I also can’t find any support articles from Microsoft. Now, I could believe a turned off cache could cause problems. But logically, it doesn’t sound right to me that somehow the cache being full is the cause of Google’s troubles. The cache, when full, should rotate out the old content, and new content gets cached. Its a pretty simple algorithm, and if it were broken, wouldn’t most other web applications be suffering as well?

So, gmail, whats the nitty gritty? Do you have empirical evidence? Prove to us this isn’t voodoo engineering!

Today Google unveiled its latest beta of the Google Desktop. This is a pretty neat product! They did a nice job of incorporating a few of their already published tools (including Google Desktop Search and Google Deskbar), but they also added a lot of other neat stuff, like the Google Sidebar and Outlook Integration.

Sidebar
The sidebar is a nice idea. The concept is taken utilities such as from Desktop Sidebar, which has been around for a while. But it integrates very well with the Google properties, including email search, web search, web history, picasa, and weather.

So far, I’m liking it quite a lot, and not minding the screen real-estate it consumes. I do plan to remove it, however, because I must remain loyal to my own team 🙂

Outlook Integration
Always interesting to me is Outlook Integration. For the first time, they’ve introduced an Outlook addin for email search! The good news is that its there, and that it even opens up search results in a UI for Outlook with a simple Lookout-like window! The bad news is that its so primitive, you probably would rather stick with MSN Desktop Search or Lookout. Google’s interface doesn’t have the ability to drag&drop, right-click for actions, filter results, select columns other than the 3 they’ve selected for you, view types of results, etc.

But this does show promise! Google finally understands that not everything is best suited in a web UI.

Word-wheeling
Another cool feature to their search is that they’ve added what we call “word-wheeling” to their deskbar. This is a blatant steal from MSN’s product. As you type, it instantly searches the local index for matches on what you’ve typed so far. This gives the user great feedback to visualize results quickly. Great!

On the improvement side, though, I think the feature has UI trouble. First, the window opens in a variable-size. So with each keystroke, the window bounces up and down making it difficult to follow. A fixed sized window would be better, even if there were whitespace. Further, the results in the window are desktop search results. But as soon as you press enter, the desktop search results disappear, and you now see web results, with a new single link to try to find the desktop results.

As we’d expect, Google is anxious to push the user into the web. But when the data is on the hard disk, this creates a few extra clicks.

Spyware
One thing that really bugs me when I install software is when the software changes my desktop settings without asking me. Google’s product automatically changed my default search engine to Google, so that in IE, the “Search” bar now goes to their site. I did not ask for them to do this.