While taking a lunch break I decided to finish up implementing full support for FeedDemon newspapers in RSS Bandit. With my checkin a few minutes ago it is now possible to use the various custom newspaper styles for FeedDemon in RSS Bandit and vice versa. More importantly one can now view all items in a feed at once in the reading pane instead of just reading them one at a time.

Actually that is incorrect.

My goal was that one should be able to view all items in a feed in the newspaper view. However it seems I hit some performance issues using the System.Xml.Xsl.XslTransform class in the .NET Framework. Applying a newspaper view on 3 months of posts in a high traffic feed such as the InfoWorld feed took 10 to 15 seconds to display which was a bit too long especially since other tasks would be going on in the background at the same time which would make it take even longer. So the compromise I reached was that clicking on the a feed node in the tree view shows only the unread posts in the newspaper view. Below are links to screenshots of various newspaper views running in RSS Bandit

  1. Outlook 2003 (RSS Bandit style)
  2. PopBox Blue (FeedDemon style)
  3. Headlines (FeedDemon style)
  4. Sticky Notes (one of Radek's FeedDemon styles)

One thing I've noticed is that different feeds tend to benefit from different styles. For example, I'd prefer to read news sites like Wired or Slashdot with the Headlines style while I'd rather read traditional blogs with a style closer to Sticky Notes or PopBox Blue. This should be a fairly straightforward feature to add and the infrastructure code already exists. The question is whether any user besides me will utilize all this configurability. :)

There is also the feature that FeedDemon has where clicking on a ".fdxsl" file from within the application automatically downloads and installs the style. Although convenient this seems like a security issue. This would mean that the file would be written to “C:\Program Files\RssBandit\templates” which may require running as Administrator. If we keep this feature we might have to move the templates to a user specific folder. What do you RSS Bandit users think?


 

Categories: RSS Bandit

December 14, 2004
@ 05:48 AM

I noticed that the Many2Many weblog on social software has an entry entitled Ballmer Gets Blogging Religion which contains a review of MSN Spaces by Liz Lawley. She wrote

I set up an account there today (and was required to use my Microsoft Passport, which didn’t thrill me). My first impression was generally positive. The blogs support trackbacks, a notable omission in Blogger. They also have RSS feeds, which is good, but no Atom, which is disappointing. The built-in photo album is a nice touch, though it doesn’t hold a candle to Flickr. There are a range of themes to choose from, some of which are quite lovely. However, the site warns me that without Internet Explorer (for the PC, natch), I can’t take advantage of the full range of customization options. (To their credit, the site works well in Firefox on my Mac.)

The response time on the server is pretty sluggish this evening, which is a bit of a concern. And in general, I’m always nervous about having my blog posts hosted on a central service that I don’t control—I like having my text on a server that I can back up whenever I’d like. Not to mention that I feel pretty strongly about having my blog at my own domain name, free of ties to specific hosting services or tools.

All in all, I found Spaces to be a very credible and more fully-featured alternative to Blogger for users who want to set up a blog quickly and easily, and don’t want to spend money doing so (or learn a lot of technical skills to accomplish it). From accounts I’ve been reading lately, Blogger has been increasingly slow and unreliable—not ideal qualities at any time, but particularly not when a big-time competitor has just unleashed an alternative.

I was talking to Mike this afternoon and we were flattered by the feedback we got from Liz's review. There are a number of issues that Liz raises that I felt I should comment on.

The first point of clarification is about not supporting Atom feeds. The explanation for why MSN Spaces supports RSS 2.0 and not RSS 1.0 or Atom 0.3 is described in my post from several months ago entitled Mr. Safe's Guide to the RSS vs. Atom debate. Basically RSS 2.0 is the widest supported and most straightforward syndication format. Also there is no technical reason to support multiple syndication formats especially since it is potentially confusing to end users.

The built-in photo album may not be as powerful as an entire site focused on photo sharing such as Flickr or deviantART but I think it does a good job of allowing people to share photos in a simple, straightforward manner while allowing a richer expressivity than is currently provided by any of the major hosted blogging providers. The MSN Spaces team is always open to feedback on how to improve the service and I'm particularly curious as to what improvements or features others would like to see in the realm of photo sharing.

The performance issues Liz encountered on the days she tried the site have since been fixed. It was a combination of bad luck [hardware problems on some key servers] and unanticipated load in certain scenarios. Our GPM is fond of pointing out that no amount of stress testing can accurately potray actual usage of a service :)

Our team is paying attention to the various performance issues and we have tackled a number of the causes of sluggishness in the site. Any problems should be reported to through the feedback form on the site or can even be sent to me directly if necessary.  However I can't promise that I'll get back to every email immediately.

Thanks for the excellent feedback Liz.


 

Categories: MSN

It seems December is a good month for new releases from MSN. From Microsoft PressPass we learn Microsoft Introduces MSN Toolbar Suite Beta With Desktop Search , specifically

Microsoft Corp. today introduced a beta version of its new MSN® Toolbar Suite...The free suite of MSN search tools, available now in the United States at http://beta.toolbar.msn.com, is the latest development in a comprehensive MSN Search service that helps consumers more quickly find precisely what they are looking for and gives them more control over their search experience. The new MSN Toolbar Suite includes an updated version of the popular MSN Toolbar for Microsoft® Internet Explorer and new toolbars that are conveniently accessible through Windows and Microsoft Office Outlook®. The new toolbars include the MSN Deskbar for the Windows desktop, MSN Toolbar for Microsoft Office Outlook and MSN Toolbar for Microsoft Windows Explorer.

Being the MSN geek I am I hightailed it to http://beta.toolbar.msn.com to try out the the new Toolbar suite. So far the only part that has held my interest is the MSN Toolbar for Outlook which looks like a decent replacement for LookOut. The desktop search doesn't really interest me because I don't lose files on my hard drive and the Internet Explorer toolbar adds just a tad bit of clutter to IE (see below for screenshot). I use the Yahoo! toolbar all the time since it has my bookmarks and links to a lot of Yahoo! services I use (Maps, Movies, Mail, Finance, etc). I use the Google toolbar for search. The MSN toolbar doesn't really give me anything I want enough to lose the screen real estate although the quick links to MSN Spaces are nice. If you haven't installed any of the other toolbars then the MSN toolbar is as good as any of he others since the core functionality is the same but it doesn't have enough to get someone like me who's already using two IE add-in toolbars to add a third.

I also dislike the fact that it refused to install on my Windows 2003 machine.


 

Categories: MSN

Paul Vick has an excellent post about white elephant projects at Microsoft entitled Black hole projects  where he writes

I left Office just about the time that Netdocs really started going, but I do know a few people who invested quite a few years of their lives into it. I can't say that I know much more than Steve about it, but it did get me thinking about other "black hole projects" at Microsoft. There was one I was very close to earlier in my career that I managed not to get myself sucked into and several others that I just watched from afar. None I can really talk about since they never saw the light of day, but it did get me thinking about the peculiar traits of a black hole project. They seem to be:

  • They must have absurdly grandiose goals. Something like "fundamentally reimagine the way that people work with computers." Nobody, including the people who originate the goals, has a clear idea what the goals actually mean.
  • They must involve throwing out some large existing codebase and rewriting everything from scratch, "the right way, this time."
  • They must have completely unrealistic deadlines. Usually this is because they believe that they can rewrite the original codebase in much, much less time than it took to write that codebase in the first place.
  • They must have completely unrealistic beliefs about compatibility. Usually this takes the form of believing you can rewrite a huge codebase and preserve all of the little quirks and such without a massive amount of extra effort.
  • They are always "six months" from from major deadline that never seems to arrive. Or, if it does arrive, another milestone is added on to the end of the project to compensate.
  • They must consume huge amounts of resources, sucking the lifeblood out of one or more established products that make significant amounts of money or have significant marketshare.
  • They must take over any group that does anything that relates to their absurdly broad goals, especially if that group is small, focused, has modest goals and actually has a hope of shipping in a reasonable timeframe.
  • They must be prominently featured as demos at several company meetings, to the point where people groan "Oh, god, not another demo of this thing. When is it ever going to ship?"
  • They usually are prominently talked up by BillG publicly years before shipping/dying a quiet death.
  • They usually involve "componetizing" some monolithic application or system. This means that not only are you rewriting a huge amount of code, you're also splitting it up across one or more teams that have to all seamlessly work together.
  • As a result of the previous point, they also usually involve absolutely massive integration problems as different teams try madly to get their components working with each other.
  • They usually involve rewriting the application or system on top of brand-new technology that has not been proven at a large scale yet. As such, they get to flush out all the scalability problems with the new technology.
  • They are usually led by one or more Captain Ahabs, madly pursuing the white whale with absolute conviction, while the deckhands stand around saying "Gee, that whale looks awfully big. I'm not sure we can really take him down."
  • Finally, 90% of the time, they must fail and die a flaming death, possibly taking down or damaging other products with it. If they do ship, they must have taken at least 4-5 years to ship and be at least 2 years overdue.

I'm kind of frightened at how easy it was to come up with this list - it all just kind of poured out. Looking back over 12.5 years at Microsoft, I'm also kind of frightened at how many projects this describes. Including some projects that are ongoing at the moment.

Someone who works with me at MSN mentioned that there was a time the Netdocs team was larger than the entire Microsoft Office product unit combined. Scary. As Paul mentions, the sad thing is that there are projects like this that continue to exist at Microsoft even though everybody sees the signs and already knows how the story ends. In fact, you don't even have to work at Microsoft to be able to tell what some of these projects are.

Sad.


 

Categories: Life in the B0rg Cube

December 12, 2004
@ 06:56 PM

I was just completely freaked out a few minutes ago. All of a sudden in the middle of editing some XSLT stylesheets I started to get a resonating hum similar to electronic interference in the base of my skull at regular intervals. I was about to call 911 when I realized it only happened when I was near my monitor or television and stopped when I turned them off. I called a friend and she mentioned that she'd heard that this sometimes happened to people with silver fillings in their teeth. Since I'd just got some dental work done about a week and a half ago I guessed this might have been some static electricity buildup. So I brushed my teeth and now I don't have the weird hum in my head while using the computer anymore.

Unfortunately I couldn't find anything on Google about this.


 

Categories: Ramblings

Looking at the calendar I realized that I have two articles due this month, one for my Extreme XML column on MSDN and another that I promised XML.com a few months ago. I was reminded of this by the following excerpt from Ed Dumbill's recent article On Folly where he wrote

Champion cited two developments of particular interest. The first is E4X, the addition of native XML capabilities to ECMAScript. An implementation of this in the Mozilla project is currently coming to fruition. The second development is "Comega" (aka "Cω"), an extension of C# including native XML data types. (Editor's Note: Watch XML.com for a forthcoming introduction to Comega from Dare Obasanjo.)

So I'm on the hook for an overview of Cω. I started to wonder whether it wouldn't be cool if my Extreme XML column focused deeply on Cω while my XML.com article was an overview of both E4X and Cω. This would save me some effort in coming up with a separate topic for my Extreme XML column but should provide interesting information for both XMl.com readers and MSDN readers. What do you think?


 

Categories: XML

When I first started working on RSS Bandit I wanted an application that looked and acted as much like Microsoft Outlook as possible. Two years and over a hundred thousand downloads latter I realize that there are a number of drawbacks to using this model for reading feeds [or any information for that matter]. Mike Torres describes some of these reasons in his post Why I dig Bloglines, he writes

Part of the problem for me is that applications that look and feel like Microsoft Outlook tend to make me feel like I am working, and I am immediately in "information overload" mode (we get hundreds of pieces of email each day at Microsoft.)  Catching up with friends, reading Scripting.com, or checking out Engadget shouldn't be tedious.  But for some reason, it was.  Until I switched to Bloglines.
...
Anyway, here is what I like about Bloglines:

...
  • I can scan dozens of feeds in less than a minute.  With NewsGator for Outlook and other Outlook-style interfaces, it just simply took longer.  Probably because Bloglines shows me the feed in the way it is supposed to be presented - reverse chronological order on a single page.  Not as individual messages that I have to click through. 
...

This is the bane of the current information viewing model paradigm favored by email and newsgroup readers which many RSS aggregators have decided to inherit. The major problem is that the Outlook mail reading paradigm has a fundamental assumption which turns out to be flawed. It assumes you want to read every item you get in your inbox. This flawed assumption leads to the kind of information overload that hampers the productivity of lots of people I know at work. I've met several people who seem to always have hundreds unread items in their email inbox. For this reason I always have to learn who's easier to reach via IM or swinging by their office in person than sending them mail.

Most people I know get four classes of messages in their information aggregators (I am lumping reading email, reading news and reading RSS/Atom feeds into a single category). These are

1. notifications (checkin mails, comments to my blog, etc)
2. headlines (email newsletters, feeds from news sites, etc)
3. messages sent directly to me or that is similarly relevant
4. messages sent to an interest group I am a part of (XML-DEV mailing list, comp.text.xml newsgroup, etc)

The problem is that the typical Outlook inspired information aggregator treats all of the above as being of equal relevance. Even though Outlook does provide mechanisms for managing assigning relevance to incoming messages, they are either hard to find or cumbersome to use.

This is definitely one of the areas that needs to be improved in the world of information aggregators in general and RSS/Atom readers in particular. There are a number of features that I'm working on for the next version of RSS Bandit aimed at making it easier for people to consume information from various sources in a flexible manner according to what relevance they place on the information source.


 

Torsten has been hard at work on the UI for managing newsgroups in the next version of RSS Bandit. Below is a screenshot of what is currently checked into CVS. We'd love to hear any comments you have.

For example, the View menu behaves like a tabbed pane but we decided against tabs for some technical reasons. Is this confusing? Also I've suggested that we change the buttons on the top left named 'Identity' and 'News Server' to 'Add Identity' and 'Add News Server' to separate the fact that those buttons perform actions while the ones on the right act more like tabs in a tabbed pane. Agree? Disagree?

Speaking of which I need to test the code that handles binary attachments so if you know any public news servers that allow you to subscribe to binary newsgroups, let me now. Unfortunately there aren't any binary newsgroups on news.microsoft.com.


 

Categories: RSS Bandit

Since I left the XML team at Microsoft they've gone on an impressive hiring spree. Two people who I'd have loved to work with who have joined up after I left are

David Remy: former Director of Product Engineering at Bea Systems, he was responsible for security, web services, and XML for Bea's Weblogic Workshop product line.

Mike Champion: formerly a research and development specialist at Software AG. He was on the W3C's Document Object Model (DOM) Working Group for over three years and was the co-chair of the Web Services Architecture Working Group.

I have to see how quickly I can nag both of them to start blogging. David used to be in charge of the folks who produced XML Beans so I suspect he has all sorts of interesting perspectives on XML programming models. Mike and I have been exchanging mail on XML-DEV for years and now that we can have some of these conversations in person, I work across campus. Irony indeed. :)


 

Categories: Life in the B0rg Cube | XML

According to an article entitled 50 Cent Involved In Scuffle At Airport In Nigeria on AllHipHop.com 

American Hip-Hop star 50 Cent was engaged in a scuffle with the entourage of another rapper in a Lagos, Nigeria airport last night. 50 Cent was in the African nation taking part in the annual Star Mega Jam, which brings top name talent to perform along side popular Nigerian artists.

The incident started in an airplane belonging to the Aviation Development Company, before an aborted trip to Port Harcourt for a final performance. Eyewitnesses stated that Nigerian rapper Eedris Abdulkareem attempted to sit in a seat reserved for the internationally known 50 Cent, but was prevented from doing so.Abdulkareem’s entourage protested, resulting in a brawl inside the airplane.The scuffle carried on to the tarmac of the domestic wing of the Murtala Muhammad Airport, drawing the attention of employee’s and other passengers.

The rapper left without completing the performance due to the incident.

That's kinda messed up. I'm just glad this happened after my mom got 50's autograph when she interviewed him.