Dylan Greene dot com

I can't read Japanese, so I have no idea what these cute characters are saying about Microsoft's latest business offerings involving collaboration, but I can clearly see that people in Japan interact with a much more amazing side of Microsoft than we do in the states.

Who said business-oriented web sites for Americans had to be so cookie cutter boring?

I use Windows Media Player 9 for listening to music. I have some qualms with it...

Feature 1:You are in your car listening to a CD, and you turn your radio off to answer your cell phone. Orturn your car off to do some chores. When you turn the stereo back on, the CD continues right from where it left off.

So why is it that Windows Media player can't remember what it was doing after being closed? If I shut down my computer, close Media Player, or even hibernate my laptop, when I re-open Windows Media Player it should continue right from where it was, no questions asked. The list of songs should be remembered,even if I hadn'tsaved a playlist.

Feature2: You're in your car,listening to a CD, and then you switch to the radio to find out about traffic. Ifyou go back to the CD, your car's player auotomatically continues from where was on the CD.

So why is it that if I'm listening to music, then click on a WMV, MPG, AVI, or other video (or music) on a web page, the video takes over what Windows Media Player was playing, and then gives nooption to go back to the music I was listening to?

Feature3: If your car has a CD jukebox system, many systems let you add and remove a CD without effecting the rest of the CD's.

So why doesn't Windows Media Player let you easily add/remove a CD (or folders with MP3/WMA's) from what's currently playing? I know you can do this manually, especially if I have aplaylist set up, but it's not as obvious and simple as it should be.

Conclusion: Practically allcarCD players have these three features, andsome MP3 players have them as well. I think it's about time that Windows Media Player catches up to our car's CD player. I have not seen Windows Media Player 10(the next major version), so maybe some of these features will be there. I don't know if other playerssuch as Apple's iTunes, AOL's WinAmp, Real's Realplayer, have these features, but that wouldn't ben enough for me to switch because I already use Windows Media Playerfor just about everything - built-in cd ripping, cd burning, mp3 player file transferring, full screen video, WMV-HD playback, QuickTime, DivX, AC3, XviD, OGG, etc. Plus I don't need to worry about ads, spyware, or a feature thatwould convert my music to a format that my mp3 player doesn't support.

Earlier tonight I sent out emails with a private URL to the TeacherReviewspreview site to the 50+ people who'vehelped support TeacherReviewswith donations. Thank you!

The preview participants are able to see the reviews, but most of the other features are disabled at the moment, including adding new reviews. At the last minute I decided to disable the user system until I could do more testing, which means all of the features that require you to be signed in are disabled. Security and ease-of-use aremytwo top priorities,and since I haven't done enough testing to be sure everything is perfect security-wise, I'd rather just hold off until I can make sure all of the code is secure.

The public preview will begin in a week or two, at which time everybody will finally be able to read and post reviews. Thesite will officially re-launchonce all of the important new features are complete.

I think tonight I'm going to go to bed early for once in the last few months. I took off the last two days from my real job to getmore TeacherReviews work done,soI've been programming for the last two days straight withsmall breaks for food, stretching, and some sleep. My girlfriend is here patiently waiting for me and I've been ignoring her to work on this. Time for me to step away from the computer... well until early tomorrow morning. Can't wait to finish the user system!

I hate getting voice mail on my cell phone. It takes too much time to listen to messages, and it cost me minutes.

What I would like to see: List new voice messages on the cell phone's screen. I imagine the list to look similar to new text messages, with the date, time, phone number, and length of message. If the phone number is in my phone listing, the name and the location (home/work/cell) of the person would be shown. Then I should be able to scroll through that list on my cell phone, and click "Listen" to hear that message.

My girlfriend has a great idea that I'd love to see in my next cell phone: If you dial somebody and they aren't there, and your phone knows other numbers for that person (such as work/cell/home), the phone should make it easy to choose an alternate number for that person right away without having to go back to the list of numbers.

I'm almost ready to launch the preview of the new TeacherReviews. The planned date is this Friday, rain or shine.

Some new features:

• Rate the reviews
• See the reviewer's average grades (so you don't have to wonder if they just give everybody bad grades)
• Easier access to the newest reviews

Some features not done yet:

• Professor customization (such as personal comments, links to syllabus)
• University customization (such as school photos)
• Searching
• Email notification when new reviews are posted

I'll be able to add features even once the site is up, so I'm not going to wait until everything is done before launching.

I think you'll be happy with the new site. It's fast and easy to use, and most importantly, all the old reviews are still there.

Tonight is the last episode of The Apprentice, start at 9pm.

I bet you could guess what would happen if President Bush was on The Apprentice. An interesting take brought to you by Ben Cohen's (of Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream) TrueMajority.org.

In other Apprentice news, Troy McClain, my person favorite character, has started a new company called FinancialApprentice.com with fellow ex-Apprentice Jessie, which "aims to educate people on how to obtain credit and boost their credit rating, as well as understand credit risk, loans, mortgages and, to some degree, entrepreneurship." I'm not sure if their 15 minutes of fame today can translate to a business for the future.

Lost Remote is reporting that that Clear Chanel has dropped Howard Stern for good.

This has my brain warped....

On one hand, I personally don't enjoy the Howard Stern show. I find it boring and un-funny. If I want offensive I'll listen to O'Reilly.

On the other hand, I don't want the FCC telling me what is offensive and what I can't listen to. The FCC is fining Clear Channel $495,000 because there was a discussion that included oral sex innuendos. The same topic that was "news" every night toward the end Clinton's presidential career now cost half a million dollars in fines to talk about on the air.

It wasn't long ago that Clear Channel lobbied the FCC until Powel changed the laws so that they (and other large media companies) could buy up radio stations all over the country. Clear Channel is now the largest conglomerate with 1,376 radio stations. Now their fines are multiplied by the number of market that the "offensive" words were heard in. I'm betting to pay for these fines we'll be subjected to even longer and more frequent commercial breaks. At least our ears won't bleed every time Stern jokes about "going down".

The end result of this is crappier radio for all but those few complainers that need to learn how to change the station where they hear something they don't like. Thanks to the FCC we now have less channels and programing to choose from, station owners are limiting or firing radio jockeys for being "too risky", and radio content is being watered down to the point that it's losing all entertainment value.

Note: Howard Stern is not off the air, just off Clear Channel stations. Here in DC he's still on WJFK, which is owned by Infinity Broadcasting.

Also in DC, the FCC has proposed fining Clear Channel for Elliot in the Morning because of nine alleged violations "that involved graphic and explicit sexual material, and were designed to pander to, titillate and shock listeners," which totals to $27,500 per violation, or $247,500 in all. Clear Channel hasn't said if he's being yanked off the air too.

The conspiracy theorist in me makes me wonder if XM and Sirus are involved in this. Like cable companies, they are exempt from most FCC regulations, and no doubt will see a rise in subscribers because of all this. I wonder if anybody is looking into this.

An unconfirmed report from excellent gadget site Engadget:

Regarding the Xbox 2 hard drive, I was snowboarding in Whistler, B.C. from February 19 - 26, 2004. We were in a bar called the Amsterdam Cafe in the village one night and J. Allard, the head of Microsofts Xbox division was in the bar with some friends. I recognized him from a recent Business 2.0 article and we started talking. (He bought my friends and I a round of drinks he called Hey Zeuses - they were Red Bull and tequila and they were nasty.) Anyway, we were talking about the Xbox 2 and he said their current plan was not to include a hard drive in the Xbox 2 itself, but to offer a portable hard drive as an accessory you could buy separately. Heres the kicker: He said what they were trying to do was to incorporate MP3 (and WMA, obviously) functionality into the portable hard drive and turn the thing into an iPod killer. Basically, the idea was to come up with an MP3 player that was as good or better than the iPod that would also serve as the hard drive for the Xbox 2. And he said they planned to sell them as a loss leader at $100 each.

I personally doubt it's going to the an iPod killer.

First, XBOX and iPod owners are different audiences for the most part, so I doubt any XBOX 2 accessories, no matter how cool, will do any damage to the iPod sales numbers.

Second, there are over 500 MP3 devices available that play Microsoft's WMA alternative to MP3. I'm guessing the companies that make those devices pay a licensing fee to Microsoft. Would Microsoft want to compete with it's own license holders?

And third, why not just put a USB port on the XBOX 2 and let gamers use their own MP3 player of choice as an external storage medium instead of locking users into just that one solution? Oops, I can hear you saying: "Because that's the sort of thing Microsoft would do." Hehe, guess we'll just wait and see...

Some interesting Apprentice info:

• The board room is on the same floor as their swank apartment.
• The elevators outside the board room are fake and just lead to another hallway.
• The young woman who rented the apartment Troy's team renovated already obtained a lease before the show decided to even renovate that apartment. She received $2000 in free furniture her involvement, and knew that no matter what rent she negotiated for, she'd be paying her original rent.
• That apartment was empty because the previous occupant jumped out the window a month earlier.

More details: Elevator Rides to Nowhere, from New Yorkish and Reality's Apprentice, which was written by the person living underneath the renovated apartment and is an interesting read.

Tracked from: Apprentice Watch and Craig Pfeifer's Maps and Legends.

I must admit that I'm enjoying the Apprentice, though not as much now that Troy has been fired. He seemed to be the only one using real-world business tactics and he seemed to have the most fun doing so.

What I don't get: Since Trump always has final say on who goes, couldn't he have decided who wins on the first day, and then just fire anybody but that person every time?

About 5 months ago I posted a link to a simple blog reader built in FLEX, Macromedia's new server/client application framework which uses XML to define user interface layouts.

Joe Marini, who was a Program Manager at Macromedia but now is on the Longhorn team at Microsoft, has posted code and a screenshot for a similar blog reader done in XAML. What makes this example cool (well, to me) is that it's done just using XAML markup. There's no code there besides the XAML.

Is this going to be useful? Hell yeah. It's a time saver and it means less code.

Does this give too much power to the UI code? I think so. I feel that UI code should be 100% benign and all functionality should be in a separate application block. It could also mean some really complex UI code, which could defeat it's usefulness.

Who knows... I guess we'll wait and see...

MSDN has posted a huge preview of Visual Studio .NET 2005 (formally known as VS.NET"Whidbey"). It's full of screenshots, interesting information, and code comparisons to older versions. There's also information about Visual Studio Orcas, the next major version of Visual Studio, which is being built to take advantage of the new technologies provided by Longhorn.

I'm wondering if anybody has a link for something that shows the direction thatthe popular free Java-based developmentenvironment/framework Eclipse is heading. I'd like to see how it is evolving and improving.

As a "hobby" developer (I built this site and the framework that powers it, butI don't code professionally), I find the current versions of Visual Studio to be overwhelming (too much functionality) and Eclipse to be underwhelming (not enough functionality, even with free plug-ins), so I use FrontPage 2003.

The things I need are color coding, auto-complete/intellisense,WebDAV, WYSIWYG view for prototyping, and the keyboard shortcut keys that I've become used to from using Microsoft Office. Plus it needs to load fast, let me work on multiple web sites (or open multiple instances with ease), look like a Windows XP application in Windows XP (Eclipse looks likea tweaked Windows 98 app to me), and let me determine how I place my curly-braces. I'm not doing any server-side debugging with ASP (haven't had a need,rolled my ownsimple debug.writeline class), but I will definitely want to have good debugging tools when it comes time to port this site's framework to ASP.NET... Visual Studio 2005 looks nice, but I fear it might still be to much for me.

I wish the IntelliJ IDEA guys had an IDE for ASP.NET cooking... I'm always impressed with their Java tools and UI design. I've seen rumorsof such a beast, but it seems to have been downgraded to a VS.NET plug-in.

Anybody have experience with thefree Web Matrixproject from the ASP.NET team?I wish Microsoft opened this to the community Eclipse-style to let it grow more. Maybe it's the lack of links on it's web site, but it looks to melike there's no community involvement and limited community acceptance around Web Matrix.

I have tax information from my mutual fund and I don't know where to store it: Should I put it with the rest of my mutual fund information or with the rest of my tax information? In the real world it's hard to store one item in multiple places.

You might have the same issue with emails that you try to categorize using folders. What happens when an email relates to two projects? The same problem occurs with documents, bookmarks, music, and more. Because of the real-world metaphor that an object can only be in one place at a time, you're forced to store in one folder or make a duplicate of the item, which isn't ideal, especially for documents and music files.

Outlook 2003

Outlook 2003 has a great feature to help with this called Search Folders. A Search Folder is contains the results to any search you specify. I have a Search Folder for all unread email across all of my folders, another one for Flagged Items across all folders, and several others. The Search Folders act like real folders, so I can forward, delete, and move items as if items in the Search Folder are in a real folder. Unlike a typical search feature, the contents of Search Folders are updated as you receive or organize your email.

While not hard to set up, Search Folders are not perfect for every situation. I'm not going to set up a Search Folder for every possible category, mainly because it's still much easier to drag emails to appropriate folders or use the Rules Wizard.

More info: How to use Search Folders in Outlook 2003.

iTunes

iTunes has a similar feature called Smart Playlist, which is very well described on Apple's web site. With iTunes you can have Smart Playlist of music in your collection that you have never listened to and optionally have it update as you add more music.

Smart Playlist differs from Search Folders in that (as far as I know) you can't organize or delete the actual music files from the Smart Playlist view because you are looking at entries in a play list, not collection of files. In my opinion this isn't ideal because the user is still required to go back to the normal view organize and delete files. Apple may change this behavior.

More info: Smart Playlist video.

Windows Media Player

I use Windows Media Player for playing music. I've never bothered to create a playlist and instead I just rely on the folder organization on my hard drive. Windows Media Player has a built-in Smart Playlist-like feature which choices like "Fresh Tracks", "Tracks I listen to on Weekends", "Music I haven't heard recently", and several more.

Unlike iTunes you can't customize these searches, nor build a playlist out of a custom search. Windows XP can show metadata from music files such as Artist and Album name in the Windows Explorer (right click on the column name), but you still can't use Find in Windows to find music using the metadata.

More info: Unofficial Windows Media Player FAQ

Longhorn

Longhorn is Microsoft's code name for their next major revision to Windows, and is expected to be released in June 2061 (but could be as soon as 2005 if the European Union forces Microsoft remove a feature or two). Longhorn's file system is very different than the file systems we use today. Files are not stored in folders, but instead are assigned a folder or folders. (Basic techie details: the file system is implemented using a database; files and folders are stored as records; folder contents are the results of SQL queries).

So finally with Longhorn a file can easily live in multiple locations. Plus folders also work like Search Folders/Smart Playlist, showing the results of some complex query of metadata.

The technology for this feature is called WinFS, and Longhorn does not limit WinFS to the file system (so I'm not sure what the FS stands for). One example is that WinFS is used to organize your contacts in Longhorn, so if you have a contact that is both a friend and a co-worker, so put them in both places at the same time.

More info: Longhorn and WinFS video.

Conclusion?

Once Longhorn comes out and applications like Outlook, Windows Media Player, and maybe even iTunes start taking advantage of features like WinFS, I think we'll finally start to get away from the broken mental model that items on your computer must live in just one place. Until then, I'm still not sure how to best organize all my financial paperwork.

According to a press release on Sun's and Microsoft's web sites, the two companies have entered a "broad cooperation agreement" and have settled all outstanding litigations.

This is straight from the press release:

• Technical Collaboration: The Technical Collaboration Agreement will provide both companies with access to aspects of each other's server-based technology and will enable them to use this information to develop new server software products that will work better together. The cooperation will initially center on Windows Server and Windows Client, but will eventually include other important areas, including email and database software. For example, one of the important elements of large scale computing environments is software to manage user identities, authentication and authorization. As a result of this agreement, Sun and Microsoft engineers will cooperate to allow identity information to be easily shared between Microsoft Active Directory and the Sun Java System Identity Server, resulting in less complex and more secure computing environments.
  
• Microsoft Communications Protocol Program: Sun has agreed to sign a license for the Windows desktop operating system communications protocols under Microsoft's Communications Protocol Program, established pursuant to Microsoft's consent decree and final judgment with the U.S. Department of Justice and 18 state attorneys general.
  
• Microsoft Support for Java: The companies have agreed that Microsoft may continue to provide product support for the Microsoft Java Virtual Machine that customers have deployed in Microsoft's products
  
• Windows Certification for Sun Server: Sun and Microsoft today are announcing Windows certification for Sun's Xeon servers. In addition, the Windows certification process for Sun's Opteron-based servers is moving forward.
  
• Future Collaboration for Java and .NET: Sun and Microsoft have agreed that they will work together to improve technical collaboration between their Java and .NET technologies.
  
• Patents and Intellectual Property: The parties have agreed to a broad covenant not to sue with respect to all past patent infringement claims they may have against each other. The agreement also provides for potential future extensions of this type of covenant. The two companies have also agreed to embark on negotiations for a patent cross-license agreement between them.
  
• Legal Settlements: The two companies are settling and terminating their lawsuit in the United States. Sun is also satisfied that the agreements announced today satisfy the objectives it was pursuing in the EU actions pending against Microsoft.

Congratulations to Sun and Microsoft for working out their differences and finally moving forward. Hopefully this collaboration will result in great new products for us.

Microsoft and Apple had a similar agreement in 1997 (News.com article)

I'm sure they couldn't announce this yesterday because people would think it was an April Fool's joke.

Sun also announced that they expect to have a net loss of $750-$810 million for last quarter and are reducing their workforce by approximately 3,300 people (press release). Hopefully this agreement with Microsoft wasn't out of desperation.

More coverage: Yahoo, Yahoo (another article), Slashdot, Scoble (MS blogger), Web Cast, News.com