Dan’s Space on the Web

The new Zune 4.0 software was released recently, and I love it. It looks pretty damn sexy and is very functional (especially the Quickplay and Smart DJ options). However there’s one thing that still pisses me off – the Zune is completely in its own world, despite being from Microsoft.

To point out a few things…

1. the Zune doesn’t work with Windows Media Player. What the heck? This confused the nuts out of me when I first got my Zune. Here I have in my hand, a Microsoft Zune Mp3 Player, and it doesn’t work with Microsoft Windows Media Player? OK… I guess I can live with the fact that I have to get YET another media player onto my desktop. but that’s not the end of it.

2. the Zune software has its own library. WMP and Media Center share their libraries, and in Win 7 they share it with the “global” libraries, but the Zune doesn’t. So now I got to go setting up and managing a separate library. great. Also, I can’t really remember but, I think the Zune library has its own method of managing album art which doesn’t carry outside of the Zune software.

3. Zune software doesn’t send Now Playing information to Live Messenger. ok not so important, but still what the heck. Even iTunes is able to do this. So is winamp. and foobar (with the help of a plugin).
Update: My mistake. this does work now. Not sure why it didn’t work earlier.

These are just small examples of how certain Microsoft products don’t work well with each other. I think it’s a disappointing waste. Another similar situation is with the Xbox and Windows PC. Both are powerful gaming platforms, yet they seem to compete with each other. But that’s a story for another day.

On a more positive note, at least somethings are finally coming together – win 7’s shared libraries, Windows Live Essentials, the Zune HD might be sharing an app store with WiMo, and also has some integration with Xbox Live.

Today we’re trying to get to the official Windows 7 page (hosted off microsoft.com).

The results are so abysmal there’s no point taking screenshots. What’s that? You want proof? Fine.

Live Search, keywords: windows 7

not on any of the first 5 result pages, couldn’t be bothered to find out where it is. The closest I found was on page 5 with a hit for the EULA page.

Google search, keywords: windows 7

first hit.

Come on, Live Search, I really would like to do a post where you gave the better result. I really really do.

This 3rd post on Live Search vs. Google probably makes me look like I have something against Microsoft. That is no where near true, and to make it up to them I’ll soon be posting a rather positive one about their Windows Live Messenger.

Ok, seriously?

Live Search, keywords: Live Messenger
 

Google Search, keywords: Live Messenger

Goal: to download Windows Live Messenger.

With minimal keywords, Live Search failed to give me satisfactory results: the first result is almost completely off, second result is satisfactory although the displayed url throws things off with ‘addyahoo’ at the end, and the remaining top hits are rubbish.

With the same keywords, Google got it right on the first hit. It even provided sub-results for it, including a direct link to the Download page. The following top hits are also close if not correct.

Seriously, Microsoft? Is this the search engine you are trying to use to take back the web? Sure, I could have searched for “Windows Live Messenger” instead, but shouldn’t your search engine recognize your own product even if I miss the “Windows” in it? Google not only found the product, it guessed correctly that I was trying to download it. Sometimes I wonder if Google reads my mind, but then I realize that that’s sillytalk.

Sometimes I wonder if Microsoft is even using their own products to test their search engine.

Just did some maintenence for my family PC and reinstalled WinXP. Wanted to give it a quick makeover, so went looking for the Zune desktop theme. Decided that I’ll give Live Search a shot, since that box was there in my IE7.

Attempt #1, keywords: Zune Theme

Note that the first link, zune.net, while it’s the official Zune website it does not have a download link for the desktop theme. So..

Attempt #2, keywords: Zune Desktop

Attempt #3, keywords: Zune Desktop Theme

I knew that there was an official download link from microsoft.com which I wanted to use, so the last result shown above in the 3rd attempt (download.com), was not acceptable. Note that there eventually were similar download links in later search results (for all 3 attempts), but just not the one I wanted.

A little frustrated, I decided to see how Google would fair.

Attempt #1, keywords: zune desktop

There we go.

Just in case you’re wondering how the other keywords would work on Google,

Now, I’m not saying that Live Search sucks completely. It’s had its (rare) moments for me. However this case is especially surprising since the thing I’m looking for is not only a Microsoft product, but hosted on the microsoft.com, and yet it failed to show up as the first hit, or even the first 5 hits. Something is wrong here, no?

Wow, I just freed up 5 GB of space, ~3GB of which were duplicate files.

Thanks, Easy Duplicate Finder !

(The mass duplicate files are due to me having used to often format my computer, and just simply copy and paste files to be backed up into separate folders each time)

Besides that, here are some common useless files I found lying around
- essays and presentations I wrote in secondary school
- random MSN Received Files (especially media that I opened once, and never touched again)
- useless chat logs

and a few more I forgot… I started writing this post … 11 months ago, saved it as a draft, and forgot about it. Yes, today I’m cleaning out the trash.

As an added tip to having more hard disk space, often I have friends who are building new systems and ask for my opinion on their configuration. They’re usually on a budget, but I notice something crazy like 2 500GB hard drives. Honestly, nobody needs that much space. Your drive may be exploding with anime and music, but come on, do you actually rewatch all those old shows? Some might be worth keeping, but not all. Burn those to DVDs, delete the rest. Same goes for music – there’s no way you can possibly listen to 500 GB of music, even once through. That will literally take years.

My advice to them is usually to re-evaluate what you are storing, and perhaps you can exchange that spare hard disk for better system performance.

Personally the biggest space I’ve ever had is a 250GB drive, but I donated that to my family’s HTPC about a year ago and have since been surviving fine on 80GB (30GB of which is for my mac partition) + 120GB. I install lots of games (and games these days take like 5GB or more), yet still have free space remaining.

I’ll have to admit that it’s getting tight thanks to games, but instead of whoring 1TB all to myself, I’ll be getting a new external drive to act as storage and backup for my whole family. I need somewhere to store all those Steam backup files instead of having to constantly redownload the games, and our HTPC is slowly reaching it’s limit for recorded TV. oh and HD recordings are coming up…

I was rather disappointed with Microsoft’s failure to meet their initial promise of distributing the Windows 7 beta to the public on Jan 9th at 12pm. The fact that it was limited to the first 2.5 million people made it worse.

I had delayed a lunch appointment to 12.30pm in hopes of being one of that 2.5 million, and in the end I never got it. It was probably a waste of a good number of other people’s lunch hour as well. No word on their homepage, just the same “want to try the beta? come back in the afternoon on January 9″. They should have at least immediately put up a notice saying that it was delayed, even if there was no ETA – it’s unfair to leave the customer in the dark and having to continuously refresh the page, which I imagine just puts even more load on their servers. Unforeseen demand and server overload? I find that hard to believe. With a catch like “first x number of people”, you should definitely expect tons of people to be desperately refreshing their browsers hours before the release. ok maybe not hours, but close. It looked like a case of bad server management, which is disappointing coming from Microsoft.

Fortunately, they have redeemed themselves with what I think is fair compensation – the beta is not only now properly up and available to the public, but the 2.5 mil limit has been lifted in favor of a limited time approach. The Windows 7 beta is available from the Windows 7 page until January 24th.

trying a new setup by forwarding all my mail to my private gmail, thereby eliminating the need for thunderbird. Instead, to get email notifications, decided to grab the Gmail Notifier. Immediately I noticed one thing:

It only asks you if you want to enable auto-start at startup during installation – after that, there isn’t anywhere for you to change this.

Having recently moved hosting to Dreamhost, I moved enhancedseed.com’s email hosting to gmail as well. I usually have all my @enhancedseed.com email setup to forward all email to my private gmail address, so I did the same for the new hosting.

Interestingly, when I sent an email to fake12@enhancedseed.com to test the forwarding,  the email never made it to my private gmail’s inbox. Instead, it got immediately marked as read and archived.

To further figure out what’s going on, I sent another email to the same address, but from my school email account. As expected, this time it worked fine, arriving and sitting in my inbox like any other email until I opened it.

So what’s going on? Initially I thought that perhaps GMail was “smart” enough to see that the from: entry was myself. However this is not the case, because if I were to send an email to myself directly (not that I write emails to myself as a friend wrongly intepreted)  it was happily sit in the inbox, unread, until I open it. Then, I remembered what happened a few days ago when I had setup my Thunderbird with my gmail via IMAP, and had mapped the Drafts folder to gmail’s Draft “folder”.

What happened when I mapped the Draft folder accordingly was that I started seeing many emails being downloaded there, when I had no Drafts being stored in my account. Upon inspection, turns out these emails were drafts that were auto-saved while composing my emails in the gmail web-interface.

I concluded that since GMail does not use the folder structure but instead applies Labels, it probably “sends” these saved drafts to my account, immediately archives them and labels them “Draft”. How it knew that it was an “incoming” draft was by looking at where it came from: myself, which brings us back to the start of this article.

By sending an email to fake12@enhancedseed.com and then having it automatically forward all mail back to the same account, I suspect that GMail saw the forwarded mail as coming from me and treats it similarly as a draft.

However, why didn’t it label the email as “Draft”? Perhaps when “sending” the draft emails it has some header information that my forwarded emails as lacking, and so the labelling part isn’t triggered.

I also realize that this method of sending yourself draft emails to store them is pretty silly, so it’s probably some hand-waving magic going on internally within the server that doesn’t quite literally do what I say it does.  Of course, I don’t have information on what exactly happens with drafts, so it’s hard for me to figure out exactly what’s going on with my case. I will have to think about this a bit more and maybe carry out a few more tests…

Update: I noticed that chat logs are stored as read mail as well. Also thought about Sent mail – are those just being labeled as well? Also, the behavior in question was replicated by sending an email to a googlegroup I am registered for but under a different email that forwards back to the account I sent the email from (email.A -> group -> email.B -> email.A).

edit: wait, the googlegroup repro was probably due to a filter I created for emails sent to the googlegroup (the filter is meant to catch emails sent to the group email).  On the other hand, the filter isn’t supposed to automatically mark it as read.

That’s one thing I would fix in Windows XP: the taskbar doesn’t allow you to re-order opened applications.

What’s the use of keeping it in fixed order? So that I can remember in which order I opened my applications? Maybe, but that’s not very useful. It would be a lot more useful if it were the other way around.

Things to do before I graduate and return to Singapore: “Borrow” a projector and console over a break – Check.

Completed Halo 3 in under 8 hours (on normal difficulty). “Criminally short”, to quote the Escapist, but still pretty awesome.  Nothing like blowing up a Covenant Scarab, and that last maul run is probably the best “omg-the-place-is-exploding-run” sequences I have ever played.