New Delhi Times

I had an extremely frustrating day yesterday. Literally the whole day was spent in doing something as trivial as installing PHP5 on our server machine. I use XAMPP on my Windows laptop for LAMP development and switching to PHP5 on it was a breeze. So I wasn’t anticipating any problems on Linux as well. Boy, was I wrong! It turned out that PHP5 doesn’t bundle with MySQL client libraries anymore. So MySQL support needs to be explicitly compiled in. Fine, lets compile PHP5. Of course that didn’t help. Now Apache started crashing. And Pear DB.php package started crashing silently. Turns out Apache must be compiled with prefork MPM (whatever that means). Apache was pre-installed on my server as part of setup. I could only guess that it was compiled with wrong options. So then I ended up downloading the source code for Apache and compiling it with the right options. Did I tell you I had to clean install Fedora also on my server before I could install apache? After a full day or compiling and messing things up, my machine was practically unusable.
Sigh!!! Yesterday’s experience made me wonder why is that there is no MSI style setup system for Linux. Even open source technologies like Apache and PHP install very smoothly on Windows. Of course, Windows has its own issues with dll-hell and apps breaking other apps (a lot of this will be fixed with .NET 2.0 and Longhorn). Being a closed system also helps I guess.
On the other hand, RPMs and DEB packages in Linux come closest to MSIs in Windows. My recent experiences have made me wary of using RPMs. I need more control on the compile options. Linux also suffers from the fact that there are numerous distros. Supporting each distro with a single setup program is virtually impossible. Even supporting two differet versions of Windows becomes a nightmare for Microsoft. Then, licensing issues crop up. For example, PHP5 doesn’t ship with MySQL client libs because of some change in licensing policy. So if you want MySQL support, compiling from source seems to be the only option.
In my humble (and probably naieve) opinion, single click installs are a key to getting wider adoption of Linux. Even as a developer, I find having to compile source code unpleasant. For a home or office user, that is unthinkable. The Visual Studio setup wizard makes it extremely simple to create an elegant looking setup for your application. We need something like that for Linux. If compatibility with all the different distros is an issue, then maybe some sort of consensus and standardization is required. From the point of view of an ISV who developes software for Linux, providing support can become a nightmare if all the hundered different distros need to be supported.
I guess that is enough ranting for the day. I strongly believe in being technology agnostic. I develop on both Windows and Linux platforms. So even though I might be coming across as a Linux basher, I am just a frustrated software guy letting off some steam

MiniMSFT is a blog run by an anonymous Microsoft employee who believes that Microsoft needs to shed some fat (read – incompetent people) to get competitive again. I used to occasionally read this blog while I was at Microsoft and ran into it again today. It makes for interesting reading though one must keep in mind that it is obviously a blog with an agenda. Reading the comments on that blog, one might feel that Microsofties are one discontended lot. But I think that is not really true. Employee turnover is really low at Microsoft and in my three years there, I was the only person in my group who left on his own will. In fact, one of my concerns at Microsoft was that it had become such a comfort zone for me. Work was great, benefits were awesome, I lived just across the road from the campus and in general life was good. While that is nothing to complain about, I realized that within a few more years of the same life, I would never be able to get out of my comfort zone. Hence, I made the move. And lets just say, I have put myself in quite an uncomfortable zone right now

Yesterday Reliance disabled outgoing calls on my WLL phone because i had run up a bill of 5000 bucks. Now today, hotmail disabled my outgoing email. Why? I don’t know. I spent the whole of today morning sending out important emails to our clients. And many hours later, I realized nobody is getting my email.
I was pissed off enough to switch to using gmail exclusively. But, in what could only be a CIA conspiracy to make me totally unproductive, gmail refused to send email as well. Google thinks adding a “Oops…” to an error message makes it funny when in fact it makes it just more annoying.
Well, eventually gmail did comply and now I can send mail via gmail. Hotmail has still blocked my outgoing email. No idea why.
What a waste of time.

Hotmail pissed me off immensely today. For whatever reasons, my hotmail account was inaccessible for several hours today. I have been using hotmail for my official communications of late (a big mistake as I now realize). We have been working across three continents on a project – so being able to communicate effectively is critical.
So while I was twiddling thumbs and hitting the refresh button waiting for hotmail to come back, I thought about what all is wrong with hotmail. A LOT, in my opinion. For example:
1. No pop access.
2. Awfully slow and painful access via Outlook
3. 250MB space for only people who sign up in North America. What’s up with that?
4. Really slow and inefficient search. There is no advanced search feature. You just get one search box. MSN is supposed to be building a kick-ass search engine. How about using it in hotmail?
5. No auto-complete in TO: field while composing email. Both Yahoo and Gmail have it and it makes life much easier when you have 100s of contacts in your address book.
6. A very very annoying caching issue. This has been introduced recently. Clicking “Inbox” just brings up the locally cached copy of the inbox. So you end up having to hit refresh 5 times before the real inbox shows up. Guys, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!
7. Overuse of Javascript. Many links are actually call javascrip functions on clicking. This means, you can’t do a right-click -> open in new window on these links. That means, I cant compose a mail in a seperate window while reading my mail in the other window.
8. Poor usability and navigation. Popup blockers block the “upload attachment” window. The contacts list on the compose window is organised in some mysterious way. Some of my contacts never show up there for whatever reason. When the compose mail page loads, it suddenly takes focus away from the address field to insert the signature in the body field.
I could go on and on. If somebody from MSFT is reading, then please forward this to the hotmail team. I dont want to stop using hotmail and I know Microsoft is capable of doing a much better job of it.

CNET claims:
“So concerned is management, owning an iPod at Microsoft is beginning to become impolitic, the manager said. Employees are hiding their iPods by swapping the telltale white headphones for a less conspicuous pair.”
and
“So popular is the iPod, executives are increasingly sending out memos frowning on its use.”
I find that very hard to believe. In my time at Microsoft, I never saw a memo going out discouraging use of competing technology. Except, of course in the case of open source, where legal issues prevent MSFT employees from freely looking at the source code. Sure, there are many in the company who wont touch a QT or Real media file. But that is more out of company pride and not because the upper management wont like it. In fact internal mailing lists usually have very open discussion on whats wrong with Microsoft products. There would often be comments like “And I wont quit using “insert competing product here” until MS “enter product name here” gives me so and so features!”
That is one of the best things I liked about Microsoft. The core value “open and respectful” really means something there.
It does give a funny picture imagining my former co-workers rushing to hide their ipods as they see Bill passing by ….

CNET reports:
Microsoft has agreed to rename the new slimmed-down version of Windows it’s preparing to release in Europe, after antitrust regulators there balked at the title.
Microsoft announced last month that it intended to use the name “Windows XP Reduced Media Edition” for the program, which has, by order of the European Commission, been stripped of the Media Player that’s usually included.
—-
My heart goes out for the devs/test/PMs who have to work on this product. How exciting can it be to create a product that does less than what its predecessor did? How inspiring can it be to know that no informed consumers are ever going to buy a reduced version of Windows, especially when it costs the same as the original version (not sure on this though…) And that too, at a time when the rest of the company is working on shipping a super cool, much anticipated, long awaited Longhorn?

Based on Scoble’s post, I speculated yesterday that Microsoft might release a desktop search tool. I was so right!
“Microsoft said it planned to deploy its new tool through a set of different toolbars that could be installed on the Windows desktop, the Internet Explorer browser and within Office Outlook on the e-mail, contacts and scheduling program.”
Comparisons with Google’s desktop search tool are inevitable. It will be interesting to see who wins this round.

Scoble claims Microsoft is going to announce something really cool tonight.
“Come back on Monday. Remember last Sunday when I said I had seen something that left me speechless? Well, in the videos I filmed (and I filmed more than 1.5 hours worth with nearly the entire team working on the thing that’s being shipped into beta on Monday) I am heard saying “that’s wicked.”
I have no idea what it might be (desktop search?). I can’t wait to find out!

Redmond, the place I called home for the last 3 years, is the number 1 digital city (in the 30,000-75000 population category) in US!! What else could you expect from a city with 30,000 (minus 1) MSFT geeks?
Read more here.

CNET reports that Microsoft Research (MSR) is opening a lab in Bangalore.
“The lab, set to open in January, will initially focus on four areas: multilingual systems, technology for emerging markets, geographical information systems and sensor networks. Over time, however, the direction of the lab’s research will be largely determined by the people it recruits.”
Microsoft is focusing heavily on emerging markets. It will be interesting to see what they come up with for India. I wasn’t too impressed by the XP starter edition.