File copying in Vista

I just came across this blog entry addressing file copying in Vista [SP1]: here. I can't say I follow it all yet but who would have thought that copying a file could be so complicated?! Nice blog entry though.

Life at Microsoft

One of the interesting things about visiting Redmond is seeing how different life is on the Redmond Campus and in the product teams. It's a little hard to explain but fortunately there are videos which show what life is like over there.

Sleepless in Cambridge

I'm now back from a wonderful trip to Redmond! I am grateful to Jim for being a great host. I met lots of people in Building 35 and learnt loads about TSQL. All very interesting. Now we have lots of work to be getting on with.

My fortune cookie at P.F. Changs read "You are wise to be deeply attached to your family and home". Maybe they know something about Microsoft that I don't but either way it's nice to be back :-)

Sleepy in Seattle

I'm currently in the Seattle area. I'm visiting the mothership and talking about The Next Big Project with various product people. All secret, but very exciting.

I spent today relaxing in downtown Seattle. I really like the Pike Place Market area: there are all sorts of people there; from dot-com millionaires to homeless people to ALT- people. There are funky places to have coffee and hang out. Next to a cheese factory I looked at some knives in a kitchen store that would have made Satnam cry had he been there!

The cool thing was somewhat spoilt by my rental car. Somewhat amusingly the woman at the Avis desk remembered me from my November visit. I thought I was polite but when I went to the car park I discovered that my Chevvy Cobalt was the lovely shade of "banana yellow"! Nice. [updated] See what you think:

Hmm...now off to get another coffee to get myself into the timezone :-)

iPhone with activesync

I'm a happy user of Windows Mobile 6. I've had some not-so-good phones in the past, although my latest - the HTC Touch - really is a nice piece of kit. My commitment with WM is because I really need my Outlook details on me at all times. (I used to use a PDA for this before I carried a mobile with me routinely.) I've tried other phones that claim that they can sync with outlook, but it never works.

Even though the iPhone is very tempting, I haven't succumb because I can't easily sync all my Outlook information to it. Somewhat amazingly, Nick pointed me to this interview with Terry Myerson [link]. It turns out that Microsoft has just done a deal with Apple to enable them to sync with exchange and embed active sync on the iPhone!!! Wow - I didn't see this coming! Once an iPhone appears with this feature I'll be first in line :-)

UpgradeJ

Despite having two PC members as authors, the paper on UpgradeJ by me, James and Matt got accepted for ECOOP08! We were a little surprised as one of the reviewers was sceptical - but I guess this is an example of author response working (there were others for ECOOP [putting on my PC hat]).

There were a lot of good suggestions from the referees so it'll take a while to fix. However we should be releasing a full version with proofs as a tech report at the same time we deliver the camera-ready copy. Hopefully next month. I'll post when it's available.

Anyhow - see you in Cyprus in July? (The perfect Summer location :-))

PS: Congratulations to James who got two papers accepted for ECOOP. (Doubly impressive as he had three submissions!)

Aero - no more

I've been resisting but...

...today my desktop was sooo slow. I was trying to show Claudio something in C# 3.0 but we had to wait a stupid time watching the animated wheel while Vista&VS fought with each other. I only have a single core machine but it is a 3.6Ghz Pentium 4 - not exactly a slow machine!

We went to the desktop properties and actually selected "optimize for performance". Essentially the machine reverted to a sub-Windows 2000 look - yikes! optimal? Maybe, but too embarrassing! So I've decided to switch off Aero and go to Vista Basic. Still looks okay and, it must be said, things are zipping along quite nicely. I have to wait for my multi-core desktop before I can do transparent windows again.