Monday, January 23, 2006

India As if there weren't enough excitement already, a little over a week ago we celebrated the first anniversary of MSR India. Our team is now in their new building in Bangalore <insert real estate horror stories here> and they celebrated the anniversary with an academic symposium and some interesting announcements. Complicating matters, in late December there was a gunman attack at an IT-related academic event in Bangalore. This was very tragic and saddening. Given the proximity to our own event, it certainly raised the obvious questions in our mind. But the work that we are doing with the academic community in India is very important to us, so we made sure we had appropriate security precautions in place and pressed on with the event as planned. In the end, it was a great event, well attended, and we hope it was vlauable to all who attended. Our India lab, while still small, is doing super well, attracting fantastic research talent and making great progress. I'm in particular looking forward to the MSR internal Techfest tradeshow next month in Redmond, so I can see all of the cool things that MSR India (and our other labs) have been creating. 9:13:52 PM    comment []

Life's little pleasures Here's one of life's little pleasures: taking a can of whipped crean, shaking it up, and then spraying it direcftly into your kid's mouth. Did that tonight. I swear it makes me feel five years younger -- instantly. (the kid enjoys it too) Which is good, because I turned 39 three weeks ago. The first in what I hope is a long series of 39th birthdays. 8:59:50 PM    comment []

drive-by spyware Back in the summer, an MSR researcher published a paper on the results of a web crawl that he did looking for web sites that use security holes to install malware on your machine. Summary: it happens, more frequently than you might think, and there is a very well-organized ecosystem of people and companies behind it. A team of researchers at University of Washington have just published a paper that replicated some of that work, plus went off in some other directions trying to quantfy the amount of spyware and malware downloaded from web sites. Ths is what I love about the open research community: someone does a piece of good work that advances the field, and other people take it, replicate, validate, and build upon it. Ideas get shared, progress gets made faster, and we all benefit. The UW paper is a very interesting read. According to their study, the number of sites that are using unpatched security holes to install malware has diminished dramatically. That's good news for everyone. Of course, it's super important that other people replicate and validate these findngs, and that the experiment gets repeated at regular intervals. 8:54:11 PM    comment []

Vongo When I heard about the Vongo service from Starz! during Bill Gates' CES keynote, I thought "Cool! I want to try this!" I'm already a Netflix subscriber, but for $10/month I can get movies on my tablet PC to travel with me, without having to haul an external DVD drive. So I signed up, downloaded the app and installed it. So far, so good. I can see the movie library, and watch previews. But I can't actually download the movies -- some weird network error. Keep in mind that I started at Microsoft as a developer in the networking group. I grok networks. I spent an hour futzing with the settings on my firewall and on my tablet to try to get it to work, with no luck. Nothing in their FAQ that would suggest what I might do, other than that my firewall might be the problem. so finally I give up and fire an email off to their customer service folks describing the problem. And the next day I get a response. The bad news was that they claimed that this was a frequent problem for people who had not configured their Windows Media Player correctly (blame the user; yeah right). The good news is that it appeared to be a DRM-configuration issue, and they pointed me to a URL to load up in Windows Media Player, which downloaded the right keys and played a test file. From that point on, Vongo had no trouble downloading movies. Vongo's movie collection is basically the Starz! movie collection. There's some good old stuff on there (e.g. Monty Python's "And Now for Something Completely Different" and a few recent things, and more if you're willing to do pay-per-view on top of the $10/month basic fee (I'm not). But I'm quickly exhausting the list of library movies that I want to watch. So I'll probably give it one more month, to see if it gets better (they add new movies every week, and some age out) before I dump it. Cool service, though. After the initial speed bump, works well. And you can watch the Starz! movie channel live on webcast. 8:31:51 PM    comment []

Creative Christmas Presents I got inspired over the holidays to come up with a few really novel gift ideas. I've been a fan for quite a while of Accoutrements' collection of action figures. You can find them in the occasional retail outlet (like Powell's in Portland) but you can buy them all online at Archie McPhee's. So here was bright idea #1: my parents were getting together for Christmas with my brother, sister and their respectve SO's in California, and my daughters and I were going to miss it, so I sent presents down ahead of time. Accompanying a big box with individual gifts for each of them was a smaller box with six action figures from Accoutrements' collection, and a note saying "one for each of you -- up to you how to choose." The six I sent were an eclectic collection, ranging from Jesus to Alexander the Great. I was hoping they would have fun with it... and they did. Forunately, no fights broke out. The second gift, also from Archie McPhee, was for my daughters and myself. I got us a Mystery Bag, and just stuck a tag on it and put it under the tree. This was really the big hit of our Christmas morning -- it was filled with all sorts of crazy fun stuff, and we're all sharing it and doing silly things with the stuff that was in there.   8:11:34 PM    comment []

Got My Camera Back Right after Christmas, I managed to get the sensor dirty on my precious Canon EOS 20D digital SLR camera. Well, I sent it off to the Canon factory service center in California, and when I got back from Hanover it was waiting for me. The Canon folks overdelivered -- cleaned the sensor and all the rest of the optics (including the viewfinder) while they were at it, and checked and tested everything. And they did it all under warranty; the only thing I had to pay for was to ship it there (they picked up the tab to fedex it back to me). Way to go Canon. By the way, I have a lot of pictures on my Flickr site now. I even got motivated to go back through my old boxes of photos and scan the decent ones in. 7:58:44 PM    comment []

Travel Last week was super crazy busy. I spent Wednesday visiting Dartmouth (and Tuesday and Thursday travelling to and from Hanover). The Tuck School of Business  invited me to be on a panel to discuss "the digital home" and I couldn't say no. Actually, I was overdue for a visit, so it was a good excuse -- despite how much I hate the winters in New Hampshire. The panel was fun, and I got to meeting many other interesting people in the CS department, the Jones Media Center, the Med School and the John Sloan Dickey Foundation for International Relations. Great discussions all around. I lucked out on the weather -- roads were bare and dry for the drives in both directions between Hanover and Manchester on Tuesdya and Thurday. Wednesday it was 45 degrees and pouring with rain all day -- absolutely freakish for January in Hanover, but made this Seattle resident feel right at home :-) Thursday made me realize what an amazing time we live in; I got up at 5am Eastern time, drove to Manchester, flew through Detroit to Seattle, and picked up my kids from school in the afternoon. The notion of waking up in New Hampshire in the morning and having a normal afternoon and evening in Seattle would astound somone 100 years ago. Now we almost take it for granted -- that is, unless youhave to fly through O'Hare or Atlanta. 7:53:00 PM    comment []

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