Tim Marman's Loosely Coupled

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• Is Live Mesh constantly crashing? Try removing Silverlight

  On two of the four machines I’m running Live Mesh on, I found the Mesh Operating Environment (moe.exe) repeatedly crashing. It was completely stable on the other two machines, but on these two machines it would just crash, restart, and crash again a few minutes later. The crash details were fairly sparse (only the Windows Error Reporting logs, not direct entries from Mesh), but I noticed they referenced mscorlib (the .NET runtime object library). I also noticed that both of these machines had Silverlight installed, while the two machines that were working fine didn’t. Silverlight does include a .NET CLR implementation, so I figured it was possible there was some conflict. Sure enough, the crashes stopped on both machines once I uninstalled Silverlight. In fairness, I’ve installed a number of alpha versions of Silverlight on my machine, so it’s possible this was not a general incompatibility with Silverlight and Mesh and just remnants of those previous versions. In any case, hope this saves... Posted Jul 30 2008, 02:51 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Microsoft, .NET, Knowledge Base

• You don’t change the world with a marginally better mousetrap

  For those of you paying attention, Cuil , a new search engine taking aim at Google, launched with much hype. Much of that hype comes from the fact that it was founded by former Google search architect Anna Patterson and her husband, Stanford professor Tom Costello. That hype and good press didn’t last long though. WebWare says they showed us how not to launch a search engine . Forget the hype and whether Cuil is or isn’t better or different or whatever than Google and all the rest – the real point is that it just doesn’t matter . As Jeff Nolan puts it , “you don’t beat Google just by being marginally better than Google”. I wrote recently that technology only matters when it creates new possibilities . Here, Cuil doesn’t really bring anything new to the table. Cuil claims to be be “bigger than Google” in terms of what it indexes, but it doesn’t really matter since most us of never get past the first page of results. Even though the This also underlines part of why Microsoft and Yahoo! can... Posted Jul 30 2008, 11:40 AM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Rants, Business, Microsoft, Google, Entrepreneurship, Startup, Venture Capital, Facebook

• Google is “fast becoming just another company”

  An interesting article about the backlash with Google increasing its day care costs ( via Alex ). Two months ago, Google held a series of secret focus groups with employees who have children in Google’s day care facilities. The purpose was to gauge their reaction to the company’s plan to raise the amount it charged for in-house day care by 75 percent. Parents who had been paying $1,425 a month for infant care would see their costs rise to nearly $2,500 — well above the market rate. For parents with toddlers and preschoolers, who were charged less, the price increases were equally eye-popping. Under the new plan, parents with two kids in Google day care would most likely see their annual day care bill grow to more than $57,000 from around $33,000. At the first of the three focus groups, parents wept openly. As word leaked out about the company’s plan, the Google parents began to fight back. They came up with ideas to save money, used the company’s T.G.I.F. sessions — a weekly meeting for... Posted Jul 05 2008, 10:38 AM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Business, Microsoft, Google, Startup, Facebook

• Is IIS7 on Vista not serving static content?

  If you add IIS7 and ASP.NET on Vista, many of the common HTTP modules are not installed by default – including the one for static content. The problem is that it doesn’t return a 404 or other error, but rather zero-byte files. If you’re seeing empty files returned for CSS, images and JScript files, this is likely the culprit. (You’ll all see the Static Files handler for * being mapped to the DefaultDocumentModule). The answer is to go into the Windows Features dialog and make sure that the Common Http Features are checked off. Hope this helps. Posted Jul 02 2008, 02:10 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Software Development, Vista, Microsoft, .NET, Programming, Knowledge Base

• The Enterprise, The iPhone, and the Role of Silverlight

  With its recent announcement to support ActiveSync on the iPhone , Apple is clearly going after the enterprise user. The problem, as Colin puts it, is that the decisions that consumers make decisions on a radically different set of criteria than organizations . Lack of Exchange support was surely holding back enterprise adoption, so that move was both obvious and inevitable. The fact that they are also supporting remote wipe is a bigger deal than most might realize too - security is a major concern for large enterprises, and for a long time Blackberry was the de facto device in large part because of this. (Windows Mobiles devices weren't allowed at my last job until the Remote Wipe feature was enabled). Fundamentally, I think we're moving to a model where enterprises are going to demand a certain baseline for devices to play in their garden. Features like over-the-air Exchange connectivity, remote wipe, and support for .NET, Java, and Flash are quickly becoming non-negotiable. It... Posted Mar 27 2008, 09:00 AM by Tim with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Rants, Gadgets, Microsoft, .NET, Enterprise, Apple, Programming

• Congrats to Faisal on his new role on the ADO.NET team

  My good buddy Faisal has moved from MSBuild to ADO.NET . Specifically, he's the Program Manager for LINQ to SQL and the Object Service for Entity Framework. He says you'll hear a lot more from him on these things, but of course if past history is any indication his blogging will be short lived :) Either way, I'm still waiting for him to convince me why I should LINQ instead of SubSonic . The only issue we're really having now with SubSonic is with the JOIN story, and they're supposedly prototyping stuff to address this in the next build. Posted Dec 05 2007, 03:45 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Technology, Software Development, Personal, Microsoft, .NET, Programming

• Facebook: Lawsuits, IPOs, and Acquisitions

  ConnectU is suing Facebook for, among other things, copyright infringement, breach of contract, theft of trade secret. (It should be noted that Facebook is counter-suing for business torts and unfair business practices). ConnectU (which started at Harvard Connection) alleges that Mark Zuckerberg was brought on as a member of the ConnectU development team, given access to the existing code base and business plans, and eventually "stole" them. For more details, read the full set of complaints and other filings . Rob is wondering why no one is covering this lawsuit ... it's certainly a big deal given the recent valuations and talk of an IPO. As Mike Arrington notes , "this isn’t a case of plaintiffs looking for a quick buck as billion dollar valuations are discussed" - this is actually a long-standing dispute that commenced long before we were saying "Facebook" and "billions" in the same sentence. Facebook recently acquired Parakey , a as-yet-launched... Posted Jul 24 2007, 07:19 AM by Tim with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Web 2.0, Business, Microsoft, Google, Startup, Venture Capital, Facebook

• Looking at Google's acquisition of Postini

  Last week, Google (GOOG) purchased Postini for $625m . Jason calls this Google's most enterprisey acquisition yet - and despite all the other acquisitions, it's "the first evidence . . . that Google is ready to take the kid gloves off outside of the ad-driven model." Cote says that $625 million is not flippant , and regardless of whether you consider this a move to "directly compete" with Microsoft (MSFT), it does mean (especially when considering other efforts like Google Gears) that "Google is a threat to Microsoft". Fred, as an existing Postini customer, outlines what he'd like to see Google do with Postini . Fred focuses on mail because, let's be honest, that's what they're best known for. But as Jason suggested, I think the acquisition goes beyond this. InfoWorld coverage of the acquisition outlines this broader application. Postini provides on-demand security, archiving, and policy enforcement services, primarily for e-mail and... Posted Jul 17 2007, 11:35 AM by Tim with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Business, Microsoft, Google, Enterprise

• More on UrgeMS.exe

  UrgeMS.exe seems to be causing issues for a lot of people. I mentioned previously that you can disable the process via security policy, and someone pointed out a registry setting to disable it a little cleaner. I was hoping they'd fix this in the future, but it looks like all they did was make it worse. A recent update made this process a bit, shall we say, heartier. In previous versions, UrgeMS.exe was launched only when Windows Media Player started up; now it seems to launch the process repeatedly while using URGE. Worse yet, the registry fix mentioned no longer works - whatever launches this process explicitly resets the Enabled registry key to true. A user on the CNET forums posted another workaround : replacing the UrgeMS.exe process with an "empty" executable. So while Windows Media Player will still repeatedly launch this process, at least now it won't thrash your disk and use a significant amount of CPU. I've attached the empty executable I'm using - it's simply a new console application... Posted Jul 01 2007, 05:28 PM by Tim with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Music, Misbehaving Software, Microsoft, Audio

• Microsoft Silverlight

  A lot of people are very excited about Silverlight , the technology that was formerly known as WPF/E. Jesse says it will give Flash a real run for its money because of a better video story (emphasis in original). Unlike Flash, Silverlight (the new name) will support DRM, it supports the industry standard VC-1 codec used in HD-DVD and Blueray, and it can take advantage of the built-in media streaming capabilities of IIS. As for DRM support, I don't think that's of any real consequence. Jesse claims "companies that want to stream TV and movies over the web, will not consider any method that doesn't allow for DRM protection", but we're already seeing a trend away from DRM. That said, there are certainly things to get excited about, particularly the prospect of cross-platform CLR support and the ability to develop Flash-like applications with the power of the Visual Studio environment (and not having to learn a new scripting language at that). One thing worth noting is the fact that Flash is... Posted May 25 2007, 02:30 PM by Tim with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Software Development, Innovation, Microsoft, C#, .NET, Video, Programming, DRM