Author: Rick Hallihan

I’ve only had a few minutes to look at this, but it appears that you can obtain search results from the MSN Search Beta, simply by adding “&format=rss” to the end of the url. I read about this first on SearchEngineWatch.

The first thing I did was create an ego-feed on the name of my blog (“Blobservations”) and one of the returned links was from dvorak.org, specifically, this post. The interesting point is that the MSN Search Beta found this, but my Technorati search for inbound links didn’t pick this up. Now I know that this has to do with blog pings, and that Technorati probably would have picked it up if it had been properly notified. The point is that MSN search found it on it’s own, for a post that is roughly 37 hours old. That’s cool!

It’ll be interesting to see exactly how quickly it can find new blog content. I’ve got some MSN Search Beta “Feeds” in my blogroll now, so I’ll post more as I get a better feel for the performance.

I recently purchased an Audiovox SMT5600 from AT&T Wireless. My experiences with the device were short, and range from sweet to bitter.

First, I love the phone. From a geek-centric perspective, it had tons of features that I would love to have with me all the time. Contacts synced with Outlook, internet access, and the photo/video camera. All of these features wrapped into a tiny package make this phone an awesome integrated device.

On the down-side, AT&T/Cingular coverage in my hometown isn’t up to par. With my Verizon phone, I can pretty much make calls from everywhere I go. I live in a fairly rural area, and the while AT&T has made some decent improvements in recent years, the coverage is still a little sparse.

When I had decent signals (3 bars or more) the phone worked great. When I had only one bar, or no bars, the phone performed miserably. While this is what I would expect, the phone didn’t seem to handle the weak-signal condition gracefully. I would dial, and it would sit there trying to connect for 30 seconds or so. Sometimes it would give up with a short double-beep. Sometimes it would show what looked like the end-of-call screen with a duration of 00:00. It was probably dutifully reporting what was actually happening, but from a user-experience perspective, it undermined my confidence in the device. Later in the evening, my wife tried to make several calls with the phone while we were running some errands. She’s used to our Verizon coverage, and she instinctively blamed the poor performance on the phone. I tried to explain why the phone is really cool, and how it’s really the network that is causing the problems, but in reality, neither the phone, nor the network are any good without the support of the other.

Some other random thoughts:

* My experiences with PocketPCs made me like this phone less. There were many occasions where I found myself longing for the stylus, or for some way to enter text without having to wrap my brain around T9 or multi-tap. The interface was familiar enough that I just felt that I should be able to use this device like a PocketPC.

* It’s hard to convince yourself that the microphone actually works when it’s so far away from your mouth. After several years with clamshell style phones, this is a tough mental block to overcome.

* The built-in storage is way too small. Vendors should consider throwing in a complimentary MiniSD card, at least 32MB, Maybe 64. Maybe SanDisk or someone would be willing to provide them cheap or free, just for the exposure. Preload the MiniSD with some free or trial software for the SmartPhone. Software vendors might even be willing to pay for the placement.

Well, the phone is getting shipped back as soon as I receive the return label from customer service. We’re back to using our trusty Motorola T720 on the Verizon network.

In the middle of this News.com interview by Michael Kanellos, Bill Gates makes some interesting comments about blogging, focusing on adoption, attrition, and his own blogging ambitions.

From the interview:

“I’ve toyed with doing one myself, but I don’t want to be one of those people who start and then don’t finish it, and again I’m thinking maybe I could do one a month or one every six weeks–something like that. I’d kind of like to, but I’ve got to be sure I can keep going for at least a year to make it worth doing.” — Bill Gates

Peter Provost points to an online nerd test. I scored a 91. Not sure if I am proud or ashamed…

Lori Pierce has a good post with some links about how she’s no longer running as admin.

While this post points to some great resources, the fact that you need “resources” to make this work shows that all of us developers (not just the folks at MSFT) need to do more work.

Most end users don’t have the knowledge or patience to get things working properly with unprivileged accounts. Even if they did, the next time they tried and failed to install some new software, they’d revert to their old ways.

Unfortunately, it’s going to take some radical changes to make this the norm for home users. I think ideally, you could have a hardware switch on the side of your PC. Try to install some software without the switch in “admin mode” and it would advise you to switch to admin mode. Try to browse the internet with the switch in admin mode, and it would warn you with annoying popup boxes every 30 seconds that you’re running in admin mode. Maybe even put the switch on the keyboard. The hardware and software would have to cooperate, the OS would have to have a good hold on the hardware so that it couldn’t be spoofed by a virus. Maybe we could just reuse that CTRL-ALT-DEL interrupt.

Its a complicated solution, but people like being able to change the configuration of thier PCs, add software, try new things. That means installing software, drivers, etc. We just need some way to make sure that the user is the only one with the power to make these changes, and we need to make it easy.