This is a little off of the typical content for my blog but when I saw this I thought I just have to share (and besides its Friday so you deserve a little break). I got an e-mail asking me to take a survey. It was a web based survey from a company I know so I decided to try it out. Almost all the questions were the typical questions with answers on a scale of 1-7 with 1 being the dislike/no answer and 7 being the like/yes answer. Then I got to a question with this for the possible answers.

I sat there for a minute analyzing the numbering scheme. I tried to find a pattern like 1 in the middle with the numbers concentrically arranged around it. I also looked at an odd/even distribution. It isn't like they just reversed the numbers and the questions above and below it were in the correct 1-7 order. Finally I decided that it was taking too much of my time and I should just skip the question. Unfortunately all of the questions required an answer. Normally I would have just closed the browser window and decided that they weren't worth the time but this time I decided that a little random data might give them something to think about and just chose the 1 button. I don't know if I was indicating I wanted them to do it for me, I was ambivalent about the whole thing, or that I want to do it myself but it would be interesting to be a fly on the wall in the meeting where they start asking about the results and why this one question seems to be outside of the expected values. I am sure there will be some finger pointing and questioning of the database or the web programmers. I am truly sorry for any grief I might cause those people. In the end I think they will have to throw the question out or get some high priced behavioral analyst to decide if I noticed the changed number scheme and clicked on the number I wanted or if I just blindly clicked the position I expected my number to be in. That would be some feat of mind reading.

Sometime over the weekend the home page for Live Search at http://www.live.com has been updated. It is a lot cleaner and loads a lot faster. I have only done a few searches with the new page and don't have any feel for changes to the search results. I like the new clean interface but to be honest what I really want are good search results. If I just wanted a pretty interface on the search page I could go to http://www.msdewey.com or http://www.tafiti.com to get a pretty interface on the search engine.

According to ComputerWorld IE gained a small market share in April. It is the first gain for IE since October and comes after Apple attempted to push Safari out via automatic updates. I didn't do that well in statistics but the numbers seemed relatively small and might just reflect that there is some settling in the marketplace as people pick their favorite browser and use it. The article points out that IE6 gained in popularity. That tells me it wasn't a whole slew of new Windows Vista machines. I am hoping it wasn't a lot of people who gave up on Vista and went back to XP but that is certainly also a possibility. If that were the case I would expect the numbers to change as those people download IE7, Safari, or FireFox to their XP machines.

Of course as we all know and are reminded of almost every time we watch the news, statistics can be made to tell almost any story that we want.

I just saw that Microsoft is not going to sweeten the deal for Yahoo! any more than it has and has decided against a hostile takeover. I am not sure what Microsoft would have expected to gain but with all the moves that Yahoo! has made lateley to make sure that it is an unattractive takeover target I guess it is the best for Microsoft. When they start talking companies of that size and the different cultures there are a lot of factors to take into consideration. I am sure I am not aware of even a small part of them so my opinion probably doesn't count for anything. I guess that is why Steve Balmer and Jerry Yang get the compensation packages that they do and why I am nowhere close to getting paid as much.

The article did say that if Yahoo! didn't show stronger performance they might be a target for a takeover bid. I am sure at that point Microsoft will take another look at whatever they thought was attractive about Yahoo! and decide whether to make another bid.

I saw a piece in the RISKS digest at http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/25.13.html#subj4 that says spam (unsolicited e-mail) has hit its 30 year anniversary. I also saw an article this morning off the MSN home page http://tech.msn.com/security/article.aspx?cp-documentid=6679669 talking about spam. With all the doom and gloom messages that spam is a major problem I have to admit that I am happily living in my protected world not having to deal with the problem for the most part. I used to get tons of spam at my Keane account until they installed a filter. I then went down from 300 or so spam messages a day to around 20. That number was much more manageable. I don't know what Advaiya, Microsoft, hotmail, gmail, or the other places where I have e-mail accounts does to stop spam but I see very few messages. Perhaps I have just gotten lucky with not having my new e-mail in an article or other place where it can be picked up on-line and added to the spammers lists?

In any case I think we can all agree that getting any kind of message whether it be for a product we don't want, a job offer from the company we swore we would never work for, or the nagging hints from our boss that we have a project due it isn't the kind of thing that we want a lot of and especially first thing in the morning when I typically find the most spam in my inbox.

Just as an aside, since I mentioned my experience with my Keane e-mail account. I have recently been told and have tested that it does not send back a message that the account has been closed so people sending to it are probably thinking that I am ignoring them. The truth is that I haven't been able to access the account since August when I left Keane. If you are trying to contact me on some matter you can contact me through my blog here and I will give you a better e-mail address to reach me at.

Yesterday Microsoft released version 2 of Expression Studio. You can find a lot more information at http://www.microsoft.com/expression but some of the key new features include

• Silverlight support
• Importing Adobe Photoshop files
• Support for ASP.NET AJAX
• Convert XAML into WPF user controls
• New codecs
• Image slicing

I think there is probably something for everyone in the package.

Last night Microsoft announced that the technology preview of Live Mesh is available to a limited number of beta testers. Live Mesh is a way for me to sign up all of my devices (mobile and Mac coming soon) and designate libraries (files) on each one to be synchronized to the others. I also get a secure remote desktop into the machine. This all runs in the cloud and uses your Live ID and SSL to secure the data. I can see this enhancing/replacing the array of tools I use now for synchronizing and remote access to my machines and data. I am excited to start working with the technology preview and see how this will work when I am on the road next for remote access to my home PC. Right now if I need to get to it I can have someone log into it and I use the remote help option as an easy way to do remote access without having to configure firewalls and worry about having a connection from the Internet to that system. The downside of that is that someone has to request the help and then allow me to have control so it takes someone being available. From what little I have seen about Live Mesh I don't have to have someone at the device to connect to it securely so it will make it more convenient.

Of course at the top of my wish list is to have Live Mesh work with CardSpace but since I can set up my Live ID to use CardSpace I don't know that it is that big of an issue.

When the SDK comes out later it will be interesting to see how Microsoft delivers on their promise of having the same API on the client and in the cloud. If the API looks just like the current .NET Framework that would go a long way to making this the "killer application" of clould computing even though it is really a platform to create killer apps. If all of the .NET programmers can just write their applications and then at some time decide to move them from an on premise app to a being hosted in the cloud that would make this platform extremely useful and really enable it to take off. If I have to write my applications in a new way with different constructs and they only run in the "mesh" then I don't know if I would start targeting this platform for general user applications. There are a class of applications that use collaboration heavily and could use the mesh immediately but I don't know that writing your typical data entry and reporting line of business application would gain enough benefit from the mesh to justify a new programming model and the drop in productivity that it would entail.

For now I will just try to explore what I can do with the technology preview and post my experiences.

You can find more information about Live Mesh at the web site http://www.mesh.com. There are also the following resources available:

- Watch the interview with Ray Ozzie introducing Live Mesh on Channel 9 (link: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=399578) 

- Watch an interview with Abolade Gbadegesin on Live Mesh Architecture (link: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=399577) on Channel 9
- Watch the demo of the Live Mesh application on Channel 10 

Some good background on Mesh can be found at http://blogs.msdn.com/livemesh/

I got back from vacation and got a few prompts this morning to update software installed on my machine. This one for Flash player caught my eye since the biggest sale point of Microsoft's Silverlight over Adobe's Flash has been that Silverlight can play HD videos. Now it looks like Adobe has closed that gap so it may make it harder to sell companies on Silverlight.

I saw an article on the BBC News technology web site that said PayPal would start warning users who have older, less secure browsers and eventually would block them from accessing their site. My first reaction when I read that there are users using IE 3 and 4 to access PayPal was "you gotta be kidding me". I knew that there are people using older browsers out there but I always assumed that they were like my parents who are on dial-up, visit the 2 or 3 web sites they know, and don't do anything else. They don't feel the need to upgrade their computer because it is faster than they can type and I also figured they weren't using the latest browser because downloading IE 7 would take too long. I was surprised that these people would be using PayPal. The more I thought about it I decided I know people like that. One of their favorite web sites is EBay and they love to buy and sell items, always looking for a good bargain. I can then see how PayPal would be getting involved with people using older browsers. I applaud them in their role to help protect the Internet because it will help all of us to be safer.

I am looking forward to the time when the use of Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificates becomes widespread and we will see users looking for the green address bar just like they look for the lock icon for SSL now. I am also holding out hope that at some point in the future we will see Microsoft putting out patches on a DVD and making them available at Wal-Mart or other large retailers where people like my parents can get them and update their computers. As time goes by I see fewer and fewer reasons for Microsoft to go through the cost but it would definitely make it so I wouldn't have to spend most of a night updating computers when I go to visit family. Until Microsoft starts dropping DVDs with the latest patches I (and a lot of other people in IT) will just plan on giving up some sleep each year to update older computers.