From the press release entitled Industry Testing of Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 Begins we learn

Microsoft Announces Estimated Retail Pricing for All Windows Vista Editions

With Windows XP, customers often had to make tradeoffs in features and functionality as the Windows XP editions were aligned with specific hardware types. With Windows Vista, customers now have the ability to make choices between editions based on the valuable features they desire, which are now available as standard features of mainstream editions. For example, 64-bit support and Tablet PC and touch technology are standard features of the Home Premium and Business editions.

Pricing information for all Windows Vista editions is available online, along with additional information on the various editions of Windows Vista.

It looks like my next choice of operating system will have a suggested retail price for full package product of $399.00 and a suggested upgrade retail price of $259.00. Given that I'm running Windows Server 2003 at home it looks like I'll be paying the higher price. 

Gabe Rivera, author of Techmeme, has a blog post entitled Why I don't offer a personal filter where he writes

I'm facing another round of inquiries on personal filtering, mostly from Techmeme fans who've read Ross Mayfield's or Dare Obasanjo'sJeff Clavier and Ted Leung nearly a year ago!) recent thoughts on the matter. (Just for the record, the first round included requests from

Why don't I offer a personal filter service aka "meMeme" aka "my.memeorandum"? Briefly, filters based on the editorial approach used for Techmeme/memeorandum don't work well outside of a few topic domains (like politics and tech), because cross linking is typically too sparse to produce a compelling mix of news. Sam Ruby unintentionally confirmed this yesterday should you pause to consider what sort of daily news selection could be derived from his Venus output. While it's true that cross linking is dense in some blogospheres, these are largely the same domains already covered by my existing sites.

Why not try editorial approaches based on new kinds of semantic analyses? My belief is that the requisite technology is harder than anything powering Google News, Topix, or my current sites. Attempts based on current technologies come up woefully short, with the resulting "Daily Me" consisting of a seemingly random mix of content missing most or all "must have" articles and posts. And having the "must haves" is essential for winning the earlier adopter types that would dominate the userbase of such a filter in the first place.

I reread the output from Sam's blogroll and it reminded me that there is a difference between the scenarios that sites like Techmeme and Tailrank are interested in and the goals of a personalized meme tracker. Here are a copuple of questions to get you started on understanding the differences in implementation choices one might make between implementing a personalized meme tracker vs. a topic specific memetracker,

1. Q: How do you deal with "noise" links such as http://del.icio.us/tag/rest or http://www.technorati.com/tag/AJAX which may be common in the feeds the user is interested in?

   A: In both cases, it would seem the first step is to hard code the application to understand certain kinds of links as "noise". The interesting question is how to deal with the introduction of new types of "noise" links to the ecosystem. A web-based application may be easily updated as new "noisy" links enter the system but things are a bit more difficult for a desktop application. Perhaps allowing users to nominate certain classes of links as noise?

2. Q: What 'class' of news items or blog posts should be used in evaluating what is [currently] popular?

   A: It is quite obvious that simply using the entirety of the posts from a particular feed to calculate a links popularity is flawed. Using that metric, I suspect that links such as http://adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000385.php or http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/06/10/correcting-the-record-about-microsoft/ would always be the most popular links from my blogroll. Using a specific date or time range (e.g. over the past 24-48 hours) seems to be what sites such as Techmeme and Tailrank seem to do. An aggregator such as RSS Bandit or FeedDemon may use other techniques such as only using 'unread' items to calculate currently popular topics.

3. Q: How do you deal with link blogs?

   A: A number of people in my blogroll have blog posts that are basically a repost of al the links they have posted to del.icio.us that day (e.g. Stephen O'Grady and Mark Baker). Sites like Techmeme and Tailrank filter these posts because no one wants to see a bunch of headlines that are all of the form 'links for 2006-09-05' with no real content. On the other hand, if a large number of folks in my blogroll are linking to a particular news item then it is likely to be interesting to me regardless of whether there 'meaty' blog posts behind their links or just linkblog style postings.

These are a couple of the queestions that I've been pondering since I started thinking about this feature a couple of months ago. At the end of the day I think that although Gabe's perspective is useful since he did build the site that inspired this thinking, the scenarios are different enough to change some of the implementation choices in ways that may seem surprising to some.

PS: It seems Sam has already turned Gabe's feedback into code based on reading his blog post MeMeme 2.0. There are definitely interesting times ahead.

About six months ago, I wrote a blog post entitled Jubilee Thoughts: Tracking Hot Topics where I talked about adding meme tracking functionality similar to the features of Memeorandum and TailRank to RSS Bandit. Since I wrote that blog post I haven't written a lick of code that actually does this but I've thought and talked about it a lot. While all I've done is talk I can't help but notice that a few others have been writing code while I've been pontificating in my blog.

In his blog post entitled Spyder Spots a Memetracker Nick Bradbury writes

Andy "Spyder" Herron writes about the "personal memetracker" that's hidden in FeedDemon 2.0.0.25.

I had hoped to complete this feature by now, but as Andy points out, it still needs some work (which is why I hid it and gave it a "beta" label). If you'd like to try it out, select "Popular Topics" from the Browse menu (or just add the "Popular Topics" toolbutton to the toolbar above FeedDemon's browser).

I should add that this feature will probably be useful only to people who subscribe to a lot of feeds since it relies on common links to determine popularity. So if you're not subscribed to feeds which link to the same articles, chances are it won't show you any results.

In another blog post entitled MeMeme Sam Ruby writes

Ross Mayfield: Cue up not what is popular, or what the people I subscribed to produced.  Cue up what my social network has found interesting.

Herewith, a simple demonstration of what aggressive canonicalization can produce.  Venus may be in Python, but suppose I’m in a Ruby mood.  The cache is simply files in Atom 1.0 format, with all textual content normalized to XHTML.

Lets make a few simplifying assumptions: all posts are created equal, each post can only vote once for any given link (this also takes care of things like summaries which partially repeat content), posts implicitly vote (once!) for themselves, and the weight of a vote degrades as the square of the distance between when the post was made and now.

Here’s the code, and here’s a snapshot of the output.  The output took 6.239 elapsed seconds to produce on my laptop.  I still have more work to do to eliminate some of the self-referential links (in fact, I a priori removed Bob Sutor’s blog from the analysis as it otherwise he would dominate the results).  But I am confident that this is solvable, in fact, I am working on expanding what filters can do.  I’ll post more on that shortly.

With both Sam and Nick on the case, I'm quite sure that within the next few months it will be taken for granted that one of the features of news aggregator is to provide personalized meme tracking. Although I'm sure that we'll all use the same set of basic rules for providing this feature, I suspect that the problems that we are trying to solve will end up being different which will influence how we'll implement the feature.

For example, the main reason I want this feature isn't to track what the popular topics are across multiple blogs but instead to find what the popular topics are across aggregated blog feeds such as blogs.msdn.com and the numerous planet sites. In reading Sam's blog it seems he'd consider the same feed linking to the same news items as spam to filter out while I consider it be the only part of the feature I'd use. This issue illustrates the main problems I've had with designing the feature in my head. What "knobs" or options should we give users to control how the meme tracker decides what is interesting or not vs. what should be ignored when generating the list of 'hot topics' (e.g. the various meme trackers have said they filter out link blogs since they tend to dominate the results as well)?

Since I've decided to be more focused with regards to RSS Bandit development, I won't touch this feature until podcasting support is done. However I'd like to hear thoughts from our users in the meantime.

It seems I'm slightly ahead of schedule and have added most of the support required for using a website's favicons as the icons used to represent the feed in the RSS Bandit feed subscriptions tree view. Below is a screenshot of what the list of subscriptions looks like when some of the feeds have favicons.

There are still a couple of fit & finish work items to complete such as adding an option to turn off favicons for the people who find the people's choices of icons too distracting. However for the most part this feature is done.

Over the next few days, I'll start taking a look at what it means to add support for podcasting to the application. Since stumbling upon the very hilarious yet quite accurate review of Pirates of the Carribean 2 by Ask A Ninja, I've been wanting to try out subscribing to podcasts. However I'm not sure what the expected user experience should be so I'm going to try out a couple of podcast clients over the next week. So far I have Doppler Radio and Juice (formerly iPodder) on my list. Is there any other client I should be trying out? Also are there any obvious features I should or should not add?

Today I was browsing Windows Live QnA and stumbled across one the user pages (shown below) and realized that we've finally shipped the Windows Live friends list to another web property besides Windows Live Spaces

This is one of the coolest things about working on platform technology, you ship it once and it gets used all over the place. When I first started working on the social networking for Windows Live along with Mike Torres and others, we strongly believed that Social Networking features should be an integrated part of all of our online experiences instead of just being part of a single "social networking" site. The friends list isn't just a feature of Windows Live Spaces or Windows Live Messenger, it's a feature of Windows Live. 

Another principle we've had is that anywhere you see a user in a Windows Live property, there should be multiple ways to interact with that user via the 'contact control' shown above. One of these ways is to add an entry point for viewing that user's friends list or adding that user to your IM or friends list [NOTE: you can opt out of having people spam you using this mechanism]. This is a part of our user experience platform which Jay and Neel have been working on for a while. Encouraging multiple ways for people to interact should be a key aspect of social software applications.

It's been almost two years since I started at MSN Windows Live and one of the best things about working here is that I've rarely had to argue with people about fundamental principles of what the user experience we provide should be. Our debates are more around when to ship the features and how to implement them than anything else.

Greg Linden has a blog post entitled Google Personalized Search and Bigtable where he writes

One tidbit I found curious in the Google Bigtable paper was this hint about the internals of Google Personalized Search:

Personalized Search generates user profiles using a MapReduce over Bigtable. These user profiles are used to personalize live search results.

This appears to confirm that Google Personalized Search works by building high-level profiles of user interests from their past behavior.

I would guess it works by determining subject interests (e.g. sports, computers) and biasing all search results toward those categories. That would be similar to the old personalized search in Google Labs (which was based on Kaltix technology) where you had to explicitly specify that profile, but now the profile is generated implicitly using your search history.

My concern with this approach is that it does not focus on what you are doing right now, what you are trying to find, your current mission. Instead, it is a coarse-grained bias of all results toward what you generally seem to enjoy.

This problem is worse if the profiles are not updated in real time.

I totally disagree with Greg here on almost every point. Building a profile of a user's interests to improve their search results is totally different from improving their search results in realtime. The former is personalized search while the latter is more akin to clustering of search results. For example, if I search for "football", a search engine can either use the fact that I've searched for soccer related terms in the past to bubble up the offical website of Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) instead of the National Football League (NFL) website in the search results or it could cluster the results of the search so I see all the options. Ideally, it should do both. However, expecting that my profile is built in realtime (e.g. learning from my search results from five minutes ago as opposed to those from five days ago) although ideal doesn't seem to me to be necessary to be beneficial to end users. This seems like one of those places where a good enough offline-processing based solution is better than a over better engineered real-time solution. Search is rarely about returning or reacting to realtime data anyway. :) 

PS: I do think it's quite interesting to see how many Google applications are built on BigTable and MapReduce. From the post Namespaced Extensions in Feeds it looks like Google Reader is another example.

Jeff Atwood has a blog post entitled Thread Priorities are Evil where he writes

Joe Duffy is something of an expert on the topic of threading and concurrency-- he works for Microsoft on CPU-based parallelism in the .NET Common Language Runtime-- and he has this to say:

Messing with [thread] priorities is actually a very dangerous practice, and this is only one illustration of what can go wrong. (Other illustrations are topics for another day.) In summary, plenty of people do it and so reusable libraries need to be somewhat resilient to it; otherwise, we get bugs from customers who have some valid scenario for swapping around priorities, and then we as library developers end up fixing them in service packs. It's less costly to write the right code in the first place.

Here's the problem. If somebody begins the work that will make 'cond' true on a lower priority thread (the producer), and then the timing of the program is such that the higher priority thread that issues this spinning (the consumer) gets scheduled, the consumer will starve the producer completely. This is a classic race. And even though there's an explicit Sleep in there, issuing it doesn't allow the producer to be scheduled because it's at a lower priority. The consumer will just spin forever and unless a free CPU opens up, the producer will never produce. Oops!

The moral of the story? [Thread] priorities are evil, don't mess with them.

Although there are some edge conditions where micromanaging thread priorities can make sense, it's generally a bad idea. Set up your threads at normal priority and let the operating system deal with scheduling them. No matter how brilliant a programmer you may be, I can practically guarantee you won't be able to outsmart the programmers who wrote the scheduler in your operating system.

On reviewing the RSS Bandit code it seems that we use ThreadPriority.BelowNormal and ThreadPriority.Lowest in a bunch of places which may cause the kind of deadlocks Joe Duffy describes. This is yet another example of why multithreaded programming is the spawn of Satan.

Mike Torres has a blog post entitled Web 2.0 Revelation #3: I dig Firefox Extensions where he writes

But having returned to Firefox (on my Mac and casually on my PC), I'm seriously impressed by just how much Firefox Extensions have enabled me to do.  And as much as I really love using IE7 on my PC, having things like the SessionSaver, Answers, LiveLines, and del.iciou.us extensions are going a long way towards swaying me over to Firefox again (note: I haven't used Firefox exclusively on my PC since it was called Firebird a few years ago!)

The list of extensions I'm exploring on the PC:

• Browster to make searching and browsing just a little bit faster - slick!  (works in IE too)
• de.icio.us to make sure I update my linkblog regularly
• Answers just because it's cool
• Tab X because I need close buttons on tabs
• Livelines to map the RSS feed icon to "Subscribe in Bloglines"
• SessionSaver to keep me from losing my place
• Luna (theme) to make it look like it belongs on Windows again - although I want a better looking theme

One of the things that's immediately clear to me after a little experimentation this week: IE7 just doesn't have enough to sway power users just yet.

I've been preaching the Firefox religion to Mike and others at work primarily by praising the virtues of inline search and SessionSaver. The more I use Firefox with SessionSaver the more it irritates me that every Windows application doesn't have this functionality. I've definitely been inspired to add similar functionality to RSS Bandit.

Anyway, it looks like Mike didn't just tiptoe into the water but instead jumped in deeper than I have. On his recommendation I have installed Tab X and Luna which have quickly made my browsing experience even better. I may try out the de.icio.us extension if I can ever remember my password for the service. I probably should give a shout out to the Yahoo! Toolbar for Firefox as well. Firefox extensions totally r0x0r.

From the Bloomberg news article Microsoft Gives Bonuses Totaling Almost $1 Billion (Update3) we learn

Aug. 31 (Bloomberg) -- Microsoft Corp. paid out performance bonuses totaling almost $1 billion in restricted stock to 900 of its top executives.

One-third of the 37 million shares vest immediately, Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft, the world's biggest software company, said in a regulatory filing today. Chairman Bill Gates and Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer were excluded.

The company revamped its compensation plan in 2003 to hold onto key executives because many of the stock options granted previously were worthless. Doing so gave the company a way to reward executives and remain competitive with rival employers such as Google Inc. after the stock fell 56 percent in 2001 and 2002.

It's September which means our yearly bonuses and raises are around the corner. It looks like I need to think up another excuse for why my girlfriend and I can't go furniture shopping at IKEA. :)

One of our most common requests for improving the user interface of RSS Bandit has been to add an option so that all links clicked in the newspaper view result in tabs that are opened in the background instead of the new browser tabs stealing focus. This allows you to breeze through a newspaper view with a lot of items and click the links of the items you are interested without without having to go back and forth between the newspaper view and open browser tabs. Below is a screenshot of the new option

I've realized that it's been a long time since we shipped an RSS Bandit release and have started spending more evenings getting the code in ship shape. This evening I'll start work on the often requested feature that we utilize favicons in the tree view instead of the generic folder icon. My only question is whethere I should bother adding a flag to disable that behavior. Will mind having  show up beside my feed instead of the boring folder icon enough to want to turn the feature off? Let me know what you think.