• I’ve installed Windows a lot in a year. 2 different versions of Windows 7 a total of 9 times, 2 different versions of Server 2008 3 times. (And 3 Win7+1 Server2K8R2 installs at home!) Although i haven’t installed windows in several months, though.
• I’ve installed Visual Studio 2010 even more.  Probably something like 20 different internal builds on 3 machines and several VM’s. Although since the RTM version was available, i haven’t had to install that anymore either. Visual Studio 2010 is so much better than 2008.  After using Eclipse for years, i’ve gotten used to so many of the built in features there that i was really surprised that visual studio doesn’t have similar functionality.  There are some add-ons that add a lot of the refactoring things and other tools, but like visual studio, most of them are not free.
• It’s amazing how many IM conversations i have. At rosetta we would have just gotten up and walked over there instead of using IM. Communicator at MS works way better than it did at Merck.  Even the desktop sharing works really well.  At Merck, the old version of netmeeting we were using was pretty finicky.
• I’ve had 4 different offices (not counting the conference room we worked out of for a week+)
• There’s an email mailing list (or 2) for anything and everything.  The email alias often has a name that makes no sense unless you know what the codename of a product was 5 years ago.  And with all the email, there are still a ton of people with no email etiquette whatsoever.  And there are people that have 30 lines of crap in their signature.
• Across 4 computers and 2 VM’s i’ve had exactly one bluescreen, and it was in the windows2008 server installer. (apparently it didn’t like the USB headset i had plugged in!)
• I use OneNote all the time to take notes.  I’d never used it before.  And the 2010 version of OneNote makes some other things even easier.  I only write on paper now when i go to meetings and don’t take my laptop, or if i’m sketching out paper prototypes.  Sadly, it looks like the mobile version of onenote is pretty crippled compared to the full version.  i only see numbered and bulleted lists, when i use the other tags like checkboxes and colors all the time.
• C# as a language (and the .net framework in general) is pretty awesome.  Especially LINQ and lambdas.  Likewise,  WPF + the xaml language and bindings makes it trivial to do a lot of things without much (or any) code. The visual GUI designer tools in VS2010 and Blend are the first ones i’ve used that don’t generate horrible horrible code.  And the binding functionality makes hooking data up to controls trivial.
•   Expression Blend + SketchFlow are pretty awesome.  I need more time to learn them both, as they’re way more powerful and useful than i’m using them.   But there are some things that take like 2 seconds in Blend that are painful in visual studio.
• There is a HUGE amount of available training.  Classroom, online, books, everything, and most of it that i have used as been very very good.
• like half the people I know have iphones.  windows phone 7 looks cool at all, its just so far behind/away.  Apple has released 4 hardware revisions and major OS versions in the time its taken MS to do 1?  Since my first gen iphone is effectively a dead end now that it is no longer upgradable, I’m waiting for it to be worth my time to buy a new phone…
• The company meeting at Safeco field is crazy.  Last year had lots of great stuff, with Windows 7 and Office 2010 coming.  This year’s should be interesting, with Win Phone 7 and Kinect coming soon.  It would also be cool if they gave some more Windows 8 details.
• I’d say like 33% of the people I know/have met are hardcore pro MS people.  Another 33% are just there for a job that pays the bills.  Another 33% are pro MS but realistic about the areas where we could be doing better.  That last 1% is a crazy rabid anti microsoft bunch that thinks we’re on the wrong track completely about everything we do no matter what it is.  We could be curing cancer and they’d still be upset.

Random things about working at Microsoft for a year was originally posted at John's Random Review.

Its kinda sad: in a ~3500 word press release about Merck’s 3Q2008 earnings, its single a whopping sentence:

This will provide a more efficient use of research facilities and result in the closure of three basic research sites in Tsukuba, Japan; Pomezia, Italy; and Seattle by the end of 2009.

33 words. 0.94%. Not statistically significant, as the statistics people would say.

More news as I know more!

ETA: The new official statement:

Today Merck & Co. announced its intent to close its Seattle research site. At Rosetta Biosoftware, however, we are continuing with business as usual. Rosetta Biosoftware continues to operate as a commercial provider of life science software solutions. Rosetta Biosoftware is a separate business unit of Rosetta Inpharmatics LLC, wholly owned subsidiary of Merck.

Yes, Rosetta (aka Merck Seattle) is closing. was originally posted at John's Random Review.

This is what happens when i leave my desk at work. was originally posted at John's Random Review.

Joel Spolsky recommends not disabling menu items in context where they can’t be used:

Instead, leave the menu item enabled. If there’s some reason you can’t complete the action, the menu item can display a message telling the user why.

…
Spolsky’s suggestion is also predicated on the assumption that the user is stupid. Better is to assume that the user is clever and curious and will be able to figure out for themself why a certain command is currently disabled.

I don’t normally post “work related” things here, but daring fireball doesn’t have comments or anything that i can find, so i can’t comment there to disagree, so i’ll do it here! I generally agree with the things John posts, but in this case, i think he’s wrong, at least for some kinds of applications. I’d break the apps into a few categories, one based on frequency of use, and one on complexity.

High frequency+low complexity: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, or any other web browser. You probably use it every day. If the back button is disabled, you know why. if the stop button is disabled, you know why. Fine, let them be disabled like Gruber wants.

On the opposite corner of the frequency+complexity graph are the products I work on. They are used for analysis and visualization of gene expression data (Rosetta Resolver), mass spectrometry based proteomics data (Rosetta Elucidator), or genetics data (Rosetta Syllego). They are used by people to analyze billions of datapoints which were generated by multi-million dollar instruments that ran continuously for weeks, after weeks of design, planning, biology and chemistry. (Yeah, all of our products have Rosetta at the beginning, and they also have longer names, like “The Rosetta Resover System for Gene Expression Analysis”, in the same way that Excel isn’t “Excel”, it is “Microsoft Excel”, but i digress…)

Some people use use our products every day, making them high complexity+high frequency. Their job might be to use our products and other statistics tools to analyze data, and that’s all they do. For those people, would be fine if some of the buttons or menu items are disabled when they don’t apply, because they know intimate details of how the system works.

But a lot more of out users are low frequency users: they might use one of the apps for a couple weeks to analyze data they have spent months gathering, get their results, write their paper, and then not use the app again for several months while they start planning and generate data for the next big thing they are doing. During that time, there might have even been a major upgrade to a new version of the application. When they want to perform a task, and the menu item is disabled, they don’t have time to be “clever” and try to “discover” why that the button that does their complicated thing isn’t enabled. They are too busy trying to cure cancer or some other thing to spend time trying to solve the mystery of why their menu item is non-obviously disabled. It is better to pop up a dialog telling them that some of 11,000 things they are looking for are still loading, and let them choose if they should be excluded from what they are trying to do or if they want to wait until later.

The alternative is a disabled button and a call to customer service, where a brilliant PhD user tries to explain to a support analyst that they can’t get their favorite tool to turn on.

Our users aren’t stupid. They just don’t have time to be curious! was originally posted at John's Random Review.

This post recovered from my really old blog on the internet archive @ http://web.archive.org

IPO! was originally posted at John's Random Review.

This post recovered from my really old blog on the internet archive @ http://web.archive.org

Promoted! was originally posted at John's Random Review.