Kafka's Space

worst credit card ever?

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 18:03:47 GMT

When I recently was purchasing something from buy.com, I was tempted by the offer to save $50 if I signed up for the revolutioncard. I figured I could save some money, then cancel the card after using it just for this one purchase. Signing up for the card was simple and my purchase went through without a hitch. Then I decided to log into my account, and that's when things got scary.

I created a strong password for my account, then tried to login. I got an error message stating that only alphanumeric characters are allowed. I'm not allowed to have a strong password for my credit card account? Actually, you are allowed to have a strong password, you just can't use it to log in. So I figured I'd reset my password, live with a not great password until I payed my balance and then cancel the card. It turns out that their password "reset" simply e-mails you your current password. This means that 1. they are storing my password unencrypted and anyone who has access to their database can read it 2. they are sending my password out in e-mail, where anyone can sniff it and 3. I still can't log in because my password contains characters they won't let me use when I login. WTF!

I called customer support and waited for 45 minutes to talk to someone. They obviously had gotten lots of calls about this since the woman who helped me knew exactly what had happened. She said she wished they would change the sign in pages so I couldn't put "special" characters in in the first place. She then told me it would take about 3 days for them to reset my password and that when they were done I should just log in with my original password, minus any special characters. Yup, that's right, they had someone go in by hand and edit my password, removing the offending characters. As soon as I pay off my balance (by mail) I will be canceling this card.

Talk like a pirate street?

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 22:53:20 GMT

My street sign, Harpster, has been missing for many many months. A couple weeks ago the city finally replaced it, and I guess they decided to take part in talk like a pirate day.

Software engineers do construction too!

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 20:46:41 GMT

So this is what some bored people on my team spent last weekend doing. I gotta say that tying the wall to a fund raising drive is a stroke of genius.

Clean up your address book

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 22:43:42 GMT

The latest version of Windows Live Hotmail is rolling out over the next few weeks, you can see the team blog for all the details. Here's a little more information on one of the features I've been working on, cleaning up duplicate contacts from you address book.

On the options page, there is a link for "Clean up duplicate contacts." This will walk you through all the duplicates we can identify and let you merge them as you see fit. There's even an option to automatically merge all identical contacts to save you time.

In addition, on the contacts page you can select entries by hand and click the "merge" button on the toolbar. This allows you to quickly combine multiple contacts without having to copy and paste information between browser windows.

And finally, after cleaning up your address book it would be a shame to let duplicates back in, wouldn't it? When you click "add contact" while reading or after sending a message, WL Hotmail will notify you if someone by that name already exists in your address book and let you merge the new e-mail address to that record.

There you have it. Not the sexiest feature we've ever rolled out, but hopefully one that is very useful.

Passport photos for babies?

Fri, 10 Aug 2007 06:15:26 GMT

I went to get a passport for my 3 month old baby this morning. They took his picture and I had to put his height, eye color, and hair color on the application. Since it take 3-4 months for them to process the application by the time we actually fly the picture won't look like him, the height will be wrong, his eye color might change, and he might have hair. Plus the passport is good for 5 years, so I'm sure customs will have no problem identifying a 5 year old from his infant photo.

Wow - 35W collapses into the Mississippi

Thu, 02 Aug 2007 06:18:35 GMT

A bridge on a major highway in Minneapolis/St. Paul collapsed into the Mississippi today. Something like this happens and it really puts your day into perspective. All my friends and family are ok (as far as I know so far), but those early moments when the phone lines were jammed were nerve wracking. Not really sure why I'm writing this, but it makes me feel a little better.

Silicon Alley Insider - soft launch

Fri, 20 Jul 2007 18:31:19 GMT

Silicon Alley Insider had a soft launch today, the site is still in beta. In their own words

Welcome! Silicon Alley Insider is a new business site, produced by and for the New York digital business community. We started publishing for real on Friday, July 19. We're currently in beta, so we're grateful for your patience and feedback.
We cover the intersection of the technology, media, and communications industries, with a focus on companies and people making waves in New York. Specifically, we provide news, commentary, and discussion about digital publishing, entertainment, news, music, social networking, mobile, and gaming.

This is my brother's new project (I believe he's employee #4 after the founders: 2 DoubleClick guys and Henry Blodget), wish him luck!

My brother hits the big time

Thu, 21 Jun 2007 22:08:39 GMT

Pete gets his own story on Gawker today.

WL Hotmail is live!

Tue, 08 May 2007 15:00:55 GMT

It's been a long road, but Windows Live Hotmail is officially out of beta. I joined the Hotmail team before the mail competitions heated up and have been working this latest versions for close to 3 years now. Leaving beta is actually a bit anti-climatic. We've worked so hard to make sure the final release is ready for primetime, I think the thrill of opening up to that first small set of beta testers 2 years ago was a bigger rush. But it is still a great feeling to be open to the world. It's amazing to think that a beta population of 25 million is less than 10% of our customers, but there are very few things that run at our scale.

We've been working on the next round of features already, but we are taking a couple hours this afternoon to celebrate and look back at how far "Kahuna" has come. Thanks to everyone who gave us feedback, keep it coming, we're always listening. Can't wait to let everyone know what my group is working on now ;)

WL Mail - import and export your contacts

Tue, 23 Jan 2007 18:14:29 GMT

The M9 release of WL Mail is being tested right now - see the team blog for more information. I'm sure there will also be a full list of new features there soon (or the liveside crew, who seem to know everything ;), but in the meantime I thought I'd highlight some features for contacts.

The M9 release was focused on the "classic" experience and the contacts team was no different. We added group support, search, sort, and a way to quickly narrow down your contacts by letter. But what probably has people more excited is that we added more ways to import contacts and the ability to export your contacts. Check out the options page where you can now import contacts in a number of different CSV file formats (including Yahoo! Mail and Gmail). You'll also see an option to export your contacts to a CSV file so you can add your WL Mail contacts to Outlook, your phone, or whatever you want. After all, they're your contacts.

playing sound files in WL Mail

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 17:24:12 GMT

This feature was just released fairly quietly a few weeks ago:

You can now listen to sound files from within WL Mail without having to launch a separate application. This only works for IE (although if you have a Firefox plugin to use ActiveX controls, it might work). Our dogfooders at Microsoft who are using a VoIP service for their home phone love being able to listen to their voicemails without opening the attachment.

Car break-in, bad end to a nice day

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 00:33:10 GMT

So my wife and I spent a nice day with friends in San Francisco yesterday, including some time at the SFMOMA. When we got back to my friend's apartment I found my car window had been smashed in. At first we couldn't understand why anyone had done it as they hadn't rifled through the car looking for anything, and come on, why would you break into a 1998 Toyota Carolla? Then my wife remembered she had taken off her jacket since it was such a nice day and left it on the front seat. Unfortunately her cell phone was in the pocket as well. I always try to put electronics and laptop bags out of site or in the trunk, but it never would have occurred to me to hide a jacket. Overall, not such a big deal. Windows aren't too expensive and it was the freebie Nokia phone, but it's still unsettling to have that happen.

Bike Commuting

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 16:17:05 GMT

I've been trying to bike to work as frequently as possible but I always seem to find an excuse: it's too dark after work, the roads might be wet and I'll get splattered, my bike isn't comfortable, I need to carry something bulky to work that day. Well, I'm going to try to get rid of my excuses and start riding consistently. I've got a powerful light (one of those beefy ones with a separate NiMH battery pack) and a new bike. I've got fenders on order to keep the splatter down on wet days and a rack as well so I won't have to carry everything on my back. My goal is to bike to work 4 days a week. We'll see how I do. Despite the heavy fog this morning, I'm one for one this week.

Create PDFs from Office

Tue, 12 Sep 2006 20:32:29 GMT

Looks like the ability to save a word doc as a PDF is finally here. You can download the plug-in for Office 2007 here. How many years have we been waiting for this?

My other favorite plug-in this week is adding inline search to IE. Omar tipped me off with his post. I love that feature in Firefox, now I can have it in IE as well.

At Gnomedex

Fri, 30 Jun 2006 23:13:43 GMT

I'm in Seattle for Gnomedex. It's an interesting conference so far, rather than talks, each presenter is supposed to bring a topic and engage the audience in a discussion. The keynote from John Edwards didn't quite seem to fit in, but was interesting none the less. Internet access is pretty slow, but I guess that's to be expected with so many people in one room online at once.

If you're here and want to talk about WL Mail or Windows Live in general, ping me at skafka at microsoft dot com.

I love my energy companies

Tue, 06 Jun 2006 15:22:38 GMT

As much as I love PG&E here in California, I'd forgotten how fun the utilities in Chicago were. Frequent blackouts when the weather got hot and wonderful bureaucracy. 6 months after I moved out of Chicago, Peoples Gas sent me a bill for $0.10, which was of course less than it cost them to send the bill. They also told me it was past due. This was all news to me as I had paid my final bill. After talking to them on the phone for a few minutes, I decided it was easier to just waste the stamp and send in the money.

Well a couple days ago, almost 6 years after moving to California, I got a refund check from Peoples Gas for $0.10.

WL Mail updated - again

Tue, 06 Jun 2006 15:15:34 GMT

So we had a few hiccups and had to take our "M6" release off the site for a couple weeks, but it's finally back up. We're still working on "M7", which I'm really excited about. I'll write more about that on our team blog in a few weeks. Sorry for the long wait, hope you enjoy the new features.

next release of WL Mail out soon

Sat, 06 May 2006 00:22:07 GMT

I just posted the highlights of the "M6" release on our team blog. A couple policy changes we made are to no longer delete saved sent messages after 30 days and to keep your account active unless you don't sign in for 120 days (it used to be 30).

But the thing that I'm most excited about is our support for Firefox (1.5). Now I can finally get all my non IE using friends and family the beta.

meeting the beta testers

Thu, 27 Apr 2006 17:27:49 GMT

Once again, the "MSN Butterfly Tour" is coming to Redmond. Of course this time around it's all about Windows Live. Perhaps it's time for a new name. Regardless of the name, the point is that 60 or so beta testers of all things Windows Live will be in Redmond next week to get a sneak peak at lots of new stuff and a chance to ask questions.

I'll be up there on Monday to show off the next release of WL Mail. I can't share the details quite yet (and neither will the butterflies, they're under NDA ), but I'll definitely be posting again on our team blog and here just before the release.

Spaces integration released today

Wed, 05 Apr 2006 23:59:21 GMT

A lot of people have been asking if we were going to integrate WL Mail with Spaces or Messenger. The answer of course is yes. Today we took the first step, turning on the "contact control" in WL Mail. If you look at your contacts, you'll see the new contact control. For contacts that are Messenger enabled this lets you see their profile picture, Messenger presence, gleams (the "something is new" indicator), their contact card and more. We've been working on this for awhile with the Spaces team so it's great to finally get this out. There is definitely more to come, consider this just a taste.

Photo Album: PCT - Summer '04

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 19:00:32 GMT

PCT - Summer '04

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More Photos...

Photo Album: Skyline to the sea

Tue, 25 Apr 2006 21:52:52 GMT

Skyline to the sea

trail head

morning view

fog in the valley

in big basin

in big basin 2

banana slug

more big basin

berry creek falls

Book List: Books I'm reading

Thu, 21 Jun 2007 22:35:59 GMT

Books I'm reading

Thom Jones: Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine
Michael Chabon: The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Blog list: Microsoft Blogs

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 04:01:47 GMT

Microsoft Blogs