Web review

WARNING: After some tests, it seems that Windows Live Messenger contact list have problems after change of email login. So do this at your risk.
This problem always plagued Windows Live (aka MSN) users: you signed up for a Microsoft Passport account since 2002  with a custom e-mail as login, then you changed the e-mail address but you can’t change your Live Messenger login (this was my case).

About a year ago I tried to directly ask Microsoft, but they answered me that this wasn’t possible; they suggested me to sign up for a new Live account.

Now I discovered that it’s possible to do it easily. leggi tutto »

I recently received an e-mail from the team of Google Adsense, that invited me to partecipate to a simple survey about their advertising service. I cannot speak about contents of this survey, as required by their terms… anyway I have to highlight an interesting point I noticed:

The scripting language used for the survey is MS ASP.Net! You can check this in the screenshot attached to this post: the extension of the Survey’s start page (and, as I checked later, in the survey process)  is .aspx.

It impressed me because, as all we know, Google is usually very far from Microsoft technologies an, in general, from commercial software solutions. Which is the reason to use .Net for a simple survey script?

Today, as promised, Microsoft launched its new project: some days ago it took an obscure domain, opensourcehero.com, that pointed to http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/heroes/default.mspx with a black background and a cryptic senstence: “{Forge} New Powers” and a reference to the launch date: “February 27, 2008“. Now the site is open and the mistery is unleashed.

“{Open Source} Heroes Happen Here” (a bit long as title?) presents some featured developers that became “heroes” because of their prolific programmer profession. It’s strange and a bit ironic that they all uses proprietary technologies from Microsoft (Visual Studio, Windows Server platform…).

The site allows users to ask the “Hero Hack Pack”, a bundle of “free evaluation” software to introduce new people to MS developing.

Microsoft’s idea of the Open Source scene is very bizzarre: why an open source “hero” should develop his free software with proprietary platforms?

I’m not used to shout and accuse companies, but tonight I discovered something that I didn’t like about Microsoft.
After a lot of delivery problems for Hotmail users (I manage some sites that sends e-mail notifications to registered people… of course it isn’t absolutely not spam), I contacted the support for webmasters: I had several discussions with Microsoft employees, trying to find a solution. Finally, they told me:

… “Many legitimate mailers and marketers have qualified and joined this “white listing” program to improve mail deliverability and decrease email from being filtered to the Junk E-mail Folder. Sender Score is a third party program, administered by Return Path. Sender Score (www.senderscorecertified.com) is the only White Listing service to which we subscribe.”

So I went to Sender Score website to subscribe to the program. They say that “90 days of mailing activity is required for each IP submitted for accreditation“. Ok, it’s normal… but a few of rows below I see the registration steps:

1. Read and agree to the Sender Score Certified Email Standards
2. Read and agree to the terms and conditions of the Participating Sender Agreement
3. Complete a short self-assessment form
4. Pay an application fee

… a “fee”? To legitimate my e-mails? This is strange… ok, but how much? Let’s see pricing:

So they’re asking webmasters (also for non-profit organization!) to pay at least 400$ only to be “sure” that their e-mail will go directly into Hotmail customers’ inboxes. In other words… if you pay, they can “turn a blind eye”.

I don’t know how do you call it, but as everybody knows… here, in Italy, we are very conscious of what is “Mafia”.
Does Hotmail asks web sites to pay a “pizzo”?

When you take a picture of a group of persons, it’s hard to have everybody with open eyes, with a natural face expression, with nothing to be fixed.
Of course you can take some pics and then “merge” them with an application like Photoshop, but you have also a quicker alternative: MSR Group Shot, from Microsoft.

This is little and free software can import two or more pictures of a same subject, and then merge them using only the parts that the user prefers.

Let’s see a simple example. I have these two photos I took with my girlfriend:

… what about we want to wear same transparent glasses? Well, we import the two files in Group Shot and we select her eyes in the first pic and my eyes in the second:

The application understand that we want to “swap faces”, so after some seconds we can click on “View Composite” to get the final image:

http://research.microsoft.com/projects/GroupShot/