Tian Bai

Since Firefox 3.0, I’ve been a big fan of Firefox, especially with the wonderful Delicious add-on.  However, I have to keep IE on my computer because using Firefox in Intranet is annoying.  I have to enter my corporate / domain credentials every time I visit a sharepoint site because by default Firefox does not automatically respond to NTLM challenge.  I finally found how to partially resolve this problem.

Why it’s partially?  After reading the article above, you will realize that the list does not support wildcards / regular expressions to cover all intranet websites (sufficient but not necessary, a site whose name does not contain a ‘.’ is an intranet site), so you still need to key in your frequently visiting sites one by one.  It’s said that all the configurations under ‘about:config" can be specified in ‘prefs.js’ or ‘user.js’ as well.  Now that it’s ‘.js’ file, maybe the list can be enabled to support wildcards / regular expressions by adding a couple lines of code into the file?  Didn’t try it.  Let me know if you did, and I’ll host you a coffee.

Selecting and distributing photos of friends has been painful for me, especially when friends do not want them degraded or publicly accessible on web albums.  Manually grouping photos by person, respectively attaching to each email, and then sending one by one is just broken.  To right the wrong, I once got the idea to combine manual tagging and face detection&recognition.  I talked to several folks, searched around, and accidentally got to know ilovephotos.com via their elevator pitch that they are implementing this idea.  And… that’s it.

Today I randomly mentioned this idea to 老丁 and 何志坚 during the dinner.  Right after the dinner, 老丁 sent me the news that Picasa 3.0 was introduced with a brand-new feature called “name tags”.  I read it with with mixed feelings – glad to see that Picasa, which is one of my favorites, makes this idea real and addresses my pain; ashamed to see this not-bad idea (at least sounds not bad to both Google and me) is still just an idea to me.  I simply didn’t even start.  Admittedly, Google had this idea way earlier than I did, probably back to 2006 when it acquired Neven Vision (a key player in face and image recognition), but it should be just in the blood to feel impelled to execute on exciting ideas.

BTW, in terms of how much an idea is worth, there are two sayings I like most:

• The market price of an idea is “less than the inconvenience of signing an NDA”.
• If you get an idea that no one ever thought about / worked on, either the idea is just stupid, or you don’t even know how to use Google.

6/27 was BillG’s last day as a Microsoft FTE (full-time employee).  Working in RedW-D, I went to the Town Hall hosted in RedW Cafe via WebCast.  This time, Bill was more emotional than last time.  In the last few minutes, tears were swelling in this eyes.

Looking back, here is a great story from Joel Spolsky about his Spec review with BillG, in those glory days.  Yeah, those early days of Microsoft, those early days of BillG…

Moving ahead, BillG will devote himself to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  Many people might think it’s just giving money away, which is probably the easiest thing in the world.  This is not true, for "the barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity."  As stated in the Guiding Principles – "delivering results with the resources we have been given is of the utmost importance".  To deliver results with finite resources means to find a high-priority problem, raise a quest, break complexity down to actionable items, so that people know how to help.

"Guided by the belief that every life has equal value, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation works to reduce inequities and improve lives around the world" – I believe Bill will change the world, again.