{There is a point to this story... bear with me...}

At imason, we've got a pretty wiz-bang Nortel phone system.  One of the features of the system is that it emails me my office voicemail.  My voicemail comes in as an attachment titled voice_000.wav - this feature is phenomenal and very very convenient.  For about the last month now, every time I've tried to open my voice mail I've received this message "Cannot create file: voice_000.wav...":

This sort of put a damper in the usefulness of the feature and required me to get my voice mail the old fashioned way – booooooo.

Today, I decided enough is enough, it's 2008 for goodness sake, and I shouldn't need to "call in to get my messages."  So, did a quick google search for cannot create file

Bingo.  First result shows me that it might have something to do with my registry key.  Great.  I fire up regedit and go here - HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Security.

Hmmm I say..  What is C:\Users\showlett\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files\Content.Outlook\1S6693YF\?  So I fire up Windows Explorer and go have a look.  Basically it has a bunch of files in there - it looks like every attachment that I've ever opened from Outlook since who knows when...  Nothing really caught my eye but as I scrolled down and down I saw this:

Hmmmm I thought.  That's weird.  It ends at voice_000 (99).  I wondered - could it be that Outlook only allows for up to 99 file attachments with the same name?  Well, I deleted the 99th copy, went back to Outlook and BINGO, it was working again!

So, what's the moral of the story?

1. That the Internet is magic - it took me 2 seconds to get a lead on what the problem might be.
2. That software is still too fragile.  It asinine that it breaks at 99.
3. That I'm using Google's Chrome and loving it.
4. That I use Google's search.  Live search didn't have anything useful in the top 10 entries.
5. That you can find some really interesting things about what Outlook users have been doing by visiting a folder that looks like C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files\Content.Outlook\1S6693YF\
6. That Outlook doesn't clean up this folder -> clearing temporary Internet files doesn't do it and I'm not aware of a setting in Outlook to do it.
7. That troubleshooting and fixing stuff is still way way way too hard.

/s.

I love top 10 lists...

1. Seamless download and install
2. The widget shows non-private information
3. Option to load on startup
4. Configurable with your preferences
5. Uses a small amount of resources (<5MB of memory)
6. Has "Blink value" - value you can get in <1s.  You can look at desktop widgets that run in the task tray (the task tray is that row of icons on the bottom right hand side of your screen if you're running XP or Vista) for examples of this:

   a. I can see resource utilization is high.

   b. I can see my current status is logged in and I’m available.

   c. Not good.  No meaningful information here.

7. Has "Hover value" - value you can get in <2s.  Examples:

   a. Good, but basically what I get with the blink.

   b. Good, but basically what I get with the blink.

8. Has "Glance value" value you get in under 10s.  Example:
   
   
9. Provides Alerts.  When something happens, useful information is brought to your attention.  Example:
   
   
10. Easy linking to more detailed information if desired.  Example:

So, we're 3 days into Chrome and 2 major themes have emerged:

1.  The G-man is watching

There are some serious privacy concerns with Chrome.  In synopsis the original End User Licence Agreement (EULA - pronounced "youla" in the industry) had some pretty strong language with respect to IP (intellectual property) ownership licensing - specifically Google getting a license to everything you enter into Chrome.  For example, Chrome has a feature that provides 'auto-search' as you type in Chrome's browser bar - all these keystrokes are highly valuable to Google, and there was some discussion on CNET that Google would keep ~2% of all this data.  Google has admittted to making a mistake with the EULA and promised to reissue it but this hasn't been done yet to my knowledge.  For many industry folks, including fellow RD Bill Wagner, the privacy concerns are huge and fairly so.  A good history of the EULA issues (and Google's response) is posted at This Post Not Made In Chrome; Google's EULA Sucks Is Fixed.

2.  Chrome is not just a browser

Huh?  If it's not a browser, what is it?  First and foremost, Chrome is a platform for web applications - just read the post from the Google team:

"What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build.”

A "modern platform for...applications".  That says it all.  And they've built a pretty mean platform as well - one that has appears to have some substantial performance benefits over IE8 and Firefox. 

So, by release Chrome, Google gets to control of a platform that it's own applications will run much better on - applications like gmail and Google Docs.  With Chrome, they are no longer "dependent" on IE8 and Firefox (of course, these browsers are currently dominant and so Google will still have to play nice with them in the short term).  Take it with a grain of salt, but Google's own benchmark suite puts Javascript performance at 42x faster than IE7 and 10x faster than FireFox 3 as reported by zdnet.  To see this graphically, here's a graph from cnet (higher is better):

Keep in mind this is just for javascript performance not for overall page load times.  So, it's more useful to think of Chrome as a platform for applications than what is commonly thought of as a browser.  Guy Barrette talks more about this here.

There are lot of sites that aren't currently working in Chrome (seems like this is a real beta), but I suspect those will get fixed in short order.

Here are some quick thoughts on the Google browser called Chrome that was released today.  Overall, as you would expect from a Google beta, a pretty compelling experience.  I'll have to find some time to play around with IE8 over the coming weeks...

The start page is great!  Forget my "home page", just show me the places I go to often!!!

Search as you type is nice as well

"Incognito mode" is an interesting idea... Good or evil?

Application Shortcuts give you a quick way to launch browser-based apps and give you every piece of available screen real estate!  I like it...

Inspector is pretty cool...

The "inspector" is pretty cool.  One of the things that we often do at imason is profile pages looking for opportunities to streamline the experience.  Inspector does a great job of helping you see what's going on.  Take a look at a reasonable 'simple' page like www.imason.com/blogs/.  Now see how much is actually going on behind the scenes to make this work: