Playing with Microsoft Tag

Posted on July 31, 2009 by ewand

I know it’s been around in some form for a little while now, but I’ve only started looking at Tag – a way of essentially representing URLs in a camera-phone friendly way, such that merely pointing the phone at the “tag” takes you there.

Head over to http://tag.microsoft.com and sign in with a Live ID, to create your own tags – you can generate them in colour or black & white, in several formats and sizes. I’m thinking of putting a tag on the back of my next set of business cards, pointing to a vCard – then anyone with Tag software on their phone could add my contact details in an instant.

(this tag takes you to the blog’s URL)

Point your mobile at http://gettag.mobi to install the software – available for a whole host of platforms, including iPhone, Symbian, Android and, of course, Windows Mobile 😉

The Emperor’s New Clothes

Posted on July 28, 2009 by ewand

Firstly, apologies for the silence in recent weeks – it’s been a busy time and, well, y’know. Once you’re a week or two behind blog posting, you might as well be a month or two behind…

Anyway. Lots has happened IT-wise in the last few months. Windows 7 press seems to be going well (shock, even some Mac users think it’s not awful, though maybe it’s too Mac like…), and the RTM last week [from our annual sales conference held this year in Atlanta, in past years the source of the various Ballmer videos that can be found online] has the potential to kick-start a new wave of PC innovation in both hardware and software.

The iPhone 3GS has launched to near universal acclaim, even if it costs £1700 to upgrade for existing fans. Hats off to Apple on another great product release – Windows Mobile is now so far behind it’s almost an also-ran: despite some great devices like the HTC Snap, which I had a play with the other day … that, for me, is the ideal device: I’ve never got on that well with ‘touch’, and a slim, 3G device with a decent keyboard is hard to beat.

The buzz in the press a few weeks ago (and inspiration for the title of this post) concerned Google’s Chrome OS. Essentially, a Linux kernel fused to a Chrome browser, with enough drivers to make it work on various bits of hardware (principally Intel based netbooks), at least as far as I can tell. Maybe I’m missing the point, but I don’t see it as being all that revolutionary, or even all that functional… and others appear to be saying the same thing.

Things get more complicated, though, when trying to understand Google’s plan for where this OS/browser fusion is going – especially when thinking about the Native Client project, which aims to provide a way of executing rich client code natively on the host PC rather than going through JavaScript or similar.

It seems that Google is putting a lot of effort into reinventing the Operating System, even though there are plenty of good ones out there already… but to what end? Is the end result going to be more “open”? More secure (than Windows, or Mac, or any of the major Linux distros)? Or is it just that Google wants to control everything the end users do, and what data they do it with?

Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) wrote about a previously hyped revolution in the way we’ll all work, the Network Computer. 10 years ago, the story was that all our apps would move to a new paradigm, be written in Java, and delivered to the Network Computer – NC – on demand. The PC model was dead.

Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) was a driving force behind that initiative, at Sun. Maybe he thinks it’s time to try again?

I had to laugh at the brilliant Fake Steve Jobs’ “Dear Eric” post, highlighting something of the impending conflict of interest between erstwhile partners, GOOG and AAPL, as the anti-trust investigators start circling and looking for transgressions. With Google and Apple competing on mobile device OSs, potentially on desktop OSs and on browsers (although Chrome currently does use the same heart as Safari), how long before they start putting clear air between themselves in other areas? Maybe we’ll see Apple putting their arms around other search engines, and not hard-coding Google as the provider in Safari?

Last year, Wired magazine mocked the “Don’t be Evil” motto, by featuring an “Evil Meter” – maybe it’s time for an update?

HTC s740 – great phone, just one thing…

Posted on February 20, 2009 by ewand

I got one of these things a couple of weeks ago… in essence, a great phone (I prefer the “smartphone” type device as opposed to the touch screen variety) – I’ve spent the last couple of years with the HTC s620 and it was time for a change. Key differences are that the s740 is a “candybar” type device rather than a squatter, wider phone, and has a slide-out keyboard rather than the full qwerty affair on the front.

Technology wise, the new device is bristling with features – 3G/HSDPA (so nice & fast browsing), GPS (paired with Google Maps or Windows Live Search mobile, works well). It even has an FM radio and a half decent camera.

I’ve written recently about nicely designed, functional items which remind & reinforce how good they are every time you pick them up or use them – well the s740 has one design feature which does the exact opposite.

EVERY time I use it as a phone, I curse the stupid design of the Call & Hang up buttons.

Those tiny little buttons that stand just proud of the sleek and shiny surface of the phone? Impossible to hit them without also pressing the soft keys above, or the home or back keys below. Well not quite impossible, but requires dextrous thumbnail gymnastics to use them.

Now I’d have thought that for a PHONE, these two buttons are kind of the most important? I’m not the only one, as PC Pro opined. It’s a shame – the s620 doesn’t look as groovy, but it does have an easier to use keyboard, and phone buttons that work. If only it was 3G and had a GPS…

Look what I found in my loft: a 9-year old netbook

Posted on January 30, 2009 by ewand

I splashed out a week or two ago, and bought a Samsung NC10 netbook – a bargain at under £300, and it runs Windows 7 really well.

Impressed with the size and utility of the thing, I recalled a forerunner of the netbook, so went rooting around in my “box of old technology that it pretty much useless but cost money so I can’t ever throw it away”, in the loft.

I came across an old laptop that in its time was known as a “sub-notebook”: we got two of these machines courtesy of Sony, to demonstrate Exchange 2000, specifically the Conferencing Server version, at a big partner event in Birmingham. It was, to date, the biggest audience I’ve ever stood in front of, at about 1,400 people. I had a few minutes to demo the still-in-beta Exchange 2000, and would be doing it jointly with the host for the conference, Jonathan Ross (gulp).

Exchange 2000 Conferencing Server – aka “Jasper”

I’m now struggling to remember when this was, but since Exchange 2000 released in November 2000 (as discovered by the very useful Microsoft Support Lifecycle page), I reckon it must have been early/mid-2000, which would mean the little Vaio has to be at least 8 or 9 years old.

Sony Vaio PCG-C1XN

The two Vaios we had were great – well, great for the time anyway, although even then they were very functionally compromised even when new. The one thing you could say about the machine was it was small, and cool.

Certainly not fast – a 266MHz Celeron CPU (a cut down Pentium II, in essence, for our younger readers), 64Mb of RAM and a 6.4Gb hard disk.

The machines originally came with Windows 98, but we decided to put Windows 2000 on them for the demo; subsequently, I upgraded it to Windows XP and it’s probably a bit too much for the little mite. Suffice to say, it won’t be getting any further along the Windows evolutionary scale.

Other features of note were the webcam (one of – if not the – first laptops to come with one built in, which was the reason we wanted them for the Conferencing demo). A single USB port, FireWire (or iLink as Sony insisted on calling it), a PCMCIA slot, infra-red (you don’t get that any more now, do you?) and a dongle which had composite-video and VGA, complete the mix.

So for our demo we had to install an early Wifi network (it might have been the very first 802.11b from Compaq, costing hundreds of pounds for the router and at least £100 per PCMCIA card). All of this for 8 minutes of Woss-y glory, swept away in the sands of time.

Sony never did ask for it back – I hung onto one, and Steve kept the other. I bet he’s still got it somewhere too.

Dust the old girl off

Enough of this misty eyed nonsense. Amazingly, on plugging the machine in and powering up (apart from my going into the BIOS and setting the clock), it started to resume from hibernate – and dropped me back into the logon prompt for WinXP. I had some head scratching to do, to remember the password – but when I logged in, it was the first time for 6 years and 3 months.

Surprisingly, the Vaio is about the same thickness as my Samsung, so it doesn’t look quite as archaic as you might expect a 9-year old laptop to.

It could even be called a “Netbook”, except there’s no networking on the thing – certainly no wireless, and even dial-up would have required an old modem like the Xircom PCMCIA card I literally just found in my office drawer.

Probably the biggest difference is the price when new. Adjusting for inflation and taking into account what the Vaio would have originally cost, it’s probably nearer £3,000 than the £300 for my NC10.

That’s Moore’s law for ya.

Windows 7 tips & tricks, and Media Center tuner drivers

Posted on January 13, 2009 by ewand

I put Windows 7 Beta 1 on my home PC the other day (as a dual boot config with Vista x64) to see what it was like; I was very pleasantly surprised, with the exception of the fact that Media Center – much as it looks nicer – didn’t work out of the box with my Hauppauge Nova-T USB 2 tuner box that I use to record stuff on Media Center.

I have to admit to not using MC as the primary telly. I know some who do, but it hasn’t – yet – passed the “wife” test. So we have Sky HD in the main room for most TV, though I’ve sneaked an XBox in there with wireless connection to the home network, and it happily picks up stuff that the main PC records… sometimes unexpectedly.

Hats off to Hauppauge for their almost peerless support forums, and to “Mr X” for his enthusiastic sponsorship of the forums. There were posts late last week on their forums saying that the Nova-T tuner was blue-screening Windows 7; he said he’d try to get a driver up and running for download early this week, and sure enough it’s there and all is now well.

Today, I took the plunge and installed Windows 7 on my Lenovo Thinkpad X61 work PC – so far, so good – everything works, everything works well…

I came across ex-pat Brit and now Seattle-ite, Tim Sneath’s blog earlier today – it has some great tips for what Windows 7 beta is already doing for the end user experience. Reading the list might sound trivial, but reading it on a Win7 machine (which appears to run more smoothly and quicker than anyone might expect), it’s hard to stop the smile spreading across the face…

If you’re going to experiment with Win7, definitely check out Tim’s blog. Some great tips & tricks up there already, and hopefully more to come.

Top ten things for to do in 2009

Posted on January 13, 2009 by ewand

It seems this time of year brings out the soothsayer in lots of IT journalists and analysts, if the volume of “ten things to do” articles is anything to go by.

Mary-Jo Foley posted a couple of weeks ago on what she thought Microsoft might/should do this year.

Don Reisinger over at CNet gives his 5 predictions for home technology this year (no real surprises).

But, the funniest predictions article I’ve read in a while comes from Infoworld, regarding what Apple needs to do in 2009. Mitch Wagner compares Steve Jobs to Willy Wonka…

And that’s the real reason Steve Jobs didn’t attend Macworld this year. He hinted he skipped it for health reasons. But the real reason is that he’s on an overseas excursion, looking for Oompa Loompas he can replace Apple’s employees with.

Priceless 🙂

Is Blu-ray really “all that”?

Posted on January 5, 2009 by ewand

I made the decision to wait until the HD-DVD/Blu-ray format war had been resolved before deciding to give the winner a try. In the interim, about 18 months ago I picked up a new DVD player for about £120, which had HDMI support, did a decent job of upscaling DVDs to higher definition, and (the real reason for buying it), was a writer too.

Looking at CNet, Don Reisinger wrote recently on the various merits or pratfalls of moving to the new format. Now, the cost of players is starting to get to the £100-150 ballpark (instead of the crazy early-adopter £1000-odd mark), but the media is still a good bit more expensive – taking the Dark Knight example that Don talked about, the Blu-ray version commands a £3-4 premium in most outlets … is it worth the difference? My TV “only” does 720p or 1080i resolutions (the 1080i is scaled to fit the 720-line display), and I’m not sure I’d really notice all that much difference over an upscaled DVD. Predictions are that Blu-ray will overtake DVD in about 2012: maybe in the next couple of years, the price of media will have to change – perhaps the studios should even put out Blu-ray content at a lower price than DVDs, if they really want to drive adoption.

Thinking back to other media changeovers, there are relatively few which have succeeded, and lots that went by the wayside. Remember 8-track tape? Or Digital Compact Cassette? Even DAT failed as a consumer option, and MiniDisc went the way of the Dodo when eclipsed by MP3 players.

What marks a successful change of media in almost every instance, isn’t just better quality or size or whatever – it’s a difference in the way of using the media. When CDs first started appearing in the mid-80s, sure the sound quality was better (as much as could be determined on a cheap HiFi anyway), but the random-access nature was probably its best feature – the ability to jump straight to a track without spooling through tape or having to hoick the stylus off an LP, especially combined with remote control, made arguably the biggest difference.

MP3 (and all the variants) succeeded because it was now possible to have your entire music collection a few button presses away – no need to even switch the CDs. iTunes has arguably changed the way people buy music altogether, choosing single tracks rather than whole albums.

Blu-ray or any successor to DVD is probably only going to succeed if it changes the game somewhere else, other than being “better”. Distributing movies online seems one way of doing it, at least if you believe the commentators who tell us so. The trouble with that approach is that as quality improves, the sheer size of the downloads is going to get ungainly – even with multi-megabit internet connections, a 1080p encoded film is surely going to be 15Gb or more, and will take an age to download.

Maybe the business model for the future would be to sell Blu-ray players which also have huge hard disks that can legally cache all the contents of the media disc – that way you could buy a film on Blu-ray, take it home and add it to the library. Thereafter, you’d be able to watch anything you’ve previously bought without needing to fetch the original disc and load it up – would that be a reason enough for people to switch from DVD?

More pertinently, would the studios allow it to happen?

Zune 30Gb ‘worldwide meltdown’

Posted on December 31, 2008 by ewand

I went to grab my trusty 30Gb Zune today and it froze on startup – the “Zune” logo stayed stuck on the screen indefinitely. Hitting the web to look for techniques on how to reset the device yielded a few tips but nothing that solved my issue.

I did spot that I wasn’t alone, however – and the newswires are currently hot with the word that this problem is affecting many – if not all – of the original 30Gb Zunes. The support forums are getting pretty busy.

UPDATE: Official confirmation says here that the issue will resolve itself after the date ticks over to 1st January. This is an issue relating to the fact that 2008 was a leap year.

Microsoft has at time of writing, not said anything other than “we’re aware there is a problem and are working to fix it”: how some potential fix might manifest itself remains to be seen – hopefully, the customer experience will be similar to the so-called XBox “ring of death” scenario – I’ve had that happen on 2 XBoxes, and I have to say the smoothness and quality of the return experience is the best I’ve ever had from any company. Maybe that’s where the $1bn was spent…

Anyway, to Zunes… (and note this is the original, 30Gb Zune only – later models – 80/120 and the flash models – are unaffected). Reportedly it only affects the latest firmware – from November 2008 – too, so if you’ve a Zune that’s been sitting in a drawer for a couple of months then it’d probably be OK.

How to reset the device – in essence, reboot it by holding the back button and pressing up on the D-pad. This didn’t work for me in the “frozen” state.

How to reformat the device – I could only get this to work by waiting for the device to run out of power, then plug it in (and get the battery charging icon) and as soon as it began its start up procedure, press the back button and hold both the left part of the D-pad and the button in the middle of the pad. It did start the procedure but appeared to hang at stage 4…

A reported fix is available by opening the Zune up and disconnecting/reconnecting the battery – instructions for the brave, here. This would ordinarily void any warranty, though my device is about a year our of warranty anyway. Maybe I’ll wait for a few days and see what Redmond says, though…

Tips for optimizing Vista on new hardware

Posted on April 23, 2008 by ewand

Ed Bott over at ZDNet posted a really interesting article yesterday, detailing the journey he had of making his friend’s brand new Sony Viao laptop work properly with Windows Vista Business. In short, his friend upgraded a trusty old XP Vaio to a new machine which came with Vista, but had a terrible experience of crashes, slow start up, bogging performance etc.

In a nutshell, the advice is pretty straightforward, at least for technically minded folk and backs up the experience of some of us who’ve been using Vista all through the beta program:

Start with Vista-capable hardware. It’s almost a waste of money trying to upgrade old PCs to run Vista. New machines which (supposedly) have been designed to run Vista with modern architectures, devices which have a good chance of having decent Vista drivers and enough horsepower to do it justice, are so cheap now, it’s hardly worth trying to tweak anything older than a couple of years old to get Vista working well on it.
Use the latest, best quality drivers you can. It still amazes me how many manufacturers ship machines pre-loaded with years-old device drivers, or (conversely), how many update drivers & BIOSes frequently but with poor attention to quality (the device driver certification program is there for a reason; if you have a piece of hardware that comes with a non-certified driver, you have to ask: if the manufacturer of the device cut corners in bothering to get it certified, where else did they trim savings?)
I got a new Lenovo Thinkpad tablet a few months ago, and it was (and still is) a brilliant piece of kit. Lenovo have done a class-leading job of making it easy to keep everything up to date – including the system BIOS – in a single application, the ThinkVantage System Update. Think of that as a single app which already knows exactly what hardware you have, and checks the Lenovo site to see if there’s anything to update.

I’ve had so many PCs where the vendor’s driver download page needs you to know everything about the internal bits of the hardware (Dell, stand up and be counted) – after choosing the machine type, why do I need to know which iteration of network controllers it has, or whether it’s got the optional super-dee-dooper graphics card or bog standard one? Can’t the manufacturer figure that out, especially if they ask for a serial number to help identify what the machine is?
Don’t put any unnecessary crapware on it. This starts off as a fault of the OEM who supplied the machine (sorry Dell, I have to single you out again, but you’re far from unique). It’s worth making sure you don’t install any old junk from the internet and leave it lying around on your machine. Ed Bott even suggests doing some basic installs (like Acrobat, Flash etc) then taking a full machine backup, so you can always revert to a nice starting point. Combine that with the Really Rather Good backup software in Vista (or even the Windows Easy Transfer software) which can make sure your data is safe, and it’s not unthinkable that every six or twelve months a savvy user could easily blow away the machine and recover the starting image & last data backup to be in a good state again.
Most people accept that they need to service a car regularly to keep it running well – a modern PC is a good bit more complicated than a car (albeit with generally less terrible consequences if it all goes boom).

Part of Ed’s summary neatly encapsulates his thinking…

Well, for starters, Vista doesn’t suck. And neither does Sony’s hardware. That four-pound machine with the carbon-fiber case is practically irresistible, as my wife continues to remind me.

But when you shovel Windows Vista and a mountain of poorly chosen drivers, utilities, and trial programs onto that beautiful hardware without thinking of the customer, the results can be downright ugly. That was certainly the case with the early-2007 vintage Vaio, and it’s still true today, with too much crapware and not enough attention to quality or the user experience.

Imperialism, Metric-centricity and Live Search

Posted on April 17, 2008 by ewand

I’m a child of a mixed up time when it comes to measures and the likes. I am feet and inches tall, stones and pounds heavy, when it’s cold outside, it’s below zero degrees, but when it’s hot, it’s in the 80s.

I learned small measurement in mms and cms, so have no real idea of how big an inch is, but long distances are thought of in miles (and petrol is bought in litres to go into a car which reports how many miles per gallon it’s getting).

Now and again, I’ll need to try & recall how many chains there are in a fathom, or ounces per metric tonne, and typically call on the services of a search engine. That used to be searching for something like:

… where we’d normally get taken to a site in the results, which has a wizard of its own to do the calculation. Often times, the reason I want to convert something is because I’m already doing a calculation and I just need to know the ratios involved…

Which is why I love the little innovation that Live Search introduced:

Right at the top of the results list, there you have it – dead right this is useful 🙂