Category Archives: General Tech Stuff

2012/12/20 · 15:55

More on the Lenovo A720

It turns out that I was perhaps a little hasty in dismissing the Lenovo A720. If you use the link that Google and Bing offer when searching for “Lenovo A720,” the Best Buy page you get says that the product couldn’t be found; searching for the SKU embedded in the link returns no results. However, searching Best Buy’s site itself for “Lenovo A720” does bring up a grand total of 1 A720 configuration: 6GB of RAM, 2.5GHz Core i5, 1TB hard drive, and a 1920×1080 27″ multitouch display with a BluRay player.

Best Buy shows that they have the A720 in stock, but only for shipping; it’s not in stores. I didn’t try to order one, so it’s possible that they are exaggerating their stock on hand.

The least expensive 27″ iMac is $1799, which buys you more RAM (8GB), a faster CPU (2.9GHz Core i5), and a 2560×1440 screen. The iMac lacks the A720’s touchscreen, but it can be configured with a larger hard drive (including Apple’s Fusion hybrid SSD/conventional disk) and more RAM (max of 32GB vice the A720’s 8GB.)

Is this a price premium? For your $300, you get a higher-resolution (and, probably, higher-quality; Apple’s iMac displays are very, very good) display, more RAM, and a faster CPU, but you lose the touchscreen. I am not convinced of the value of touchscreens for desktops for the kind of work that I do, so that might not be a bad tradeoff.

However, the iMac isn’t itself available from Apple’s website until January, so the comparison is a bit of a moot point as this juncture. I’ll write another post once the highest-end models from both vendors are actually, y’know, shipping; comparing vaporware or you-can’t-have-it-ware is pretty pointless.

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2012/12/20 · 07:01

Where is the Lenovo A720?

About a year ago, I wrote an article examining whether there really was a price premium for Apple laptops. My conclusion: yes, in some cases. A short while ago, Apple introduced a new line of iMac all-in-one computers, and, that same day, Dan Holme and I got to debating their merits on Twitter. Dan is a big fan of Lenovo’s all-in-one desktops, about which I knew little, so I decided to do some digging.

I wanted to see if Apple was able to get a price premium for their all-in-one computers compared to comparable Windows 8 machines. Dan said he’s a fan of the Lenovo A720, which looks like a pretty spiffy machine. I went to Lenovo’s site on 23 October and found that there are 4 A720 models ranging in price from $1949 down to $1469. (These were sale prices; the Lenovo site had a prominent banner pointing out that their sale prices would be in effect for a week or so.) The highest-end machine shown on their site was an A720 – 25647CU. Your $1949 buys a quad-core 2.3GHz Core i7 CPU, 8GB of RAM, a 1TB disk with a 64GB SSD, and a 27″ 1920 x 1080 27″ multi-touch screen. This particular machine also includes a TV tuner and a Blu-ray optical drive. You can’t get a bigger drive, more RAM, or a better graphics card through the usual configure-to-order process.

At that time Apple hadn’t announced availability dates for the new iMacs, so I put this post aside as a draft. I went back to Lenovo’s site on 3 December and found that the A720 models are all listed as “out of stock.” I checked again 19 December and found they were still out of stock. This is odd, given that we are the height of the holiday buying season; rather than a page that says “out of stock- try back later” you’d think Lenovo would be trying to capture my money somehow.

Interestingly, if you use Google or Bing to search for “Lenovo A720,” the first two sponsored results are for Best Buy and Amazon. The Best Buy link 404s, and the Amazon link leads to a single used A720.

So where did the A720s all go?

Searches for phrases like “A720 delay” don’t bring up any results. Perhaps Lenovo is selling A720s as fast as they can make them, or perhaps there’s some issue with their production or distribution. Regardless, if you cannot actually buy one, the question of whether they are less expensive than Apple’s nearest equivalent isn’t very interesting. I look forward to revisiting the question once the A720, or its successor, resurfaces.

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2012/11/15 · 21:15

Lumia 920 days 2-5 review

I’m getting settled in to using the Lumia 920 as my daily phone. In some ways this is a big change, but in other ways it isn’t, as I’d been using the Lumia 800 a fair amount over the last few months as an alternate device.

Let me start by talking about connectivity. I’m not talking about just network connectivity, although that so far has been excellent. Even on AT&T’s crappy Bay Area network, I have yet to have a call drop or data service outage, even in notorious bad spots like right across the street from Pizz’a Chicago. No, I’m talking about physical and sync connectivity, beginning with sync connectivity.

I miss wireless sync; at least with Mac OS X, WP8 devices have to physically be plugged in to sync. The Windows Phone connector software has flaked out on me a few times this week. First it refused to sync anything at all, with only a useless error saying that some items couldn’t be synced. This turned out to be because of the OS X sandboxing feature, which prevents the WP connector from accessing music in the iTunes library folder. It’s easy to fix with the “Allow Access to Folder” command, but finding this out required a tedious slog through Microsoft’s support forum. Then yesterday, after updating to Office 2011 14.2.5, the WP connector started crashing each time I plugged the phone in. Back to the forum I went, where I found this article… that turned out not to be the problem. I posted the issue to the forum but haven’t gotten a response yet.

(At this point, lest you think me a hater, I would point out that Apple has exactly the same terrible support process: find an issue, post a plaintive query in their support forums, and hope that someone can help you out– or, alternatively, trek to the store and see if they can help you.)

Now, about the physical connection– the Lumia 920 uses a micro-USB connector. This is perfectly OK with me, as I have other devices that use the same connector, and I have Bluetooth audio streaming in my car. However, the port on the 920 is a little finicky; you have to push the connector firmly into it to ensure that it actually charges, as I found when I awoke one morning and found the phone dead because it hadn’t charged overnight while plugged in.

And speaking of battery life: I’d have to label it adequate. I get about a day’s worth of use, meaning that I leave home in the morning with a full charge and usually need to give the phone a snack sometime between 5 and 8 pm to get a full day’s use. This is essentially what I was getting from the iPhone 4, although the 920 has a bigger screen and LTE. Seems like a fair trade.

Oh, and one more miscellaneous hardware issue: the 920 screen shows fingerprints and smudges much more than the iPhone or Lumia 800. This is a bit annoying, but easily remedied.

The apps I’ve been using have continued to work well. I love the way that the Photos live tile displays my airplane photos; the motion of the live tile looks slick. The Facebook app has a number of annoyances, like insisting on scrolling up to the top of my news feed after I comment on or like any item in the feed.

My limited experience with the newly-released Skype app has been positive: it works well and looks good, though I haven’t tried it for any video calls yet.

The only app-related complaint I have involves Bluetooth music playback in the car: the phone will sometimes freeze for up to a minute. During that time I see the lock screen background, with nothing drawn on it, and the phone’s not responsive to the hardware controls, nor do the stereo controls trigger any action. This has happened three times so far, all at times when I got in the car, started it, and wanted to listen to music. I’m not sure what’s going on with it, but it’s definitely annoying.

Now, on to this installment of “Really?”: things that aren’t present in the hardware or software but really should be. I noticed that WP8 doesn’t seem to have a screen rotation lock, which is a bit of a hassle. I still really miss the hardware mute switch of the iPhone line. In fact, I will continue to miss it for a long time because of the ridiculous way that WP8 implements volume, at least as far as I can tell. If I turn the volume to mute so that the phone vibrates for alerts, that also turns off all sounds for everything on the phone– including Bluetooth audio and even listening to a voicemail message on the internal speaker. Phone calls aren’t affected, though, but this seems like a ridiculous design. I haven’t checked to see if there’s a separate volume level for headphone use, but I bet there isn’t.

Luckily alarms are unaffected, which reminds me of another missing feature: the ability to wake to music by setting a song as an alarm.

Apart from these quirks, the phone is a delight to use. I have the home screen set up the way I want it, and the pervasive use of live tiles really makes it easy for me to quickly see what’s what. The soft keyboard is a vast improvement over the one in iOS, and the autocorrect feature makes it absurdly simple to fix misspellings or to add new words to the dictionary. And I can’t say enough good about the color fidelity or display quality of the screen: it is simply gorgeous.

Tomorrow I’m flying to Huntsville, without my iPhone, so we’ll see how the WP8 experience stacks up for travel use. I’ve got MyTrips (a TripIt client) and the American Airlines app all loaded, so I expect good things.

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2012/11/11 · 22:47

Lumia 920 day 1 review

Saying “day 1” is a bit of a misnomer, since I’ve only had the phone since about noon, but I wanted to capture a few of my initial thoughts from using it during a typical weekend day: getting directions, handling e-mail and Facebook, and so on. I’ll keep posting these “day X” reviews every so often when I have more to say about the phone and OS.

I bought a black 920 at the Palo Alto AT&T store; I wanted a red one, but they were sold out of everything except black. In fact, I got the last one. That’s pretty impressive considering that we’re in the heart of Apple territory here. I bought the no-contract version; with a free wireless charging plate (which AT&T didn’t have; they’re shipping it separately) the total was about $438. For that I got… a very large phone. It feels disconcertingly large, in fact, and that’s the first thing I had to get used to.

Windows Phone 8 feels very familiar because I’m familiar with WP7.5. However, please note that there is a lot I don’t know about it, so some of the things I mention below may have fixes or workarounds that I just don’t know about. A few observations:

  • AT&T’s LTE coverage in and around Palo Alto is worlds better than their HSDPA coverage so far. I got a good signal in my parking garage and at a couple of the well-known dead spots along El Camino Real. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens when I hit the Page Mill & Hanover intersection, which usually kills calls dead. 
  • Hotspot access was easy to set up, but my iPhone 4 won’t connect to it. I had the same problem using WP7.5 on a different Lumia with the same iPhone, so I’m not sure where the culprit is.
  • Nokia Music is nifty– like a cross between Spotify and Pandora. Having said that, there’s no Spotify app (see below). I am not sure that I’m ready to make the leap to Xbox Music just yet.
  • I’m glad that the 920 has 32GB of storage built-in. This strikes me as the minimum that would be useful for me.
  • When my car stereo (the JVC KW-NT500HDT) is paired with the phone and switched to use Bluetooth audio, there’s a faint crackling sound. It’s audible any time there’s not “real” audio playing, e.g. in the gaps between songs. The Lumia 800 didn’t do this so I suspect some aspect of the WP8 BT stack is to blame.
  • The Windows Phone sync app for Mac OS X is flaky. Sometimes it doesn’t notice that the phone is plugged in, so it won’t sync. Other times it displays mysterious errors indicating that songs couldn’t be synced (and telling me which songs), but not why.

NewImage

I have several dozen apps on my iPhone, most of which I rarely if ever use. The only apps I wished I had today were Spotify, Skype, and an app I use for checking aviation weather called AeroWeather Pro. There’s a close equivalent, Aviation Weather, that might do the trick; Skype for WP8 is on the way, and I am optimistic about Spotify. Apart from that, the major apps I need (Kindle, Google Reader, USAA, Netflix, Facebook, American Airlines, Fandango, Delta, Instapaper, Evernote) all have WP8 versions. Some of the other apps that would be nice to have, but not mandatory, include the client app for Safeway and Zynga’s Drop7, along with several specific aviation apps (CloudAhoy and the ForeFlight suite chief among them.)

Perhaps the biggest missing item from the phone is something that I don’t think it will ever have: iMessage. Many of my friends and family members have iOS devices– including all 3 of my kids– and switching back over to SMS-only messaging means I lose some functionality.

I can’t comment on battery life; the phone was not fully charged when I got it, I used it heavily all day, and it hasn’t been fully charged yet. I’m interested to see whether it outlasts the iPhone 4’s battery life (which should be easy!)

And two items from the “Seriously?” file: there’s no built-in timer, which is something that ancient generations of Nokia dumb phones have had since time immemorial, and there’s no way to set a custom text tone for an individual contact (although you can set per-person ringtones.)
 
More tomorrow when the phone journeys to work with me for the first time…

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2012/11/09 · 21:06

Extremely short Surface RT & Lumia 920 reviews

Palo Alto is lucky enough to have a Microsoft Store, one of just a handful of cities so favored. I’d been wanting to spend a little time looking at the Surface RT and the Lumia 920, both of which are on my things-to-maybe-buy list. I drove over after work and spent half an hour playing with both devices. Herewith my first impressions:

  • The hardware build quality of both is superb. The kickstand is just as good as you’ve heard. The Surface felt great in hand in both portrait and landscape modes; its weight and balance are good. 
  • Despite the fact that neither device has the same resolution as its Apple retina counterparts, the image and screen quality of both devices are on a par with the iPad 3 and iPhone 4 that I currently have.
  • The Touch Cover for Surface is light and thin, but I couldn’t type on it worth a hoot. On the other hand, with the Type Cover I could sit down and rip out text just as I do on my laptop– faster, in fact, than I was ever able to do with Apple’s keyboard dock for the iPad. The weight and thickness of the Surface with the Type Cover was still quite acceptable. It feels a little weird when you flip the Type Cover over to the back, though– I’m not used to feeling keys on the back of my tablet.
  • I didn’t run into any of the performance problems or stuttering I’ve seen mentioned in web reviews but I didn’t play any video.
  • Being able to split the screen in landscape mode and have two apps side-by-side could be extremely useful.
  • My Word 2013 experience was excellent. I may go back tomorrow with some of my book and magazine docs on a USB stick and see how it handles them.

I suppose the biggest problem I have with the Surface is deciding what I’d do with it. I have an iPad which is a great reader, RSS scanner, and so on, but I don’t use it for real work due to its lack of a keyboard. I could add one, but I haven’t. It’s not clear to me that carrying a Surface would be better for my writing-oriented work than just carrying my MacBook Pro (though the Surface is much, much lighter). This will require some further reflection. I love the idea of having a lightweight, go-anywhere machine that can run a full-horsepower version of Word and PowerPoint, but I’m not sure how much I’d use that versus a full-blown laptop that can also run VMs and other kinds of software.

I spent less time on the Lumia 920, though this is arguably my more pressing need; the proximity sensor and speakerphone mic on my iPhone are both dead, so sometimes when I put the phone up to my ear I accidentally press the speakerphone icon, at which point whoever I’m talking to can no longer hear me.

  • The glass and plastic of the case on the Lumia 920 is absolutely gorgeous. I only got to see it in red, but the visual and tactile experience is top-notch.
  • I love the effect that multiple tile sizes brings to the home screen, and I can immediately see how that would give me a much more useful setup than iOS 6 does.
  • WP8 has many innovative touches, like the Lens feature of the camera app. Plus I know several folks on the WP8 team, which is nice. Double plus, 
  • I already have WP versions of almost all the major applications I use. Exceptions include ForeFlight’s apps (which I would run on an iPad in the airplane anyway), AeroWeather Pro, Yahoo Instant Messenger, and specialty apps like those for Safeway and Starbucks stores. I am reminded that the number of apps I have is much higher than the number of apps I regularly use.
  • iMessage is probably the stickiest of all the apps I use– it’s the main way I keep in touch with my kids, for example. I don’t see moving all of my correspondents to Skype as a likely outcome.
  • Because the 920 uses the same size SIM as my iPhone 4 does, so I could just swap SIMs when I needed a particular device.
  • The 920 feels freakishly large compared to the iPhone 4 or the Lumia 800 that I now have. I compared the Lumia 820 and found that it too was larger than I would like. This may yet be a deal breaker.

There are still a few things that I think would hamper integrating these two devices into my workflow. For the Surface, the biggest is probably lack of a native SkyDrive app that can sync from the cloud to the local device. I’m not always someplace where I have Internet connectivity. Since the Surface has a built-in SD card slot, I could keep my docs on a card and then just sync it to my laptop using ChronoSync or similar, but this seems unnecessarily clunky. Jeremy wasn’t crazy about the built-in mail client, and that’s potentially a problem as well.

The problems with the phone aren’t as major– I’ve been swapping between the Lumia 800 and the iPhone just fine, so putting a 920 into rotation should be perfectly feasible. First, though, I need Microsoft’s help in fixing a vexing sync problem that I’m having with my Windows Live ID…

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2012/10/30 · 11:02

Sandy shows that location does matter

I’m sure there will be zillions of other articles covering this in various trade publications, but right now, while I’m thinking about it, I wanted to dash off a couple of thoughts on how the cloud is affected by real clouds… like Hurricane Sandy.

I wanted to send an invoice to the Windows IT Pro folks for an article I had edited… but I couldn’t because the invoicing service I use was down. Ooops.

Over the last two days, I’ve gotten outage notifications from several of the services I depend on, including Trello and Harvest. As I write this on Tuesday, Harvest is back up, but Trello isn’t (nor is FogBugz, which is one of the candidates I’m considering for a hosted bug-tracking service). These outages are not unexpected; the NHC gave us all plenty of advance warning of Sandy’s likely impact. However, I was a little surprised to see how many services actually run on data centers in metro NYC. I have an intuition, but no proof, that the majority of these services are offered by small- to medium-scale companies that cannot yet afford their own dedicated data centers, which is to be expected. I predict that some of the services affected by this outage will move to relocate their services to another area, but some won’t; after all, no location is completely disaster-proof, and there are certainly benefits to having the services you offer hosted “near” your physical location.

The interesting issue is not that these services had failures; that’s to be expected. It is that as cloud service consumers, we now have to be aware of physical location in a way that “the cloud” is supposed to eliminate. File this under “cloud-related promises that turned out not to be completely true.”

Microsoft’s services, and Google’s, and Facebook’s, and Apple’s, and so on are all essentially location-independent. A metro-level failure caused by something like a hurricane or a major earthquake is a problem, but not necessarily one that end customers have to concern themselves with; there are always other data centers that can accommodate the load of the downed sites. In fact, this ability to provide continuity of service is one of the key drivers behind the architecture of Exchange 2010, and now Exchange 2013 extends continuity by simplifying the way load balancing works, thus making it easier to build larger stretched (“stretchier”?) sites. 

Not that that helps Harvest or Trello users, of course. So along with the tired-but-still-important advice to ensure that your location isn’t cut off from the cloud by single points of connectivity failure, let me add a recommendation that you periodically survey the service providers you depend on so that you know where their services are hosted and can make arrangements accordingly in case of disaster.

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2012/09/07 · 05:12

Backups and MEC

tl;dr edition: don’t let this happen to you.

I’ve been working on a couple of iOS applications for my upcoming talk at the Microsoft Exchange Conference. Since MEC starts in just over three weeks, this has become a matter of some importance.

Side note: I often talk about “the Exchange tribe” as a shorthand way to talk about the community with people who aren’t in it. The MEC team has posted a bunch of speaker photos which may help put some faces with the names. These pictures don’t show everything; for example, you can’t see Greg Taylor’s sense of humor, the color of Jeff Mealiffe’s most excellent glasses, exactly how much Scott Schnoll looks like SA Martinez from 311, or what Devin Ganger is trying to karate chop. The pictures are useful for recognizing who’s who, though the rumors that Ross Smith is making a set of MEC speaker trading cards is false as far as I know.

Last night, I unplugged my laptop, tossed it in my bag, and headed for SFO for the redeye to DFW, thence to Huntsville. This morning at DFW, I pulled out the laptop again to work on my code a bit. I had made a stupid mistake the other night: I created a class based on UIViewController instead of UITableViewController, which means that Xcode refused to link the class definition files with the view controller itself in the storyboard editor. That caused a variety of bad behavior, including an inability to link selectors for the “done” and “cancel” buttons in the view

I realized my mistake right after I had deleted the view so that I could recreate it. “No problem,” I thought. “I’ll just restore it with Time Machine.” This, despite the fact that my main Time Machine backup is on a disk back in Mountain View.

So, I tried to do that; I opened Time Machine, found my source folder (/Source/ExOOF in this case), and restored the folder from its most recent update at midnight. Switching back to Finder, I accidentally opened the project in Xcode. I quit Xcode and noticed that Finder was asking me whether I wanted to replace the folder or not. I said “yes” and was greeted by a mysterious Finder error.

Long story short, my working copy is now gone. I can’t restore the Time Machine copy either, as the local replica only contains the project file, not the source code.

“No problem,” says I. “That’s why I have CrashPlan.” A quick trip to the CrashPlan app revealed that… I back up /users/paulr only. When I first set up CrashPlan, I didn’t have anything in /source, so I didn’t back it up. Duh.

So, bottom line: my source code is safe and sound, on a disk on my desk in Mountain View that is completely inaccessible remotely. My app development will have to wait until I get back to Mountain View. I suppose I can work on the accompanying slides, but where’s the fun in that?

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2012/07/11 · 14:58

On re-kerberizing services on Mac OS X Server

Wow, this week has been a productive one for finding new and interesting blog topics, mostly based on things that broke!

As much as I rely on Apple hardware and software for my work and personal life, that doesn’t mean I’m ready to give them a free pass on issues like cost (note to self: update the laptop price comparison with the latest models) or capability. I’ve mentioned before how much I dislike Apple’s sloppy approach to system administration on OS X Server. The logging is poor, with log entries scattered all over the place; the documentation is hit-or-miss (both in terms of coverage and quality), and there can be a wide range of behavior between different tools– some give you lots of detail (or at least more verbose messages on demand), while others don’t.

Our primary OS X server is bound to our Active Directory domain, and the services on it are “kerberized” so that users can use their AD accounts, via Kerberos, to ssh into the machine, log in to the wiki, and so on. After a bit of initial flailing around, this has worked steadily for a year or so.

We have recently been working to set up single sign-on (SSO) for Subversion on Mac OS X. This has proved challenging for lots of reasons that are too tedious to go into here (and speaking of tedious: please don’t bother telling me we should be using Git instead, kthxbai). As part of that process, someone accidentally deleted the machine account that the OS X server had been using and replaced it with a user account, with the same name, for use with a manually-kerberized service.

In the Windows world, deleting a computer’s account causes all sorts of fairly immediate breakage. To OS X’s credit, it didn’t seem to be bothered that the computer account was gone.. I mean, it didn’t log any errors or anything, so it must have been happy, right? (That’s sarcasm, in case you were wondering.) The server kept right on working, except that the previously-kerberized services would no longer accept AD credentials.

The fix for this seemed straightforward: first, remove the OS X server from the domain, then add it back. This would re-establish its machine account. That step went swimmingly, although we first had to rename the user account that was created for SSO.

The only problem was that after doing this, single sign-on still didn’t work.

It turns out that when you remove an OS X server from AD, the services are essentially un-kerberized. This seems like it would be easy to fix with the “Kerberize” button in Server Manager... except that it’s apparently broken, or something, given that no combination of inputs would be accepted. So, my next attempt was to use sso_util from the command line, which also didn’t work; I got a nondescript message telling me that there was a communications error, and that was it.

The correct answer, at least on Snow Leopard: use dsconfigad -enablesso. You can be excused for not knowing that, because if you go to Apple’s own documentation, it says to run a command called “disconfigad,” whatever the hell that is. Once I ran that command, Kerberos logons for the wiki, ssh, and console logon immediately started working, yay. Now with any luck I won’t have to fool with this stupid server for another year or so.

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2012/06/20 · 05:30

In which I dispute Tony Redmond re Windows Phone upgrades

Microsoft just wrapped up the keynote for their Windows Phone Developer Summit. Following as it does on the heels of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, comparisons are inevitable… so let me succumb to the inevitable:

  • At WWDC, Apple announced iOS 6 and talked more about the forthcoming “Mountain Lion” release of OS X, which follows OS X “Lion”‘s lead by incorporating a number of iOS-like features. Many observers believe that Apple’s long-term plan is to provide as much of a unified core between iOS, OS X, and AppleTV as possible.
  • At WPDS, Microsoft announced Windows Phone 8 (“Apollo”), which will share a common core with Windows 8– thereby beating Apple to the core OS-integration punch. They also highlighted some nifty new Apollo features that will depend on their hardware device partners, including new higher-resolution screens and support for NFC.

As they normally do, Apple was mostly quiet about the device upgrade path for iOS 6. Microsoft, on the other hand, was up front about the fact that current Windows Phone devices won’t be getting Apollo. Tony has a beef with this approach:

I think this is a brain-dead decision that looks pretty feeble when compared against Apple’s record of making sure that new releases of their O/S run on older versions of iPhones. For example, the iPhone 3GS that I used before making the now-lamentable decision to try Windows Phone 7.5, upgraded smoothly from iOS 3 to iOS5 over the time I owned the phone.

This is clearly a situation where Apple is right… well, except that they’re not.

It is true that iOS 6 will run on older devices. For example, my not-yet-two-year-old iPhone 4 will run iOS 6, as will all models of the iPad; even the relatively ancient 3GS will get the upgrade.

However, there are a number of iOS 6 features that will not work on anything older than an iPhone 4S. Among these: FaceTime over 3G and turn-by-turn directions in the mapping app, two features that exist either as App Store apps or hacks that can be applied to jailbroken devices.

Apple hasn’t said why they won’t ship these features for iPhone 4 users. It might be due to technical limitations (though I doubt it in the case of turn-by-turn directions), but I suspect it’s more likely to be as a tactic to drive sales of new devices. After all, Apple’s profit on iOS devices come from the hardware (and to a lesser extent, the attach rate of purchases from the App Store).

Microsoft, on the other hand, makes no profit on WP hardware except to the extent that they collect a license fee per handset. That raises the question of what Microsoft should have done with Apollo. You could argue, as Tony does, that at least the shiny new Lumia 900 should get the upgrade, and that ideally older devices should as well. But this approach poses some really interesting tradeoffs for Microsoft. They get to choose between two options, to wit:

  • spending a large amount of money and engineering time to get Apollo running on older WP7 devices, such as the HTC Surround or the original Samsung Focus, from which they will never derive any additional revenue and for which carriers may decide not to give their customers the upgrade anyway? or
  • spending money and effort on polishing Apollo to take full advantage of new hardware, sales of which will drive carrier efforts and directly put cash in Microsoft’s coffers?

I don’t think that Microsoft’s choice was a very difficult one. If you look at the list of Apollo features, some of them (such as NFC, new resolution support, on-device BitLocker encryption,  and the new DirectX) require upgraded hardware. Some of them (such as deep VoIP integration, which I dearly wish Apple would copy, the new Nokia map experience, and support for native C++ code) do not, and could feasibly be backported, but only to the extent that they don’t depend on the new Windows 8 common kernel. Some of the new features, in fact, are actually apps, which means that Microsoft could potentially ship them as separate standalone updates in the future.

When Tony says

After all, we’re dealing with software here and surely a few IF… THEN… ELSE conditions could be incorporated into the code to support older devices?

I’m reminded of our earlier discussion about the pros and cons of requiring an Active Directory version update for Exchange 15, in particular the observation that the test burden of software changes is a lifelong obligation. Adding a feature isn’t always hard, but once it’s added you must test it on every device and configuration for as long as you support that feature– and that is even more true here when you consider the size of the WP test matrix, which contains dozens of devices and dozens of carriers. If I were Terry Myerson, the corporate VP at Microsoft who owns Windows Phone, I wouldn’t spend the money on backporting the core, even if it were technically possible. It doesn’t make sense as an investment, nor is the ongoing cost burden supportable.

(nb. Myerson, you may recall, is the fellow who made the at-the-time extremely unpopular decision that Exchange 2007 would require x64 hardware. This was widely hailed as being an arrogant and ignorant move on Microsoft’s part, but it was actually one made for solid technical reasons, and in retrospect it has proven to be the right decision; the scalability and performance benefits of that move have been critical improvements to Exchange 2007, 2010, and 15.)

While Tony thinks of Microsoft’s move as being a “sad and arrogant indication” of Microsoft’s contempt for its mobile customers[1], I instead see it as a realistic acceptance of the fact that even the mighty Microsoft has limits on what they can feasibly accomplish. They are fighting hard to stay relevant in the mobile device market, and they’ve apparently decided that their effort is better spent on net-new development work. Based on my outsider’s view, I can’t disagree.

Having said that: yes, I’m disappointed that my two-year-old HTC Mozart (and the Lumia 800 I’m going out to buy this afternoon for a project) won’t get the Apollo upgrade.. but no more so than I am that my iPhone 4 won’t get the full flavor of iOS 6. In fact, I am probably more likely to buy a new device to run Apollo than I am to buy a new device for iOS 6. Why? Look at the delta in features; absent some major new hardware improvement, or some as-yet-hidden iOS 6 features, it doesn’t make sense to shell out for a new device just to get Siri, turn-by-turn maps, and FaceTime over 3G. But at the end of the day, this is a business decision, not one that Windows Phone customers should take personally.

[1] You know who really has contempt for their mobile customers? The carriers. Yeah, that’s right; the same ones who do things like block Windows Phone and Android updates. Of course, you can argue that as an OS manufacturer that doesn’t make its own devices, Microsoft’s customers are the carriers, not consumers. Apple’s in a different space because they sell devices both through carriers and direct-to-consumer, as do Google and the increasingly-irrelevant RIM.

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2012/04/17 · 09:48

Fog Creek Copilot

Sometimes I have to do remote computer support for friends and family members. In days of yore, this meant smashing the phone handset between my ear and shoulder while typing, and frequently asking the person on the other end of the phone questions like “well, what buttons do you see?” and “are you sure there isn’t a menu option that says X?”

Since about 2005, I’ve been using Fog Creek’s Copilot service instead. Copilot is simple, cheap, and fast; you go to the website, put in your name, and get a 12-digit code. You (as what Copilot calls the helper) either read that code to the person being helped or have the web site e-mail it to them. They put the code in too; both you and the other person download a small executable, which is prestamped with the code. When both ends have the executable running, you get a screen-sharing session with the remote machine.

Copilot essentially uses the VNC protocol to transfer screen images and mouse movements, which are all “reflected” off a Fog Creek server (details here). This approach works well through firewalls and proxies, and its performance is decent over low-bandwidth connections. The client has the ability to reconnect after temporary interruptions in network service, which is handy.

Pricing is reasonable: $5 for a 24-hour “day pass”, with free usage on the weekends. There are other pricing options too, but I don’t use the service often enough to need any of them. Fog Creek positions Copilot as a useful tool for corporate help desks, which is probably true.

One interesting thing to know about Copilot: when you purchase a day pass, it’s good for 24 hours. However, by default the helper can only use the day pass from the original computer. Suppose I start a session as a helper using my Mac at home, then I want to use the same session the next day (within the 24-hour window) from a different computer. Because the executable you run on the helper’s computer has a unique key, you can’t just start a new session, and there’s no place for the helper to put in an invitation code. The Copilot FAQ says to follow the instructions to reconnect, but there aren’t any! After a few fruitless minutes of poking around, I called their toll-free support number and within two minutes had the answer: if you start helping someone on computer A and then move to computer B, Fog Creek tech support has to send you an e-mail containing a link to the correctly-stamped version of the executable. They did, and I was able to use it without problems.

So, the next time someone asks you to help fix their computer (and you’re actually willing to do it– not always a given), give Copilot a try. I’m a fan.

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2011/12/10 · 15:09

Vulkano Flow

There are many things I like about being here in Pensacola. One thing I do not, however, like is the poor television infrastructure at my hotel. I don’t get many of the channels I’d like to watch, and there’s no DVR so if something comes on when I’m doing something else (like, oh, I don’t know… WORKING or something), too bad. This essentially puts me back in time to 1999 or so, right before I got a preproduction TiVo evaluation unit– the first one in Alabama and quite possibly one of the very first east of the Mississippi.

Anyway, enough ancient history. Fast-forward to 2011, where my TV watching is mostly episodic: I want to be able to follow The Walking Dead, Flying Wild Alaska, and a few other shows. I could (and do) buy these episodes from iTunes, but that doesn’t help if I want to watch something on a channel I don’t get here (and believe me, that’s a long list).

I knew about the Slingbox and briefly considered getting one. As I was researching it, though, I came across the Vulkano line of devices. They are less expensive than the Slingbox, so I figured I’d give the Flow a try. There are a number of other devices that can act as DVRs and do various other tricks, but I wanted to use my existing U-Verse DVR and just watch it remotely.

The Flow doesn’t do HDMI, so I ordered it along with a component cable and had it shipped to my office. My friend Alex agreed to go install it in my apartment, and that went fairly smoothly; after about 30 min of work on his part (aided by text messages and Facebook chat) he’d gotten the Flow installed and configured and I was able to view a stream on my laptop.

Monsoon has free Windows and Mac OS X clients, and they sell iOS (and maybe Android?) clients. I bought the iOS client and used it immediately to watch an episode of The Simpsons, and it worked as advertised; the picture quality was only OK but it was certainly acceptable on the iPad. The real problem is the crappy Internet bandwidth at my hotel. I didn’t use it much after that, as I’ve been too busy to watch TV. However, the other night my coworkers were bellyaching about not being able to see an NFL game that was only on the NFL Network, which the hotel doesn’t get. I dragged out my laptop, plugged it into the HDMI port on the TV, fired up the Vulkano app, and we watched the game, just like it says on the box. At first the picture was a bit jumpy, but once I switched over to using my iPhone with tethering instead of the hotel Internet, we were able to watch the HD NFL Network channel at 720 x 480 and it looked great.

Last night we used it to watch a Simpsons episode here in Huntsville, where the hotel Internet is waaaay better. Picture quality was quite good and there were no drops or lags.

I’m sold. The only real complaint I have is that when you use the onscreen remote to change channels, fast-forward, pause, etc., there’s a noticeable 2-3 second lag. This makes it really tricky to do things like skip commercials, so I often don’t bother. I need to play around and see if there’s a way to solve the lag, but apart from that I’m delighted so far.

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2011/11/30 · 07:50

Overthinking problem solving

One of the really interesting things about my work here in Pensacola is that I get exposure to a wide range of problem-solving strategies. Our goal, of course, is to teach students how to solve problems using logical, repeatable steps; when they get here many of them have never had to solve any kind of complex problem (or, really, any kind of problem at all involving computers, radios, etc.) so they don’t have a good conceptual framework on how to do it.

Other students come in with the standard-issue trial-and-error methodology already in place: if something’s broken, I’ll just keep making changes until I fix it. This can be a pretty dangerous mindset. It’s one thing to solve your own problems on your own computer this way, but following the same strategy on a network that all 5,000 people aboard your aircraft carrier depend on isn’t likely to have happy results.

To supplant this process, we start with the basics:

  • Did you verify the problem? Is the problem you saw the same as the problem that was reported? This is important because users’ problem reports are often imprecise or even flat-out wrong. Even when the problem description is precise, a non-technical user may report related symptoms, not the real underlying problem.
  • Once you think you know what the problem is, how could you tell if that was really the problem? This is pretty straightforward: before you start trying to fix the problem, what are you going to do to identify the true root cause?
  • Once you’ve identified the problem, how could you fix it? Some problems only have one solution; others have many. Before you try to fix anything, you should be able to identify candidate solutions that might solve the problem and select the appropriate one
  • As you take steps to fix the problem, what tests can you perform to see if your fix is doing what you want? For multi-step solutions, checking your progress along the way is important.
  • Did you verify the solution? This is critical, and it’s something students have to be trained to do because most people don’t do it, or if they do, don’t do it in depth.

As students make the transition from ad-hoc problem solving to a more systematic approach, one of the things that some of them tend to do is overthink the problem and/or the solution. This is natural because so much of the material they’re learning is completely new. The natural tendency is to dive in and try to apply all the detailed knowledge you’ve just gotten, but sometimes the problem is simpler than you think.

Our students have a term for this: “to nuc” a problem is to overthink something or go into too much detail. The term comes from the term “nuc,” used to refer to someone trained in the Navy’s nuclear power program. Nucs are legendary for being extremely well-trained, being able to master all the minutiae of nuclear reactor operations, and being somewhat nerdy. So when a student says that she nuc’d a problem, that means that she was looking too deeply for the cause or solution to the problem. This is a really hard problem to guard against, and I don’t have a good repeatable solution for it yet, other than asking them “are you nucing this?” when they seem to be diving too deep.

This is just one of the many fascinating issues that you run into when you’re teaching people using a revolutionary method. Doing what’s never been done before is hard sometimes…

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2011/10/29 · 08:10

2011 Exchange Maestro wrap-up

Greetings from high over Nebraska, where I’m aboard a Delta flight to San Francisco for a well-deserved day of rest at home (and, hopefully, a visit to In-N-Out) before heading to Vegas for Exchange Connections and then back to Pensacola.

My first visit to Connecticut was, I’d say, quite the success. We had a good-sized group of attendees, and they asked excellent and focused questions throughout. As a presenter it’s always rewarding when the audience asks questions that indicate not only that they’re listening but that they’re thinking and this group did so particularly well. That kind of back-and-forth increases the value of the workshop for everyone, and we had a lot of it.

For a first, Tony and I hit all of our timing marks until the third day! (As you might expect, I ran long on the UM content; my natural enthusiasm got the best of me.) This left the attendees more time than usual for labs, which they used to their full advantage. We didn’t have any major equipment or logistical problems; the sponsor presentations from Hewlett-Packard and BinaryTree were quite well done.

In a side note, I’m glad to report that Tony now knows what “homeboy” means in American English after discussing my PC price advantage post. He and Brian both disagreed strenuously with my assessment of the build quality of H-P’s EliteBook line, and Tony further questioned why I spec’d a 17″ EliteBook given its inconvenient size for truly mobile use– I did so because I wanted the closest match for CPU speed. In any event my admission that there still seems to be a price premium at the higher end of the configuration scale stands. Having said that, I’ve no plans to switch away from my MacBook Pro.

As of right now, we don’t currently have plans to do any Maestro events in 2012. I’m certainly open to the possibility, but we’ve had a hard time finding the optimum way to market these events and get the word out. One possibility is that we’ll work more closely with consulting and systems integration firms to go directly to their customers, and we have a few other potential tricks up our sleeves. Stay tuned for more details!

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2011/10/28 · 05:23

The Apple price premium for laptops

This post goes out to two of my homeboys: Brian Desmond and Brian Hill. It was sparked by a discussion that Brian, Tony Redmond, and I had at breakfast this morning about laptops; more specifically, Brian D claimed that buyers who opted for Apple laptops were doomed to pay a premium price relative to the PC laptop world. I decided to spec out a few different machines from Apple, Dell, Lenovo, and H-P to see whether this is actually true.

A few rules: I wanted to keep the configurations as close as possible. Although I only buy (and highly recommend) refurbished machines from Apple, I stuck with new hardware from each vendor. Although it might have been cheaper to buy from third parties, I used Apple’s MSRP for RAM expansion.

I started with Apple’s online store. A current-generation MacBook Pro with a 2.5GHz quad-i7 CPU, 8GB of RAM, a 750GB 7200rpm disk, a 1080p camera, and a 1680 x 1050 15.4″ display costs $2549. Full specs are here. One spec of note: 0.95″ thick and 5.6 lbs. (OK, so that was two specs. So sue me.) You can drive an additional 2560 x 1920 display by using the built-in Thunderbolt port.

Then I went to Lenovo’s online store. There’s currently a special on the W520 line. I configured a W520 with a 2.5GHz quad-core i7, 8GB of RAM, a 1920 x 1080 15.6″ display, a 500GB 7200 RPM disk, and a 720p camera. MSRP for this configuration is $2990– so the MacBook Pro wins! Not really, because Lenovo’s sale price is $2059. The W520 can accommodate up to 32GB of RAM and drive two external monitors, so those are points in its favor as well, plus you can swap its DVD drive for a second hard disk (though you can do this on the MacBook Pro via third-party kits). The W520 is about 1.4″ thick and weighs 5.7 lbs in its default configuration. At this price point, the Lenovo has an advantage: $500 less for a higher-resolution display (but see my note on that below), more expandability, and a better graphics subsystem. (Oh, and a color-calibrated display, if you care, which I don’t.)

What about H-P? The EliteBook 8760w line only seems to have quad-core processors if you spring for the 17.3″ display, which is waaaay too big for many people, me included. Leaving that aside, you could have a 1920 x 1080 panel for $2499 with a 2.7GHz quad-core i7, 8GB of RAM, and a 500GB disk. No camera, no external monitor support (that I can see on the specs page, anyway), and a 7.6lb weight. There are various other combinations of (slower) CPUs and GPUs, but this seems like the best value offering from H-P. So: significantly heavier than the MBP, with a faster CPU and a higher-res display but a smaller disk for the same price. I’m going to give the nod to Apple on this one because of build quality (see below.)

For Dell, I priced a Precision Workstation M4600, their 15″-class machine. MSRP on this configuration is $2934, but Dell’s selling it for $2154. For that price, you get a 1920 x 1080 panel, a quad i7 (with 8MB cache, unlike the 6MB cache on the Mac, H-P, and Lenovo machines), 8GB of RAM, a 750GB 7200 RPM disk, and AMD’s integrated graphics (though Nvidia graphics are available for a couple hundred bucks more.) Interestingly, Dell offers a secondary SSD and a touch display as factory options. I’ve got to give Dell the price advantage here as well.

Now, about display resolution: for my poor eyes, 1920 x 1080 in a 15″ panel is too many pixels. Great for watching movies, but the high DPI means that I can’t read text at standard font sizes. I’m happy to admit that the higher-resolution panels are a point against Apple. I don’t know enough about the specs of the various graphics adapters involved to be able to authoritatively say which one is better for normal use (obviously the fancy Nvidia adapters would be more useful for CAD, etc.)

Battery life? All I can say is this: on my MBP I routinely get 4 solid hours of writing code from one battery charge, and I’ve gotten 6+ hours when just doing e-mail and web browsing. Apple claims a life of 7+ hours for light browsing. I don’t have enough data to evaluate the battery life claims of the other vendors.

Of course, there are other factors involved, too, besides the machine configuration. The Dell and H-P laptops I’ve used in the past were squeaky, plastic-y, festooned with stickers, and cheap-feeling, with displays that wobbled, flexing cases, and poor build quality. Lenovo’s build quality is excellent, with a great keyboard, a case that doesn’t flex or squeak under pressure, and good durability. I think Apple’s build quality is better, though; the aluminum unibody construction on the MacBook Pro means that there’s absolutely no flex in the case. The keyboard is as good as Lenovo’s (plus it’s backlit), and the overall industrial design is top-notch, as you’d expect from Apple. There are lots of little touches, like the magnetic power adapter, that set Apple’s hardware apart.

So, bottom line: yes, Dell and Lenovo will sell you less expensive laptops with specs equal to or better than Apple’s. H-P apparently won’t. Is the price premium worth the Apple features and industrial design? For some people, probably; for others, probably not. For now, though, it looks like the two Brians are right. Darn it.

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2011/08/25 · 20:17

Henge Dock mini-review

As part of my ongoing downsizing, I sent both my 2008 MacBook Pro and my 2006 Mac Pro to the great used computer yard in the sky and consolidated to a single 2011 MBP. After years of using ThinkPads with docking stations (and being well pleased therewith), I went looking for a Mac equivalent. When I’m home, most of the time I’ll be working at my desk, but when I’m not home the MBP needs to go with me, and I didn’t want to mess with endless plugging and unplugging of cables.

A friend at Microsoft mentioned the Henge line of docks, so I ordered one to try it out. I liked their look, and I liked the fact that there are no mechanical parts (like the old NewerTech claw-style dock I had back in the day.)

When the dock arrived (promptly, I might add), I immediately got to setting it up. Here’s what it looks like with the cables installed:

cables through slots

Each cable is installed in a slot cut into the dock. You fasten the cable connector into the slot with a setscrew. Henge includes extension cables that fit into the slots; the idea is that you put in the extension cables you want connected, fasten their setscrews, and dock your laptop. I quickly assembled everything and docked my laptop. Although it fit, it wouldn’t wake up from sleep. The MacBook Pro requires 3 things to wake with the lid closed: the power adapter, a keyboard or mouse, and a video display must all be connected. I quickly determined that this wasn’t happening, but I couldn’t tell which because the shape of the dock prevents you from seeing the plugs. I put it aside for another day, then last night, I decided to experiment some more to try to get the dock working.

I pulled the cables through the dock openings so there was enough slack to plug everything in without fully docking the laptop. This let me verify that everything was plugged in. I have the MagSafe, 2 USB, DisplayPort, and audio out cables in place. This took me a while because I accidentally pushed the head of the video cable all the way through the dock opening and then couldn’t get it back through! After a bunch of fiddling, I finally got the connector back where it belonged.

Flushed with success, once that was done, I was able to ease the plugs back into the dock openings and screw them into place. I docked the laptop, woke it up, and enjoyed working with it for a couple of hours.

Unfortunately, the video adapter (I’m using Apple’s DisplayPort-to-VGA) wouldn’t seat until I manually jiggled it. The plug fits in the opening in the dock, but in its default position it’s ever-so-slightly misaligned with the opening in the MBP case, so it won’t seat unless I rock the MBP back and forth.

After some jiggling and rocking (boy, that sounds wrong), I got it to seat and worked with my machine docked all last night. This morning, I undocked it and tried to redock it, and the same problem– the USB plugs engaged (so the external keyboard was active) but the video plug didn’t seat properly.

When I e-mailed them, Henge told me that some Apple VGA adapters are sized funny and that I could either try another adapter or trim the one I had to remove some of the excess plastic. They kindly offered me a discount coupon for their brand of adapter, which is basically an extension cable that simplifies the routing quite a bit. I have a Monoprice DVI adapter that I’m going to test tonight. I like the industrial design of the dock, but if I can’t make it work reliably, back it goes.

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