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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2012/11/15 · 18:50

Thursday trivia #80

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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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2012/11/08 · 18:30

Thursday trivia #79

  • Rule #1 of aviation: don’t hit anything.
    Clear violation of rule #1
  • Windows IT Pro has a new compendium of its articles and coverage of Exchange 2013. Check it out.
  • The ability to do discovery searches from a single locationin Office 2013/Lync 2013/SharePoint 2013/Exchange 2013 is going to sell a lot of SharePoint seats.
  • Halo 4 has been terrific so far and I’m only partway through the second mission. 343 has a winner.
  • I think some new gadgets may be coming to join the stable in the next week or two.

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2012/11/01 · 10:23

Apple releases fix for EAS calendar hijacking bug

Good news: Apple just released iOS 6.0.1, the release notes for which say that the update fixes “a bug affecting Exchange meetings.” More details here.

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2012/11/01 · 00:30

Thursday trivia #78

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2012/10/30 · 16:44

Voodoo Music Experience 2012

VOODOO sculpture

Wow.

The boys and I just wrapped up a visit for New Orleans for the Voodoo Music Experience 2012. What a fantastic time!

Friday morning I picked them up in Birmingham and we had a pleasant drive down to the city, stopping at Charlie’s Catfish House along the way. The boys were a bit nonplussed to be served whole catfish but that didn’t really slow them down. We got to the festival about 3:30pm and immediately started exploring. I was surprised that security didn’t turn me away because I was carrying a “professional camera” (you know, the kind with a detachable lens) but I wasn’t about to complain. After some wandering, David and Tom went to the EDM stage to see Nervo while Matt and I headed off to go see Thomas Dolby. We were no more than 10′ from the stage for the show, which was outstanding. I’ve been wanting to see Dolby in concert for 30 years and thoroughly enjoyed getting to do so at long last. Bonus: he has a new album and played a couple of cuts from it. Extra bonus: he was joined on stage by Michael Doucet, who plays a mean fiddle. (Set list: “Europa and the Pirate Twins”, “One of our Submarines”, “Airhead”, “Pulp Culture”, then “Spice Train”, “Evil Twin Brother”, and “The Toad Lickers” from his new album, then “I Love You Goodbye”, “Hyperactive”, and “She Blinded Me With Science.”)

DSC 0935TMDR gettin’ down

DSC 0942

After the show, I got to see my pal and (fellow Exchange MVP) Jason Sherry at the Thomas Dolby show. This was his 16th Voodoo show– an enviable record. I think he should win a prize. Matt and I also checked out Christian Ristow’s Face Forward sculpture, a giant metal head with an articulated, remote-controlled face, plus a giant metal crawfish whose antennae emit fire after dark.

DSC 0926show me your war face

We wandered around a bit more until it was time for the next EDM acts: JFK of MSTRKRFT, followed by Kaskade. (Actually, Die Antwoord was on stage but no way was I going to let the boys go see them; they are incredibly NSFW.) JFK put on a pretty good set but was not very engaged with the crowd. Kaskade, on the other hand, killed: fantastic set, good crowd involvement, and a great vibe. He was actually pretty laid-back; not really what I was expecting for an EDM set. Matt was able to talk us into the VIP area on stage rights so we were pretty close to the action, which was fantastic. David and Tom got right up front, too, which was a treat for them.

DSC 0969

Notice the cool hat he’s wearing

As you might be able to tell from the photos, my night photo technique needs some work. Most of the concert pics I shot were with my D5100 and Nikon’s 55-200 f/4. This is a great all-around lens but I need to remember to aim the focus points when I’m shooting from a distance. EDM stages are tricky, too, because there are often large backlit screens behind the performer. This wasn’t a huge problem when we were off to the side in the VIP area but it was a problem for Metallica, as you will soon see.

Anyway, we went to bed exhausted but happy Friday, slept in a bit on Saturday, then skipped breakfast and went straight to Deanie’s Seafood. Of all the many restaurants in N’Awlins, this is one of the most resonant for me; it was one of my Aunt Betty’s very, very favorites and I have many happy memories of eating there with her when visiting the city. I wanted the boys to see it, and we had a delightful meal with bonus Aunt B storytelling thrown in. Then a quick drive back to City Park put us in position for another day of music. Saturday’s weather was quite a bit different– mid-50s with a steady chill wind and heavy overcast for almost the entire day. Luckily we found the one food stand that was selling hot chocolate, Quintin’s, and patronized it heavily.

Saturday’s lineup was pretty strong. We had planned to see DJ QBert and Metallica as our two main acts; Tom wanted to see AWOLNATION, and there were a few fill-ins that we’d decided to try (like Jim-E Stacks). We briefly stopped by for Carmine P. Filthy’s set (prominently featuring this guy, so Matt and I didn’t stay for long); it was pretty repetitive. I caught a few minutes of Sister Sparrow and the Dirty Birds, enough to decide that I’d give them a shot on Spotify. We connected with my cousin, world-famous sound guy and international man of mystery Chris Bloch. He got us into the mixing truck for Chicano Batman‘s set, where he spent a good chunk of time answering our stupid questions about audio production and mixing. As a bonus, I found that I quite liked the band’s mix of Afro-Brazilian-surf funk, so they’re now in my Spotify rotation. Another neat discovery: The Features put on quite a show near the hot chocolate place (though it took me a while to figure out they were singing “Golden Comb“, not “Golden Cone”).

DSC 0974

Chris hard at work; yes, he really does know what all those knobs do.

Tom went to the AWOLNATION show and went crowd surfing, which excited him no end. The rest of us used the time to explore the food booths; I had a couple of really delicious crawfish pies, while David had shwarma and Matt a hot dog. We migrated over to the Metallica area about 30 minutes before their show and got decent seats in front of the sound tower (though the two older boys didn’t stay there; they ended up in the mosh pit.) As for the Metallica concert itself: it exceeded my expectations, especially given that they were replacing Green Day, a band I’ve never really liked. They deployed some awesome pyrotechnics for “One”, and gave us a nice mix of old and new(er) stuff, including “Master of Puppets,” “Wherever I May Roam,” “Enter Sandman,” and “Nothing Else Matters.” For their first encore they came out and started playing “American Idiot” by Green Day then stopped– James said, with mock sheepishness, “That’s all we had time to learn” before launching into some back-catalog stuff, closing with “Seek and Destroy.”

DSC 0990

rock is serious business

DSC 1000

Lars looks suspiciously like my friend Scott Mikesell

DSC 1020

they were having almost as much fun as the crowd

After a solid two-hour performance, all of us were flat worn out. We went back to the hotel and got to bed about midnight, which was lucky given that we had made plans to meet Chris and Beth at Café du Monde the next morning at 7:30. The promise of beignets was enough to get the herd moving, and we enjoyed our bounty sitting on the levee steps overlooking the river and watching the sun right near Jackson Square.

IMG 1248After breakfast, we went back to the hotel to shower and pack; the stage acts weren’t scheduled to start until noon, so I figured we’d have time to go to Radosta’s for poboys. Nope– they’re closed on Sundays, so we drove back to the Quarter to go to Coop’s. Nope, they’re a 21-and-up place. We ended up eating more festival food, to which absolutely no one objected. We’d planned to see Dev, who never showed up– she couldn’t get out of NYC because of Hurricane Sandy. No one announced that to the crowd, unfortunately, so we waited around for a while and then eventually wandered off. (The excellent Voodoo mobile app did have a tiny scrolling ticker at the bottom of its main page that announced the news, but I’m not sure anyone actually saw it.)

We were soon back to the EDM stage for Modestep, self-described as a “live four-piece bass-heavy band from London.” They sure were! However, there was enough swearing that I made Matt leave about half an hour into the show, which was too bad– it was excellent otherwise. Plus they were playing in full sunlight, which was not only very pleasant but provided superb lighting for taking pictures.

DSC 1050

 this makes me think of John McEnroe saying “you cannot be serious”

DSC 1064someone’s having a good day at work

More festival dinner, then it was time to head over to Skrillex! The crowd for his show was huge– probably 2/3 as large as Metallica’s, but in a much smaller area. We all packed up towards the front, which was fantastic until the crowd started squeezing us. Even that was OK because we were all dancing more or less in unison. Even the crowd surfers were fun… until one of them got dropped more or less on Matt’s head. After that, he and I watched the rest of the show from a more open space towards the back of the crowd. I was far enough away that after it got dark none of my pictures were really spectacular; this is probably the best of the lot.

DSC 1071

He played an absolutely killer set, including a remix of the theme from “The Fresh Prince” and a variety of his own songs. I was worn out from dancing by the end of the set, which is a sure measure of how good it was– it takes quite a performance to get me to shake my groove thang. (But don’t take my word for it; see this review.)

Immediately after the Skrillex set, we went back to the parking lot and drove straight through, arriving back in Huntsville about 2:45am. Matt and Tom slept pretty much the whole way; David lasted until about 12:45 and he zonked out too. Great time, and maybe we’ll do it again next year. The End.

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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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2012/10/26 · 07:30

Postel’s Law, Exchange ActiveSync, and iOS 6

Over the last week the Exchange community has learned a bit more about problems with Apple’s Exchange ActiveSync implementation in iOS 6; Microsoft has released a KB article outlining the problem and suggesting some workarounds, and Tony Redmond this morning pointed to a TUAW article that I hadn’t previously seen which asserts that the hijacking problem is a known issue with previous versions of iOS.

Tony’s article is titled “The emerging need for more supervision over ActiveSync implementations.” It’s certainly hard to disagree with that basic premise. Just over 18 months ago, Microsoft launched an Exchange ActiveSync logo certification program with the goal of inducing third parties who sell EAS-compatible devices or software to verify that they properly implement the client side of EAS. A quick check of this page maintained by Microsoft’s legal department shows just over four dozen EAS licensees, but only 3 vendors are listed on the EAS logo page itself. There are several possible explanations, ranging from lack of vendor interest in getting certified to a Microsoft failure to update the contents of the page.

Whatever the reason, I think Tony is right that Microsoft needs to be more proactive in requiring their EAS licensees to perform more robust testing on their clients.

Furthermore, I’m starting to think that the certification and testing program isn’t sufficient in and of itself, which brings me to Postel’s Law.

Some years ago, I worked for a company that made e-mail encryption software. This was during a time when even basic SMTP interoperability between different vendors’ systems was not assured– the Electronic Mail Association had biannual “plugfests” where vendors such as Lotus, Microsoft, and Netscape got together to ensure that their products could exchange SMTP mail properly. Whenever we ran into an interop problem, my boss would cite Postel’s Law:

Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.

It seems pretty clear that Apple’s iOS EAS implementation has bugs– long-standing ones, if the TUAW article is right– and that Apple has a responsibility to fix them. I am coming to the opinion, though, that the server-side EAS implementation is too lenient about what it accepts. For years Exchange administrators had to suffer through a dance that went something like this:

  1. A new version of Outlook would ship with a bug that would occasionally corrupt calendar or message items in some interesting way.
  2. The corrupted items would cause the client to crash; in more severe cases, they could also crash the store process or cause backups, mailbox exports, etc. to fail.
  3. The Exchange team would release a hotfix to keep that particular flavor of badly formed item from causing such a problem.
  4. The Outlook team would release a hotfix that would keep that version of Outlook from emitting that particular flavor of corruption.
  5. In the next release of Exchange, the team would add business logic to reject items with the specific flaws generated by Outlook.
  6. GOTO 1

Over time, the Exchange business logic got better, as did Outlook’s track record of not creating bad items in the first place. This approach has served Exchange administrators and users pretty well, and it’s clear that the lessons learned from this painful process have been applied in Exchange Web Services. For example, EWS will reject attempts to create calendar items with end dates that come before start dates– something that Outlook used to occasionally do out of sheer perversity.

However, it looks as though, at least in this specific case, EAS doesn’t have business logic in place to catch the modifications that lead to the hijacking behavior. That’s something that Microsoft can fix in three steps.

  • First, they can update the EAS spec so that it clearly defines which fields of each data item are to be considered read-only. This gives implementers a fair shot to understand where they may need to change their clients.
  • Second, they can update Exchange itself so that it rejects client requests that violate the updated spec.
  • Third, they can vigorously “encourage” their major ISV partners to test more aggressively against the updated spec. I have to wonder, for example, how much, if any, testing Apple has done against Exchange 2013…

I’ve been putting the blame on Apple for this problem, and while I don’t think that doing so is unfair or inaccurate, I also believe that the Exchange team can do a better job on the server side of blocking bad client requests, and I hope they’re madly planning how to do so in Exchange 2013 SP1.

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2012/10/25 · 18:15

Thursday trivia #77

  • The boys and I are headed for New Orleans this weekend to see my mother and, not incidentally, to hit the Voodoo Music Festival. Of the bands there, I am most excited about seeing Metallica and Skrillex, but there are a few other gems; hopefully we’ll make it there in time for Thomas Dolby on Friday.
  • The law surrounding workplace privacy in California is really, really interesting.
  • I’m really intrigued by two new devices: the iPad mini, because it’s the perfect size for use in the cockpit; and the Microsoft Surface, because it looks like a better device for some of the most common tasks I do on the road. I’m not quite ready to order either of them just yet, though…
  • Candy corn on the cob. What will they think of next?
  • So far season 3 of The Walking Dead is excellent. I am actually enjoying it more than season 2 because I’m watching it in HD on my AppleTV instead of in crap-o-vision from AT&T’s Uverse, which had terrible picture quality on AMC.

Bonus: if you like airplanes (and, really, who doesn’t?) then this video of Endeavour flying over southern California is priceless. Watch it in high-quality and full screen for maximum enjoyment.

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2012/10/19 · 21:40

More on bugs in iOS6 Exchange ActiveSync

As I hoped they would (but couldn’t mention in my previous post), Microsoft has weighed in with a KB article on the iOS 6 “hijacked meeting” bug. The article ID is 2768774, and it makes a couple of cogent points: first, that Microsoft is aware of, and is actively investigating, the bug. Second, that “Microsoft cannot mitigate this issue”; they recommend contacting Apple. The interesting part to me was the section on workarounds. Microsoft’s suggestions include:

  • telling users not to make calendar changes using the iOS app
  • recommending that users not update to iOS6 (as if! iOS device users are legendarily quick to update to new versions)
  • blocking iOS 6 devices using Exchange ActiveSync allow/block/quarantine
  • blocking users who have delegates, or who are granted delegate access, from using EAS
  • using POP/IMAP instead of EAS (this made me laugh out loud– really!)

I have been testing Savvy Software’s Agenda app recently and like it quite a bit. However, it, like almost all the other calendar apps of which I’m aware,  it uses the underlying iOS calendar data store and sync mechanism, so I’d expect it to fall victim to the same bug. NitroDesk has ported its Touchdown app to iOS (though its App Store reviews are pretty poor), and Emtrace has the MoxierMail EAS client (which I still need to review.) So pick your poison: none of Microsoft’s suggested workarounds are great, but their hands are tied. It’s pretty clear this is an Apple problem and it will be incumbent on Apple to fix it… which I am sure they will, eventually. 

 

 

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2012/10/18 · 18:01

Air traffic control call signs

I am a huge fan of LiveATC.net. I often listen to the San Jose airport control tower and/or NORCAL Approach as background noise at home, in the office, or while driving; it is always interesting and often educational. One of the most interesting things I’ve heard is the variety of callsigns for different aircraft and operators. Some of these are pretty prosaic– if you hear “UPS 9336 Heavy” or “Southwest 229” that tells you everything you need to know. There are some others that are more colorful, though:

  • “Traffic Watch” is a popular call during rush hour.
  • Stanford (“Stanford One”) and several other medical helicopter operators are unpredictably active; you never know when they’ll pop up.
  • There’s at least one Boeing Business Jet operating out of SJC with the call sign “Boeing 1 Tango Sierra”; I haven’t taken the time to figure out whose it is, but I’m betting Google.
  • “Redstripe” is the call sign for JetSuite, a private fractional-ownership jet company.
  • I’m not sure who owns the “Starbase” call sign but it sounds cool on the radio. The only references I could find to it were here and here, and they’re inconclusive. (Looks like the FAA thinks the second one is dispositive.)
  • “Dotcom” is an umbrella call sign offered by FltPlan.com; you can sign up for their service and then use one of their calls (e.g. “Dotcom 521”) instead of your aircraft registration number. This is useful to keep your competitors (or other interested parties) from performing physical traffic analysis on your airplanes.

There’s a pretty good list of airline callsigns that covers many international airlines, and it looks like the FAA’s official list is here (for some reason it doesn’t seem to be well indexed in Google). Other fun callsigns on the FAA list: Sputter,  Jigsaw, Flapjack,  Raptor, and Argonaut. Maybe I should print out a copy and start checking off the ones that I hear!

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2012/10/18 · 07:54

Thursday trivia #76

A special search-query edition of Thursday Trivia! Here are some of the search terms people have used to get to my blog over the last couple of months:

  • how is reading used if you’re a marine: probably not often enough.
  • fried fish harmful: for the fish, yes, it certainly is.
  • what about airwork: as for me, I highly recommend it.
  • s tripit pro worth it: yes, 100%. I also just signed up for CLEAR (thanks to a 4-month trial offer from Living Social for $18) and will report back on how well it works.
  • stupid allergy warnings: now you’re talking; I am definitely allergic to stupid too and sometimes I wish there were warnings, like the pollen forecasts that the Weather Channel does.
  • everyday carry pouch: hello, Mr. Kangaroo.

The top five search terms that have brought people here since I moved to WordPress: “conversation action settings”, “paul robichaux”, “autodiscover.xml”, “outlook auto discover”, and “the last psychiatrist.” Guess I know what I should be writing about more.

Tomorrow’s post will be titled “how Paul Robichaux used autodiscover.xml to find the last psychiatrist’s conversation action settings folder.”

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2012/10/17 · 23:00

iOS 6 and Exchange ActiveSync misbehavior

Brace yourself for a surprise: there’s at least one major bug in Apple’s Exchange ActiveSync client in iOS 6.

cue shocked silence…

This is not surprising, of course; EAS is a fairly complex protocol and Apple has displayed a somewhat cavalier attitude towards verifying that their EAS clients behave properly. If you don’t believe me, all you have to do is look at this list of known EAS issues with third-party devices and see how many of them involve iOS.

Anyway, the latest widely reported  issue is that meetings sometimes appear to be hijacked– Alice will send out a meeting invitation to Bob and Carole, but somehow Carole will end up as the meeting organizer, thus gaining the ability to cancel or change meetings.

The hijacking bug isn’t the only one; users have reported a few other iOS 6 EAS issues, including its apparent failure to handle the case where the user’s primary SMTP address is different from the user name (e.g. an SMTP address of paul@robichaux.net coupled with a UPN of paul.robichaux@robichaux.net, for example), but these other issues all have easy workarounds; meeting hijacking is the most pestiferous.

The usual pattern for these bugs is fairly predictable:

  1. Apple (or another EAS licensee) releases an update.
  2. People start complaining in various fora that some EAS-related functionality is broken. However, these reports are only rarely made directly to either Microsoft or the vendor.
  3. A critical mass of reports accumulates and begins to draw attention. This is often accelerated by the opening of support cases with either Microsoft or the ISV.
  4. The source of the problem is identified, a resolution is developed, and everything is fixed.
  5. GOTO 1

Now, stop laughing. That really is what usually happens. Note that Microsoft’s hands are somewhat tied during this process. Until they get feedback from customers that something is broken, they can’t very well investigate it. I imagine that it is very frustrating for the EAS team to see people blaming Exchange for what end up being bugs in the EAS client implementation. But I digress.

Tony points out a few nuances of how the process works, including suggestions for figuring out which devices are actually in use. (Note that one improvement in iOS 6 is that it reports a value for the DeviceOS property returned by Get-ActiveSyncDeviceStatistics; older versions just left that field blank.) Leaving that aside, though, it’s interesting to consider what’s known about the calendar hijacking bug. The best explanation I’ve seen, ironically, comes from the Z-Push development team. (Z-Push, you may recall, is an open-source EAS implementation that has nothing to do whatsoever with Exchange.) However, they are apparently first to market with a public explanation of the problem with iOS 6 that causes meeting hijacking. I won’t repeat it here; it’s worth reading the original. The root of the problem appears to be that iOS 6 emits meetings with zero attendees, and that Exchange accepts these as valid. I’m not sure whether Exchange’s acceptance is a desired behavior or not but I’m pretty sure that the device should never be emitting a zero-attendee meeting. It’s possible that there are cases where this is not true, which is why the Z-Push folks are holding their patch in QA for now instead of pushing it into the main tree of their product.

The tricky issue here, of course, is how to get the problem fixed for those of us who aren’t using Z-Push. Microsoft could conceivably make a change to Exchange’s business logic for calendar items, preventing ill-formed meeting items from being propagated. Apple could likewise fix their client so that it doesn’t send out ill-formed items in the first place. Both sides have an interest in providing a smooth EAS experience for iOS users, but each side has a different set of engineering and delivery constraints that make the process of actually getting the fix out to customers a challenge.

Microsoft hasn’t publicly said much about this bug, other than that it is being investigated. (And Apple, AFAIK, has said absolutely nothing about it, which is regrettably typical.) Your best bet is to keep an eye on KB 2563324 for updates so you’ll know when Microsoft believes they have a solid understanding of the problem and the best way to fix it.

Meanwhile, the Z-Push team claims that turning off the Exchange calendar attendant feature would eliminate the problem, at the cost of some useful functionality. The iOS 6 bug is rare enough in most environments that I’d advise living with it rather than giving up the attendant functionality, but that’s a choice you’ll have to make based on your users and their needs.

I wonder whether Emtrace’s MoxierMail client has this problem? I’ve got an evaluation copy but haven’t been able to evaluate it yet; might be time to move that up a couple of notches on the priority scale….

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